Why Aren’t You Tidy?

Two weeks ago I wrote here why should we even put effort into organizing or tidying our home and now I’m going to look at reasons that prevent people from doing it. If organizing and keeping tidy was so easy then everyone would have their place tidy and neatly organized. Places that are organized are inherently tidy but it isn’t easy to keep places tidy: if a room is tidy it is easy to keep it that way, but if it isn’t then it is a lot harder to get it tidy.

Organizing is too much work
If your home isn’t organized then getting it there isn’t an easy task. For most of us, including myself, we find that organizing say, a bedroom closet, takes too much time that we don’t have. It may be true that we don’t have that much time to organize the closet but do we really have time to do other things, like say watch hockey or basketball, or wash the car? A person may give other tasks a higher priority so we put it off but doing these things do not get it organized.

In order for someone to actually perform the task of organizing the bedroom closet we need to place it as a higher priority. We only get out the effort we put in. Fortunately, we don’t have to do the entire closet or the entire kitchen at once. We can choose to do it in small sections (like say, half the closet or two cupboards in the kitchen) It doesn’t have to be long. The whole process of organization does take longer but at least progress is being made. If we don’t organize even a little bit, then no progress is being made.

Putting the organization of your home as a higher priority and only doing a small amount at a time will let you have an organized home in no time. That is why the slogan for this website it “Get Organized, One Day At A Time”. As we try to balance work, school, family and other aspects of life, there isn’t much time left over for organizing, that is why it is important to do a little bit at a time.

We don’t have the money!
I think this is a perfectly legitimate reason. To be honest, this is the limiting factor in our home. We are recently married living in an apartment without a great deal of extra money because we are trying to pay off our student loans. We don’t have very much money to spend on purchasing new furniture or items that will help us unclutter our home so if something needs to be tidied, it has to be done in the cheapest way. We set aside $100 each month devoted to items for our home, but this by no means can support all our tidying needs because this also involves any appliances or electronics needed for the home.

There are many things in our lives that are much more important than tidying our home, like spending time with your spouse, attending your kids soccer game, vacationing with the family, or backpacking across Europe, that keeping our home tidy and organized should not cost too much money that we need to restrict these activities. Obviously if we don’t spend any money then nothing will get accomplished but if we budget a little bit each month then we know that we have a little spending money to purchase items that allow us to tidy and/or clean the area we plan to work on. It is a slow process, but hey there’s always tomorrow =)

Organizing shouldn’t be expensive so all my suggestions are, in my opinion, the best possible value for our home or office. I do not promote large expensive useless items because those things just add to the clutter, which is contradicting what I’m trying to promote here.

I hope this helps reveal some reasons why someone may or may not be tidy that will help promote change in our lives to live in a clean, organized and happy home.