Our natural inclination is to want to organize someone else or dive deep into organizing our “passions.”
The easiest way to GET ORGANIZED is to go through your home in a logical progression, starting with one room and slowly working your way through the whole house.
But we get stopped by wanting to organize family members or jumping into the deep end with passion projects.
Everyone has 1-3 current passion projects. Passion projects are hobbies, memory items, or pursuits that we identify with and that make us come alive. We over-buy and over-collect in these areas because our desire to know and do more is unquenchable.
My passion projects include traditional photo albums and my business.
These projects are not necessarily a monetary investment. But they are always a huge emotional and time investment.
Because we are so passionate and invested in our hobbies, we naturally want to get those organized first… which is always a bad idea.
5 Reasons Why To Organize Your Passion Projects LAST
1. The first step to organizing is decluttering and we rarely want to get rid of ANYthing in our passion project.
We don’t want to get rid of anything so we circle around and around making neater stacks of passion project pieces and parts, but make no progress.
2. Passion projects always have a lot of pieces and parts. Imagine a whole garage devoted to fishing, a whole basement devoted to scrapbooking, a whole room lined with bookshelves for your book collections, and on and on.
This is where we spend our time. We are most at home with these items. Your goal is to get each project in ONE area of the house.
3. Failed organization attempts always involve buying more organizers to house the “stuff,” but we still can’t find what we want when we need it.
Once you have flexed and developed your decluttering muscle in the unexciting parts of your home, you will be able to start to declutter in your passions as well.
4. Our family members’ passion projects make us the craziest! We decide if we can just get them to pare down, get organized, or sell their ideas, the whole space will be more organized.
Identify 1-2 passions for each family member and focus on NON-passion areas of clutter while relocating any passion project item to its new home.
FYI – Your kids’ rooms are their passion projects.
5. We don’t want to organize our house. But if we are going to organize, we want to start in our favorite room with our favorite stuff. Big mistake. 🙂 Start in the area you like the LEAST.
You will not be purging much from your projects, so you must be ruthless when it comes to the other items in your house.
Passion projects are hard to explain to others. We do not have a rational reason why we are saving what we are saving, but we know we “need” to keep it.
I am cool with that, but over time I want you to get down to 1-3 passion projects. You can’t be passionate about everything…
Come join the discussion over on Facebook and tell me what are the passion projects that you (and your family members) have.
