Have you ever played Candy Crush? It is so ridiculously simple and mindless… but addictive. In this week’s podcast episode, I compare organizing your house to playing this fun, addictive, and ultimately endless game of Candy Crush.
It was around three summers ago that I played this game obsessively. I would find any excuse to play Candy Crush. I would even make extra time to play it and play it for way too long trying to get through a level. Finally, I had to take it completely off my phone because I just have no willpower. A couple of years later, I put it back on my phone and found I wasn’t quite as addicted as I was the first time.
A word of warning – if you have never played Candy Crush, don’t take this podcast as permission to go and download it! When I first started playing it, I thought you could “win,” that you could finish the game, but there are literally millions of levels. You can never win. I don’t recommend wasting your time on it!
What does Candy Crush have to do with home organization?
As the new year approaches, we all start to set goals to get organized, lose weight, and put our finances in order, all at the same time. These are the top three New Year’s resolutions that we all want to achieve. On January 1st, when people ask you what you’re going to do, you say, “I’m going to lose 10 pounds, I’m going to get out of debt, and I’m going to get organized,” because that is what everybody plans to do every single January!
When it comes to home organization, at the end of the year you may say, “I’m going to get my house in order.” What you mean is you’re going to declutter, donate, sell, and get rid of things. That’s what you mean by getting organized in the last week of the year.
That’s like the first 20 levels of Candy Crush. You go in, you play it, and you go to the next level. Or, when organizing your home, you go in the room, you fill a trash bag, you take it out to the car, or you donate it and you continue like this… donating, trash, donating, trash. You feel good and you’re also getting a bit of exercise while doing it!
Another example – you’re clearing the house, taking down decorations, and you feel like you’re doing a great job, then suddenly you return to a room you have already done, checking for any other clutter, and you get a little stuck. You start to look for more help to make decisions about what you need or don’t need. It’s not as easy to get through the room.
This is like Candy Crush – often they don’t let you through the level on the first shot so you have to play it again until you finally get through it.
What happens when you get stuck?
Let’s say you make great progress until you realize there are no more “quick wins.” So where do we go from there?
Maybe you buy some little containers and organize some drawers, maybe tweaking and maintaining things you’ve done before. By about the middle of January, there is still 80% that has not been organized successfully and you don’t know where to start resolving this. You wonder if there are organizers you can buy. This usually doesn’t work, it costs a lot of money, and there aren’t organizers you can buy for the space you need to organize… don’t you hate that?
This is because 99% of organization has nothing to do with the cute containers.
It’s like you are stuck on Candy Crush level 56 and you’re asking yourself, what do I have to do to get through this level?!
There are two things you can do when playing Candy Crush when you get stuck:
- Pay for help
You can pay for more moves when you run out of your lives, plus other pay options.
- Head online – I go to YouTube
Just search for “how to beat level 57 in Candy Crush” and watch a video of some genius who knows how to beat that level.
Either you go spend the time watching someone who knows how to do it or you pay the money to take you to the next level.
Guess what, it’s the same with organizing. You start to get wins and you are flying through your house. You will want to spend more time organizing your house because you are having such success.
Equally, when you get frustrated and your laundry room is driving you bananas, you are going to start figuring out how to beat that laundry room. Someone has to win the battle and you want it to be you. You get so determined that once it is complete, you have a sense of satisfaction and can give yourself permission to go and do something else with your time.
When you’re in the middle of January and you’re going to tackle the front hall closet or the laundry room, for example, just like in Candy Crush, you have two choices:
- Go online
You can go online and find many resources and people that can help you. For example, on Pinterest or YouTube, you can see spaces that have been organized by others and watch how they do it.
- Hire help
You can get a professional organizer or you could do my program The Productive Home Solution.
How I can help you.
The Productive Home Solution
It is designed to systematically organize your entire house in 1 year. Don’t worry, it comes with a lifetime membership so you don’t have to commit to doing it all in 1 year. You can skip days and go back to them and do this over and over again.
