by Lisa Woodruff
Our natural inclination is to want to organize someone else or dive deep into organizing our "passions."
The easiest way to actually 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 totally cool with that, but over time I want you to get down to 1-3 passion projects. You can't be passionate about everything...
In 2017, I am going to dive deep into organizing these projects. For now, focus on decluttering and organizing any non-passion project space in your home.
Come join the discussion over on Facebook and tell me what are the passion projects that you (and your family members) have.