5 ADHD Organizing Tips From 2024: What Still Works, What I'd Change, and What I Got Dead Wrong

What if getting organized isn't something you finally achieve, but something you keep deciding, one small step at a time?

On this episode of Organizing an ADHD Brain, ADHD coach Megs revisits one of her earliest organizing episodes with fresh eyes, more ADHD knowledge, and a lot more compassion for how hard it actually is to start. Whether you're looking for ADHD coaching, a supportive ADHD community, or practical ways to get organized, this episode meets you where you are.

By the end, you'll have a realistic, shame-free framework for decluttering and building routines that actually work with your ADHD brain, not against it.

Megs opens by reflecting on how her thinking has shifted since recording this episode two years ago, particularly around not prescribing one-size-fits-all habits (she's officially retiring the 5 a.m. wake-up recommendation) and understanding organizing as a collaborative, regulated process rather than a checklist to complete. She shares her own history of growing up surrounded by generational clutter, her Facebook Marketplace decluttering phase, and what she learned from the book Decluttering at the Speed of Life, that not everything needs to be sold, and donating is often the more regulated, sustainable choice.

The episode covers why executive function challenges make starting and stopping so hard, why having less stuff means fewer decisions, and how tiny time-boxed steps, paired with reminders, habit stacking, a dedicated donation box, and focused "blinders", are what actually move the needle over time. She also talks through teaching kids organizing systems, what happens when everything feels equally important, and why action will always beat knowledge when it comes to getting your space under control.

The good news? You don't have to overhaul your whole home. You just have to start somewhere small, and then praise yourself for doing it, without shame.

Mentioned in this episode: 

Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana K. White: https://amzn.to/43XyQAh

Resources on ADHD and Executive Function: 

What Are ADHD Executive Functions?: https://www.additudemag.com/slideshows/what-are-adhd-executive-functions/ 

How to Improve Executive Function with ADHD: https://www.additudemag.com/how-to-improve-executive-function-adhd/ 

Time Management Skills and Organization Help for ADHD: https://www.additudemag.com/time-management-skills-organization-help-adhd/

This episode is for anyone with ADHD who has tried to get organized, given up, and is ready to try again, this time with a plan that actually fits their brain.

00:00:39 — Revisiting Old Advice with Fresh Eyes and More ADHD Knowledge 

00:13:03 — 2026 Megs: Selling Versus Donating perspective

00:15:19 — 2026 Megs: Lessons Learned from Her Parents' Decluttering Journey 

00:20:57 — The Craft Closet Reality Check 

00:22:46 — 2026 Megs: Teaching Kids How to Use Organizing Systems 

00:25:54 — 2026 Megs: When Everything Feels Equally Important 

00:35:01 — Starting Small with Time-Boxed Organizing Sessions 

00:37:59 — 2026 Megs: Using Reminders and Habit Stacking to Build Consistency 

00:45:40 — Why Having Less Stuff Creates More Ease 

00:48:41 — Praising Your Progress Without Shame 

00:50:59 — 2026 Megs: The Messy Middle and Closing Thoughts

Would you like to learn more about hiring Megs as your ADHD coach? Start here> The Perfect Place to Start

The Community is OPEN! Join right here: Organizing an ADHD Brain

You can also learn more about the community HERE> OrganizinganADHDBrain.com

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants 0:00

welcome back to another episode. I am pretty pumped to talk to you about this episode I'm going to put on in just a minute. It's actually from two years ago when I first started the podcast. I started the podcast in January of 2024, and I thought I knew just about everything about organizing. Well, it's two years later, and I'm here to tell you that I knew some things, and now there are some additional things that I would love to make you aware of, because what's interesting is when you are on social media and when you're listening to podcasts, there is an influx of

— Revisiting Old Advice with Fresh Eyes and More ADHD Knowledge

Audio Only - All Participants 0:39

information and ideas and things you should try, and the best hack and this and that. So I'll go into this saying, maybe not all the information that I provided was the best information, but it was the best information that I had in that moment. I wanna go in and talk to you about some of the things that I would word or phrase a little bit differently now that I know so much in the business that I have. This was also about a year before my husband and I moved and sold everything that we owned in our house in Colorado and moved across the country so this was leading up to that for sure. But there's a lot of really good information in some of the stories that I tell about how I got to where I am or why I started, and it's part of my journey, and I'm so proud to share that with you today, even if some of the things I wouldn't necessarily recommend anymore. For example, I know that I like to wake up at 5:00 AM every day, and that's something I'm still doing, but that is not where other people are, and that's not part of my coaching. If you're not interested in waking up at 5:00 AM, that is not something I'm going to force you to do. And that is very important to know. Coaching is not about saying like, "This is your absolute solution." It is a collaborative process This is also before I really began my own journey in regulation and understanding when I was living my life in survival mode. In fact, listening to this podcast episode really put some perspective on how far I've come in my own survival mode and so many of the things that I notice now that I wouldn't necessarily do the same anymore. Something I find really fascinating about this episode, was I say something along the lines of you don't ever get organized, right? There's this life, like you're on this journey, and you simply adopt the idea that you are an organized person, and now you're going to implement some of the habits and decisions that an organized person would make considering you have ADHD. And I still agree with that. I have, quote-unquote, decluttered my home. I've done it all. I got rid of all of my stuff back in Colorado, and yet my kids still bring home paperwork. I still have piles of papers that I don't necessarily want to look at, but I also have implemented ways to make sure that it's a part of my life. For example, I have decluttering sessions in the organizing community that I developed, which I developed after this podcast episode came out. Regular ways for us to get to these non-preferred tasks when otherwise it's much easier to avoid them. But a lot of what I'm going to talk to you about today, and I'm gonna interrupt the episode just a couple times here, is all of these things could work. Or everything that I mention today is a great idea. It's, it's something that could absolutely work. But what it comes down to is when you're getting started, can you address the uncomfortable feelings that come up? Because that's one of the biggest things that people with ADHD face, is the fact that it's incredibly hard to get started, and then once you get started, it's incredibly hard to stop without it being overwhelming. And so we're going from trying to do everything all at once when we finally, quote-unquote, feel like it, to getting to the point where we can do little things here and there a little bit at a time. On that note, let's go ahead and jump in. Let's see what two years ago Megs had to say about organizing

Megs 4:44

One of the things I often hear when it comes to organizing is Well, ADHD people can't be organized, or maybe we don't have the tools with which to be organized, or we don't have executive functioning skills that help us get in the space to be organized, and so on, and so on, and so on. Well, I went to the NAPO conference, and NAPO stands for the National Association of Productivity and Organization for Professionals. I met some amazing women there, but guess what? Oh, and men. And there were so many people with ADHD who are also professional organizers. And I absolutely love that. What I'm finding is that I keep running into people that are really good at what they do in these specific niches and And there's a reason why they're there. Can you organize on your own? Yes, and I'm going to teach you some tools that you can take with you today But there's also a reason why you can hire a professional organizer Maybe it's that you don't have a ton of time. You have kids, you're working a full time job. You've got dogs to take care of a husband or a wife, or you just want to take a darn bath. There's a reason why there's professional organizers out there. And it's because they can give you a headstart and whether you work with them monthly or once a week, once every couple of months, they're there for you to guide you along the way in decluttering your space and coming up with systems that make your life easier. Did you know it saves you a ton of money too? Okay. I might be trying to convince you, you don't have to hire me though. Anything that can make your life easier. I am an advocate for, because I can't tell you how much money you can save when you know where things are. if you've got a lot of stuff, there's probably a good chance that you know, where most of your stuff is, even if there's a pile of paperwork downstairs in the basement, you haven't looked at it in years, you can pretty collectively understand what's in that pile of paperwork, but what if you go and you sort through it? And the thing you thought was there all along is not there. You've kept it in your brain that it's been there this entire time, but now it's not there. What do you do? You get so frustrated with yourself, because I know that I did. we have a house my grandfather bought in 1968. And then when he passed away, my parents inherited the home and we moved in in 1994. Originally, the idea was, okay, let's go through grandpa's stuff and let's figure out where everything goes. That never actually happened. So all of the stuff from my parents moving 18 or 19 times in the military, then accumulated on top of my grandfather's things. Well, when we moved in there, I was only eight years old. And so that was just normal to me. I didn't know another way of living And the truth is, is because there's never been a course on. what do you do with all of your parents and grandparents things once they pass away? Yes, there are courses now. Bear with me. I never took a course on that when I was a kid. Growing up, I had this room that was full of stuff. I had collections. I used to sew my doll clothes for my American girl dolls. I had my American girl dolls. I collected little glass figurines. My room was so colorful. I used to cut out magazines and I would paste them all over my wall. I had a collection of monkeys hanging from my canopy bed and I had so much stuff. I didn't know what to do with it. So when my mom would ask me to clean my room or yell at me to clean my room, let's be honest, I would put stuff away. I would hide it. Well, where does it go? Okay. In a drawer, but nothing had a place. most things just simply ended up in a drawer stuffed away. So that I would never know where to find it again because it wasn't necessarily in the spot that I always put it, which was out in the open for me to see literally everything that I could have ever owned. this is super fast forward, when my husband and I ended up moving in together, this was before we got married, but we were living together and we both had been living on our own for a good amount of time. So we had dishes and we had silverware and we had stuff upon stuff, but we didn't do anything, but simply combine things. We didn't get rid of anything. It wasn't until about seven years ago that I started selling things on Facebook marketplace. So thank you, Facebook marketplace, big fan. And I found that, okay, I can make money from my stuff. So that gave me some good incentive to let go. But then I started attaching and monetizing everything in my head. That was actually a roadblock. I'll talk a little bit about that further on the episode on how I moved past that quite a bit. Now, in addition to that, I thought that I was getting rid of stuff at a rate that I just didn't have a lot, but it wasn't until we went to sell our house. And. We had decluttered so much. And as we were packing up, I would, you know, I took a bunch of pictures down. I took a bunch of decor and kind of hid it in the boxes. And when we posted the pictures of our house online, I was so proud because we had made the video ourselves. My husband was a real estate agent at that time. And I remember one of my friends saying to me and commenting, Wow, I'm so impressed with how decluttered it looks. You really got rid of a lot of stuff. And I was like, what? I seriously had no idea. That I had that much stuff. I just didn't. And I also just assumed that everyone else had way more stuff than me, especially based on where I grew up, it didn't feel like a thing to me. Now, did it overwhelm me? Yeah, Not necessarily the decor that I had, but more the the amount of clothes that I had, or shoes that I hadn't worn, or crafts that I had driven across the country with me and then decided never to use anymore. Anyone, a scrapbooker, Scrapbooking is really awesome but who has time for that anymore? So I had stickers and papers and you name it, I probably brought it with me from the east coast out to Colorado. anyways, my friend saying that was a turning point for me. She wasn't trying to insult and she wasn't trying to make me feel bad, but it made me feel awful because I thought I was doing a really great job. And in hindsight, I was, absolutely. When we moved into our new house and we started unpacking things and making our new house a home, I realized there was still a lot of stuff that we really just didn't need. And throughout, 2020 and beyond, I continued to sell stuff on Facebook marketplace. But if you've ever done that before, it takes a lot of time. You've got to take pictures. You've got to take measurements. Then you need to do research on what things are going for. You've got to be realistic about your expectations and the negotiations that you make with people. It's not just about posting it and being like, pay me money for this. That would be great. Yeah. It's not as simple as that, because then you have to respond to people, you have to continue to build a rapport with them, and you've got to have a profile where people trust you, you've got to understand what's a scam and what's not a scam and so on and so on. It becomes a priority in your life when you are selling stuff on Facebook Marketplace. But I did it, and I did it hardcore./

Audio Only - All Participants 12:24

I wanted to pause and talk about Facebook Marketplace for a second. This comes back to making a full decision on selling stuff, and it's okay to sell things. You can make a decision to sell things, but also keeping in mind that you are trading your time to do that. It does take time. It's not necessarily very easy to do, and there is a lot of learning that comes with it. And so if it's something that you do wanna do, I encourage you to try. See what it could be like to sell one thing or two things or three things. Maybe you come up with a cap Like, I won't sell anything for less than $50, and any of

— 2026 Megs: Selling Versus Donating perspective

Audio Only - All Participants 13:03

that stuff could be donated. I no longer sell things on Facebook Marketplace, We don't tend to have a lot of extra stuff any longer. But then in addition to that, it's just not something that I'm willing to do all the time. I also would take the approach of getting really serious about it for a couple months, and then I'd take a couple months off, and then I'd get really serious about it again, and then I'd take a couple months off. So it's not something that has to be, like, just gung ho, go all the time. But it is something that you do have to challenge yourself to get used to, because you have to remember to put things outside. You've got to be able to trust yourself. So that's why starting small and making it really easy can be a really good place to start if you do decide to sell. Not dissuading you, but it's okay to donate without selling as well./

Megs 13:52

I was working in the corporate world at the time too. So when you're working 40 to 60 hours a week, and at that point I had two young babies and my husband, and we're trying to build our lives in our new house. We had to get landscaping done. We had to put wall coverings on the wall, so on and so on. I would only be able to declutter here and there at certain points in my life. But I made a lot of progress. Fast forward, I left the corporate world. And right before I did, there was one week that I had taken off in PTO where I really decluttered hard. Another three weeks, I actually traveled back to where my parents are, and I helped them declutter. We got rid of eight to ten bags of donations where a truck just came along and picked them up one morning

Audio Only - All Participants 14:41

Just a comment on the amount of bags that we let go at my parents' house. Really interesting is they have a really hard time getting back to a project, because when we did that project, we went really hard for a couple days at a time. It was too overwhelming. And so when my parents now think of decluttering or what that could be, it's very difficult for them to get back into a project. And so I've taken a very different approach, a safe approach, where they know that, like, if something is leaving the house, I go to my mom and I say, "This is it."

— 2026 Megs: Lessons Learned from Her Parents' Decluttering Journey

Audio Only - All Participants 15:19

She made all the decisions on the stuff that was leaving previously, but it was still a lot. And so there's some hesitancy there when it comes to making the decisions. It comes back to starting really small. That's with you, that's with your family. It's not about the pressure that we put on them, 'cause it's not working. It's more about the safety that's involved and reminding them that like, "Hey, it's okay to make one decision at a time." But sometimes it comes from our all or nothing brain getting in our way and saying, "No, in order to do this, we've gotta do it all at once." But knowing what we know now about ADHD and our system's response to it, we can't actually make all of these decisions at once. It is okay if we make one decision at a time. You get to start to build the muscles that it would take for you to be able to come back to this project time and time again, because if you have a lot of stuff, you might not be able to afford an organizer to do all of that. But you can build the muscles to allow you to get to the place where it becomes easier and easier to let go and to make those decisions. This also is how you go about looking at your email or, or your password management system, or your pictures, or your work-life balance. It's not just about the stuff. In fact, you could meet someone who is so organized in their life, but there is some other aspect of their life that feels chaotic and crazy. You just can't necessarily see it right away.

Megs 16:59

I had no intentions of going into the professional organizing world. I wasn't even sure that I wanted to leave the corporate world at that point in time. But as I was working with a career coach around this time, we started talking about what I really wanted to do. And I thought about interior design. I've always been fascinated with how things look and making your home just feel like you with color and vibrance and excitement. And I wanted to teach people how much they no longer needed in their life. so I started to tackle my own home. That's what I did first. I started reading books upon books and trying to figure out what am I missing? What is going on here that I can't quite grasp keeping my own home organized. I had gotten rid of a ton of stuff. Like I said, I sold a bunch of stuff on Facebook marketplace and I still had so much

17:56

stuff

Megs 17:57

Oh my gosh. Like what was wrong with me? Nothing. Nothing was wrong with me. Okay. I want to point that out upfront. If you've got a lot of stuff, there's nothing wrong with you. A lot of the times we just don't have time. When I left the corporate world, now I had my entire day free. Obviously I wanted to start my own business, but I also wanted to make sure that I could do this for myself one of the books that I read was called decluttering at the speed of life. I highly recommend it and I'll post it in the show notes below. I learned a lot from the woman who wrote this book. One of the things being that not everything that left my home Needed to be sold. I don't know why I needed to hear it from someone else. It was if I was so attached to the fact that my things were worth money that I didn't even think about another way. And when I read about letting go without having to worry about that other stuff, it just made so much more sense to me. I tackled my home in a way that not a lot of us are able to do. And I didn't do it with the tips and the tricks and the tools that I'm going to teach you today. Because what I did is I was on a time crunch. It almost felt like I had to have my home fully organized before I started my own professional organizing business. I had done a lot. I had learned a lot. I had a lot to do./

Audio Only - All Participants 19:24

Just a side note here. I want to pop in to say that it's okay that you don't have everything perfectly organized before you start your own business. That is okay, because we're all on our own journey. You just have to be a little bit of a step ahead of someone else to be able to guide them and to hold their hand. Now, I'm certainly a lot of steps ahead now, but I didn't realize that then. So if you need to hear that, I am going to let you know that it is okay if you don't have everything organized in your home, that you still help other people do it. That's okay if that's something that you want to do and you tend to be good at it

Megs 20:02

So I went through each room. I decluttered. I made multiple trips to any donation center. I tried to find donation centers that would support good causes, so it made me feel even better about giving things away. It felt good. It felt really good. One thing that I did was try to organize my craft closet and I. Dedicated an entire day to it. I emptied everything out. I color coded everything. My colored pencils were rainbows and my markers were rainbows. The crayons were rainbows. Each and everything had its own perfect spot. I even put together little care packages for people in my area, like Coloring books and crayons and colored pencils that they could use for kids that are homeschooling I put everything back It looked really beautiful.

— The Craft Closet Reality Check

Megs 20:57

But I didn't go in there and assign places for everything. So guess what? I had to do it over again. So I did it again. I emptied everything out. I got rid of more and then I put it all back. And then months later, actually a couple of months ago, I've looked at this craft closet again. And after doing so much work for my clients and for myself, I realized. I still haven't gotten rid of enough. And so here I am, I have decluttered this craft closet now two to three times trying to come up with a perfect solution so that it can stay fairly organized, right, where things have a place. And finally I realized it was just because I didn't get rid of enough. Having less means that you have less decisions to make on all of the stuff in front of you. And when you have two kids going in there, five and seven are my kids ages now. They don't know where things go. They don't know my seven year old can read, but my five year old is still working on that. And so when they go in there, they don't necessarily read labels. They're not going in there to find the perfect spot. They're simply just going in there and putting things where they fit. Because that's what they know to do.

Audio Only - All Participants-1 22:07

And the reason this is, is specifically because like I just talked about with my kids, they're gonna go in and they're gonna put things where they can fit it. Now, without teaching and without helping them understand and without repetition, because they are also learning and will make mistakes along the way, then it is gonna go back to the way that it was or a different form of mess than it was in the beginning. There's nothing wrong with this, but this is just part of the process. This is part of the messy middle, if you will, in that your kids are gonna make a mess of things, and then it's up to you to go and help them understand how it could

— 2026 Megs: Teaching Kids How to Use Organizing Systems

Audio Only - All Participants-1 22:46

help when we put things back where we need them to go. I actually-- the other day I asked the girls to go and put away stuff in their playroom. Now, normally, I go about it a little bit differently. I ask them to, you know, "Just put away the dress-up clothes," or, "Just put away your magnetic blocks." But I asked them to put away everything, and I went downstairs, and sure enough, everything was shoved in a closet. The closet doors normally aren't closed, and this time they were, and I was like, "I bet I know exactly where all of the stuff that was on the floor was." So at first, I did feel a little heated because it does make me feel genuinely like- I'm doing all the work and that nobody actually wants to help me. We also have different priorities. But I realize that there is this sense of discomfort that we all have to go through to get to this idea that we all want to be a part of. So instead of just yelling at them and saying, "That's not how you do it," I was like, "Hey, I'm going to help you, and I'm gonna show you how we do this so that we don't have to try to redo it every time we clean." It took us five minutes. Five minutes to take all of the stuff that they had thrown on the floor and put it into their corresponding places. We're still navigating where things go because we're still in a new place. We've been here for only seven weeks. But with that said, I asked them, like, "How long did that take?" They said, "Five minutes." And I said, "Okay. So next time, when you're putting things away, could it be more beneficial to simply put things where they go? Take a moment to think about, like, oh, the dress-up clothes go in the dress-up clothes, and the Barbies go with the Barbies." They agreed, perhaps begrudgingly. But regardless, it was a good teaching moment to help them understand. Are they going to not clean up again in the way that I would hope? Sure. But also, they're also learning and trying, and they're also going to make a mess. None of this is perfect. This is our journey. This is our opportunity to play with what we want as a family.

Megs 25:03

My learning get to benefit my clients. Because I can teach them how you don't have to do this all at once. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you go in and organize a space./

Audio Only - All Participants-1 25:15

One of the most important lessons that I learned from doing this craft closet is, well, as I say all the time, if everything is important, then nothing is important. and if nothing is important, then it's impossible to know where to start, because nothing feels like it's the most important thing to work on, because everything feels important. and when I continued to declutter this craft closet, it wasn't just about having too much, it was that every time I would put certain things back,

— 2026 Megs: When Everything Feels Equally Important

Audio Only - All Participants-1 25:54

I would notice that we just weren't using it. The things were not getting used. They were things that my girls did not gravitate towards. It just wasn't working, and so we continued to let things go But a key point I wanna make here too is that you could listen to all of the podcasts in the world, you could read every single book, you could have all of the knowledge possible to be the very best organizer. Even if you were able to pull all of that information to the forefront of your brain on a whim at at any given moment without the action behind it, you would still be starting from a foundation, but a foundation without actually doing the thing. It's the action that's needed to really solidify the act of doing something to see what actually works for you. I could tell you to let go of more, except that when it comes to your nervous system and actually getting comfortable with the amount that you have when letting go, it's okay that you're not doing it all at once. It was actually really productive to do it in increments. Maybe it's something that I would do differently now in that I would go shelf by shelf to start to understand what could work instead of trying to overhaul everything. That's where the idea of playing around with it could get really fun because you start to see, well, what are we actually gonna play with versus trying to make it look perfect. That was my goal. I still wanted it to look perfect, and in the end, sure, I had a craft closet, but in the back of my mind, I was still like, "These bins aren't good enough. Need to be better. Ah." And it worked just fine. That craft closet took up way more of my brain than I needed it to So having less is amazing, and it's okay to have just one less to start. You've got to build the muscles to prove to yourself that this is something that you can do./

Megs 28:07

In fact, it can be done very simply and without overwhelming our brain to the point that we don't ever get to organizing a space in general. I was talking to another one of my clients the other day, and she said the phrase, well, once I get organized, well, I'll tell you what, I don't think that there's ever a point at which you get organized you make a decision to be more organized. And then you start to adopt the traits and habits or routines around what that actually looks like. And so let me talk to you a little bit about how I coach my clients or how I would coach you on getting to a place where you could have a more organized home. It doesn't mean that it's going to be perfect. It does not mean that it's going to look like Pinterest, at least right away, because if you have a lot of stuff, you're not going to buy containers for all of that stuff. The first step of getting organized is decluttering, which is a whole another step in itself, and decluttering means you have to make some decisions on the stuff that you have and letting it go so that you can live with the stuff that's going to elevate your life now and not just in case later. people with ADHD and myself, we have executive function issues, which means that I'll get up in the morning sometimes, and I've got so many things going on in my brain. If I don't sit down and plan out my day and really time box and figure out what I'm going to be able to achieve in the day, my brain will continue to run and get all of these ideas, and I will just continue to just do tasks around the house until I actually sit down and have a plan of action I have a bunch of articles below just on understanding your brain in a different way. There's a couple of different websites that I would recommend. One of them is ADDitude magazine. It's a D D to tune attitude, right? Get it a D D. Okay. Uh, but. Talking about executive function, I think is really important because there's nothing wrong with you. Your brain just doesn't give you the skills that neurotypical people have when it comes to executive function. I will even tell you while I'm recording this podcast, I'm going in so many different ways. I have to have a timeline in front of me. And even planning out that timeline was so overwhelming to me, I didn't want to do it. I just want to talk about the stuff, but I also want to do it in a way that it's easy to follow. And it makes sense so that you can start to implement some of these things. So executive function. We can also be time blind and we have trouble balancing tasks. And what that means for me, or for my clients sometimes too, is that if you look at a space that has a lot of stuff in it, and not all of that stuff has a place to go, it looks very overwhelming. And that is the trouble we have sometimes. We can see an end result. We know what that end result looks like. We have a solution. We've been there before. We can imagine it. It feels so good to imagine it, except that all of the little teeny tiny itty bitty steps to get there feel very overwhelming until we start to actually break it down into those teeny weeny itty bitty steps Obviously you can hire a professional organizer. Do it. Highly recommend it. Also, another way out. Is to give yourself the option to be a more organized person and then create a routine around it. Not a habit because apparently habits are things that neurotypical people can just do without even thinking about it. I still hate to brush my teeth at night, but I know I have to do it because I don't necessarily want my teeth to rot out of my face when I'm in my forties. So I do it painfully. But what I also know. Is that other people don't have that ridiculousness hanging over them to complete a task that you've been practicing your entire darn life. Something that I have incorporated when I brush my teeth is creating a routine and a trigger that when I'm brushing my teeth, My routine now is to also clean up my sink area and to put things away, like putting away my face stuff and putting away the toothpaste, putting away this and that, and that is the kind of idea I want you to start to create around being more organized. Another thing that's prevented me from organizing in the past is, my clients have said, this is just so overwhelming. I don't even know where to start. That speaks to me because when I think of something that I want to do for my business, or maybe for my kids, or even if it's learning a new piece of technology. The thought of starting it is overwhelming to me because I know I'm not going to be good at it right away. I wouldn't know all of these little tips and tricks and things that could help me be the best possible version of myself when using this tool, I want to be good at it right away, and I know that starting means that I'm not going to be, that serves as a roadblock for me. I think this can tie into executive function too, because I can't get myself to do the thing that I know I want to do, and I know could help me make my life better. That's the thing, all of these things that we're holding ourselves back from doing is going to elevate our lives. Sometimes when I'm having a bad day, I start to look around. And I'm like, does my brain feel like what I'm seeing around me? And nine times out of ten, the correlation is uncanny. Things are in disarray. Maybe I didn't do the dishes the night before, when normally, nighttime Meghan is so much nicer than daytime Megan Look, I could go on and on about all the reasons why we're not organized. There's so many different things, because while I can organize a space, there's so many other things I would love to organize that I'm just not great at. So I'd like to hire other people to do it for me, or perhaps listen to a podcast that could help guide me along the way. So the solutions I want to give to you today, if you want to learn how to get more organized yourself in your space, is to start small. As small as you possibly can. First, you're going to pick the amount of time that you're going to do it for. Once you have that, I want you to think about what time of day is going to be the most convenient for you. To dedicate this time block to is it going to be in the morning when you first get up and the kids aren't up yet? Is it going to be in the evening after the kids go to bed? I know that in the evening I just want to get into bed. So that's not going to be the best time for me.

— Starting Small with Time-Boxed Organizing Sessions

Megs 35:01

The morning is the best time for me because I have time to think before my children get up. Is it lunchtime? Is it while your kids are eating lunch? Maybe they're still home or maybe they're off at school and maybe you have set a reminder somewhere to tell you that now is the time to do it. Which leads me to my third step. Once you have picked a time. amount of time, and then picked a time of day./

Audio Only - All Participants-1 35:26

The idea with this is not to create, like, this consistent schedule that you're gonna come back to every day for the rest of your life. It's just about creating a habit, creating a way to get into a project that's really not overwhelming, because most of the time we only clean when someone's coming over, when we do angry clean, and sometimes it's so overwhelming that we don't know how to stop until we've exhausted ourselves, and now we don't know how to end a project that we're in the middle of, and we're surrounded by stuff, and we're stuck in the middle of a floor. So the idea here is that you're picking a goal, right? What time of the day would I be more likely to start decluttering or give a home to something? And how many minutes feels the least daunting right now? Five minutes. What could you do in five minutes? A lot more than you think This is a really good place to start to give yourself a reminder to get into it when you do feel like you could, and it's a little bit amount of time so that it's as easy as possible.

Megs 36:38

Now you're going to set a reminder. What have you committed to? Have you committed to doing this in the morning when you first wake up? Mid afternoon? Evening? Middle of the night? I don't know who you are, what your life is like. You do you, right? Now you're going to set a reminder. You set a reminder on Alexa. Just make sure you don't do it for five times a day. I did that. And now I don't know how to turn all of the reminders off on Alexa. She is really annoying. And sometimes my. Emotions get the best of me when I'm trying to turn her off, but I digress because I want to focus on organizing. And now you're going to set a reminder./

Audio Only - All Participants-1 37:16

So I love reminders, but if you already have 18 reminders for everything else in your life, this might not make a huge impact. So another way to remember that decluttering is something that's important to you right now, and you want to be able to develop, you know, just a small muscle for it, is to find a thing that reminds you to declutter. So it could be every time I open the fridge, I'm gonna remember that I wanna declutter for five minutes. Now, you might open the fridge a lot. So it could be every time I go to brush my teeth in the morning, I am going to remember to declutter for five minutes. So sometimes when you attach an action to, to what you actually want

— 2026 Megs: Using Reminders and Habit Stacking to Build Consistency

Audio Only - All Participants-1 37:59

to do, that's called habit stacking, and that is something that can really help you in building a muscle for it. So something I do for habit stacking is if I'm looking in the mirror and I notice a body part that I don't like and my brain starts to talk negatively about it, I do an exercise for that body part, and then that's it, and then I walk away. I'm done. Like, that is the thing that I do, and that is the habit I've created because I'm just not interested in hanging out in those spaces anymore where my brain does that. I'd rather just be like, "Oh, let's come up. I see you. I'm going to dismiss you, and I'm gonna move on." But I take an action to get out of there. And the idea with, you know, doing five, 10, 15 minutes, it's not that that is the only amount of time that you'll ever do it for. It's that you're building the muscle to show yourself that you can actually do this, that this is something that you can get back to, You're trying to break that memory of overwhelm that you have around decluttering being this non-preferred task, because there's so much goodness that is created out of it. But it is still uncomfortable, and it can be overwhelming. But those, those emotions that I'm describing there, that discomfort, is actually growth. You have to allow it to be growth and start to interrupt it and recognize it as growth so you can continue to move forward.

Megs 39:23

You can set a reminder on your phone, just set a recurring reminder, say, you know, Hey Siri, can you set a reminder for me at 7am every single day to declutter a space for 15 minutes? I added that for tomorrow 7 a. m. That's cool. Okay, so I didn't even think she was going to do it, but she literally just did it for me. now every day at 7 a. m. Siri is going to remind me that I'm going to go declutter a space. But Meghan, what does that mean? Okay, so this is where it feels really good. But this is step four. You're going to find a box. You're going to put it at your back door, in your garage, at your front door, wherever it could go, that it's out of the way, and that's going to be your donation box. You're going to put it somewhere, write donations on it. You can buy a box. You can use a plastic box. You can use the Amazon box that was just delivered. I talked to someone the other day and she said that every time an Amazon box gets delivered to the house, it does not leave unless it has something in it. She makes it purposeful that things go in that box and then they leave the home. I think that's brilliant. And step five is now you're going to figure out which space you're going to declutter. You can start with a drawer. You can start with a cabinet. You can start with one corner of a space. Remember that you have this 15, 10 or five minute increments to work within. The cool thing about it is that once it's over, you don't have to do anything else. That's it. Because the point is, is that I want you to see how, how much you can get done in that little amount of time. Now you are going to get more done if you dedicate 15 minutes versus five minutes. But the point here is to not get overwhelmed. And what I always tell myself is, gosh, I can do anything for five minutes. Anything. within reason, but anything that I put my mind to and something that I want to achieve in my life, I can do in five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes. so what does decluttering a space actually look like? here are the basic tools you're going to work with, is you're going to look at the space that maybe it frustrates you the most, maybe it frustrates you the least, but regardless, pick a space that's It's relatively easy. for example, you start with a drawer. You're going to take everything from that drawer and you're going to put it on your counter. Now, if your counters are cluttered. Then maybe you consider decluttering the counter first. Regardless, you want to take everything from the space that you're in, and you're going to take it out. Now, if it's a cabinet or a drawer, it's taking out the contents. But if you're on the counter, I want you to draw an invisible line, or maybe even a real line, on the space that you're actually going to work within. You're going to set blinders on yourself. You're going to put these little blinders on and you're not going to look at anything else. You're only going to focus on this space. The point of it is to be able to declutter the space so that you can see what's in front of you and see what you can achieve by simply dedicating a short amount of time to it. As you start to go through things, you're going to ask yourself, is this something that has a space already? Do you have a specific place? You keep scissors, and that's what you found on the counter. Do you have a specific space where you keep food? Put that where it goes. Now, there could be the case where you're still overwhelmed by everything else in the other area./

Audio Only - All Participants 43:00

side note here

Audio Only - All Participants-1 43:01

I am gonna talk about putting blinders on. That's important. But you don't actually have to take everything out. You can just start by looking at what you have. Take it out and start putting it in categories as you're emptying it, but maybe you're just moving it to the places that it does go, especially when it comes to a countertop, because you can't necessarily take things out of a countertop and then put them back. You're going to make mistakes, and I want you to make mistakes. You should make mistakes, because that is going to teach you what your needs and your wants are, so that it can help you understand how to go about it differently next time with the way that you work on things. I've been saying this a lot lately, is, uh, oftentimes I'll say these words. It's only to give you food for thought, and the food for your thought is simply for your thought to munch on it and say, "Ooh, I like that, but I don't like that, and this is what I'm gonna do instead." That phrase: Where would you go to look for this if you were trying to find it? And then trust yourself. Do not try to find the perfect space. Do not create the perfect space. Where would you go to look for this if you were trying to find it? That's its home.

Megs 44:10

Come back to the first area. Do not let yourself be distracted by other areas. It's so important that you focus on the task at hand. As you continue to work through things, ask yourself, what's trash? Maybe you just look at what's trash and throw that out first. If it's food, what's expired? Let that be a really great reason to get it out of your house. What if you have a deck of cards, and all of the games in your house are all over the place? Where do you want to be able to keep the games? And that's where they start to accumulate. Go put it there. How about, candy from a birthday party or birthday bag? You decide that, gosh, my kids already have enough candy and I don't want this in my house. You throw it away. Or maybe it is too painful to throw something away. So you put it in the donation box because they'll find use for it. Something that helps me a lot, I've been practicing this a lot too, is I see that when I have less, It just, it takes so much pressure off my back. There's so much that I don't have to keep track of anymore because there's so much that I don't need. As humans, we really don't need a lot. I'm not here to preach a minimalist journey to you. I'm here to teach you that you can absolutely be organized as a person with ADHD if you break it down into the smallest tasks imaginable. I started this business because I had this idea

— Why Having Less Stuff Creates More Ease

Megs 45:40

that Everything in my house could look perfect and everything in my house would have the perfect organizing product that I could put my perfect towels in. It wasn't as if I wanted to live this perfect life. I just knew that I was drowning in so much stuff. I wanted a solution and I thought that the solution was perfection. But the solution really is making these tiny, incremental, itty bitty steps on a daily basis. Because at the end of the day, they add up to this monumentous change that you could have never imagined making in your life. Is my life with ADHD still hard? Certainly. Does it still get messy? Uh, yeah, I have kids and I want them to live a kid life, but when I have less, there's less for me to put away. I have eureka moments all the darn time when it comes to organizing because I see the effect that it has on my life. And people don't organize their homes to be perfect. They don't organize their homes to never be messy. They organize and declutter their homes because when they have less and things get messy, there's less to put away. It's as simple as that. So even now, when my home gets messy and I look at my countertops, I see things, but I also see things that have a home and I'm like, Oh, that brush goes in that drawer over there. Those hair ties go in that hair bow drawer over there. If my daughter has schoolwork, she has a schoolwork drawer. If she has artwork, we have an artwork drawer. It is impossible to do this in one day. It's impossible to do it in a week. What is possible? Is deciding you want to make a change and doing just a teeny bit at a time. I was talking to someone today and they were like, Oh, I hate that. I have to trick my brain into cleaning, but sometimes I invite people over just so that I will get things done. And I'm like, okay, but if that works, why not praise yourself for that? you know, what works, you know, that you have a solution. what is bad about that? One, you get to hang out with awesome people. Two, you have a clean home. Three. You still have a clean home the next day. So I feel like it's a win win win situation here I want to reinforce the fact that you can praise yourself for these little wins. And that's really the last step to all of this is congratulating yourself for these little things that you're doing because they're not little things. It adds up and it's pretty amazing what it adds up to. I don't really have a sign off, do I? One of the articles I linked below talks about executive function and how we can improve our executive function skills with joy and with praise. it's literally written by people who know what they're talking about, which is why I linked some articles down there. So don't just take my word for it, take the expert's word for it. In addition to that, you can't treat ADHD.

— Praising Your Progress Without Shame

Megs 48:41

From a place of shame or blame. That's another quote that I got from one of the articles and I love it because every time I talk to someone who has been shamed for having ADHD or is shaming themselves, do you think that they're actually living their best life? Uh, no, absolutely freaking not. Because guess what we do with our darn brains is we take it on a train ride down to a place that we don't want to live in, but we do that to ourselves. Praise yourself. Please do that. And procrastination, putting it off and putting it off. It really comes from a place of ambiguity. If you don't know what you don't know, that serves as a roadblock.

Audio Only - All Participants-1 49:26

On that note, I will share I'm really proud of myself for putting out this podcast. I'm so proud of myself for showing up and teaching you what I knew in the moment, and now for continuing to show up to teach you what I now know because I'm continuing to learn so much more every single day. The amount of people that have trusted me with their ADHD brains in their homes, through Zoom, and digitally has been incredible, and it's been so fascinating and incredible to see what people are able to achieve, not only through physical organization, but also through regulation and understanding their reactions to life, so that we can start to connect our thinking and our feeling brain to understand how we can go about this life without staying stuck. the messy middle is really uncomfortable. And it is this pull of who you used to be into this version of you that you are becoming. And yes, that's the journey, but there are certain things that you get to learn along the way, then you build this confidence to understand that you can take on anything. And then you can take on anything again, and again, and again. But you do have to free up some space first. And it's a great place to start in your home, or with your emails, or with your budget, or with your digital stuff, and of course, that damn to-do list in your life.

— 2026 Megs: The Messy Middle and Closing Thoughts

Audio Only - All Participants-1 50:59

Because when you start to understand what is important, you know exactly where to start, and it feels really good. On that note, I hope you have a beautiful week. Thank you so much for listening,