99. I Got 99 Problems, but Organizing Ain't One

Over the last twenty years, I've listened to people's problems with their space. Usually, it's just a simple fix, and I try to get them to understand that, "Yes, you may have problems - lots of them. But [with me] Organizing ain't one." 

So, here we are: Episode 99! Today, we're going to talk about some solutions to three of the "biggest" problems I hear clients' stress about, so that you'll walk away from it feeling like organizing is the LEAST of your problems. You're welcome...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

I find that the older that I get, the more frustrated I get with having stuff. To the point where I'm sitting there thinking, do I even need shirts? Do I need shoes? Like, do I need a pen to write with? Do I need a lamp? And I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's because I'm middle-aged. I'm turning 46 this summer. And it's just part of a midlife crisis. I don't know if it's because I like having time to do other things. I don't want to maintain a lot. I think part of it too is that when you've been an organizer for over 15 years, it's been closer to 20 since when I actually started interning as an organizer. You see so many people who are miserable in their spaces. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that things around them are running their life. And I've mentioned this numerous times on this podcast before. I'm a single mom. I am the head of the household. I've got one great kiddo. He already understands the importance of keeping things at least tidy. He's not perfect. No kid is. I think the bigger thing is just having an environment that you feel calm and peaceful in. And I do feel like I'm getting there. I feel like this last move that we made was 100% crucial because there were a lot of exterior things going on. We lived in a very transitional neighborhood, very, very close to downtown Nashville. I had no reason to be that close to downtown Nashville anymore. Um, that's just kind of where we landed when we moved back to town. My son's father lived in the same neighborhood. So that part was easy, but everything else was complicated. Traffic was horrible. We had no sidewalks in our neighborhood. Our place was small, and it's still small now, the place that we just moved to, but the layout is different. It makes more sense. We have more storage, we have more counter space. It just works for us better. And I really, really wanted to make the change after a year of being there, but I went ahead and stayed till the second year just because we had a number of different factors. We actually moved during the winter. And so when our lease was up, my son still had school for the remainder of that spring. And he was just going two minutes down the road to the elementary school in the neighborhood. So it was like, well, I don't want to go ahead and move 20 minutes away and then have to bring him back to school every day and then try to go down and work 15, 20 minutes away, and then come back and get him. And so it just took a while to make that change. But once we did, it was like, okay, this was the right move. This is where we want to be. We're still unpacking, we're still trying to figure out some things. There's going to be an episode coming up that talks about custom organizing and how that can actually be a little bit frustrating when you move. You can take a lot of those pieces with you, but sometimes it just doesn't fit. It just doesn't work. It doesn't translate into a new space. And we're going to get into some of that. That's probably going to be in more premium content. That's probably going to go under an episode that's geared more towards organizers. Um, it doesn't mean that you can't be part of it if you're not a professional organizer. It's just more about trying to keep things a little bit flexible in terms of the space. And so we'll get to that later. So we're still unpacking. I've had to order a couple of new types of organizers that I definitely didn't need before. We had more drawers before. Now we have more cabinets. We've got more closet storage. We have one custom built-in closet that's helpful that has a couple of drawers. But as far as the kitchen, it's just, it's a disaster. Whoever designed this place did not know organizing. And that's that's what we're gonna have a whole episode about that down the road because so many developers, so many construction crews will just start picking out stuff. They're like, yeah, this fits, but they don't really know that that's not gonna translate, that only having two small drawers in a kitchen, and then everything else is cabinets and shelves. Like there's only so much you can do with that. But like I said, we'll get into that later. So as I was thinking about what I wanted to do for the 99th episode of labeled organizing, I thought, okay, of course, who doesn't think of 99 problems, right? If you're Gen X. And so I thought to myself, okay, if we can give some simple solutions to some somewhat simple problems. A lot of people think that their organizing problems are really big and they'll never be solved. But I most likely can give you a simple solution for almost everything that you think is a big problem. What I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna try to pick maybe five or six quote unquote problems. And then I'm gonna give a simple solution. And what I'm hoping this does, even if it doesn't solve your specific problem right now, hopefully it will send your mind down a path to where you can say, okay, she gave me examples of simple solutions to these other problems, and I can probably translate that into what I'm going through. And at the end of the day, it probably isn't that big of a problem. And so organizing isn't my problem. I've got all these other problems. So for the sake of fun and music, I can't play the track, unfortunately, but we can just kind of imagine that we've got 99 problems and organizing ain't one. To start off with that, let's talk about, and these are in no specific order, by the way. I just kind of want to throw them out there. Let's talk about some of the quote unquote problems that a lot of my clients have. One of them is laundry. I hear about laundry all the time. And let me back up just a second. The way we're gonna format this is I'm gonna give you a problem that I hear about. I'm gonna give you a solution if you have money to throw at the problem, and I'm gonna give you a solution if you don't have money to throw at the problem because it really does make a difference and you have to pick a lane. You either pay to have the problem solved, and then I'm gonna also throw in some other specific details with that. It's not just gonna be like, yeah, I'll just pay to have that done. That's not what this is about. But I'm also gonna give you a route to where if you don't have money to throw at the problem, which most people don't have, then it's gonna give you a solution that makes you feel like, okay, this doesn't seem as bad as what I thought. Maybe it isn't that big of a problem. Okay, so back to laundry. I hear about laundry from almost every single client I've ever had. I do have a couple of clients that are very, very tidy. And anytime I've done an organizing project for them, it's been like a one-off. It's not laundry, it's not the garage, it's not a closet. Um, they have enough space for the stuff that they have. What it tends to be is more of areas that they don't have organizers for, like a pantry. Like, hey, I've got all this food, I just have some basic shelves. I kind of clump everything together, but it's not necessarily like organized. And it definitely doesn't look like things are easy to find. Those are the times that I will say, okay, yes, this is what you need to do. But otherwise, I would say laundry is the number one thing that people say is their biggest problem. Okay, now let's talk about laundry for a second. Let's say, for the sake of time, let's just say you have more than two people in a household, okay? Because if there's just one or two people, you're not gonna have that much laundry. And I say that as a two-person household. I'm doing laundry every day, but I'm also trying to keep up with it. So I do a load usually in the morning, sometime, you know, around lunch or early afternoon. If I'm working from home that day, I switch it to the dryer and I throw in another load of usually towels. So I may have dark clothes in the morning. Around lunch, I switch, I do some towels. Late afternoon, I kind of toss up the dryer with that first load and fold that stuff, put it in a basket, throw the towels in the dryer, and then I make sure that that load definitely gets dry before I go to sleep. Now, part of moving to this new place, when we were at the other place, we didn't have as nice of like a washer and dryer, but they were both quieter in terms of a lot of times I would start a load of laundry before we went to bed, and it was actually kind of a calming noise. What I have right now is one of these singy songy washers that it spins really fast and it's really loud. It's almost like an airplane landing. And then when it's done, it has to sing me a song. And I know that there's a way I can probably mute that, but just for right now, instead of trying to do a load of laundry while we are sleeping, I try to get everything done during the day to where I just have maybe the dryer on at night because the dryer is still pretty calming. It's almost like white noise. Okay. Let's say you have two or more people in the household. Okay, let's say you've got two adults and one kid or two kids. Okay. So you've got adult clothes, you've got kid clothes, you've got towels, you've got sheets. And normally people will sort those out. Let me tell you something about laundry sorters. Everybody thinks that a laundry sorter is a magic solution. What I find, I would say probably eight times out of 10, is that the laundry sorter just becomes a dumping zone. People don't actually sort out the colors or sort out the items. They just walk by and they throw it in whatever section isn't completely filled. So if you're gonna do a laundry sorter, you need to make sure everybody, anybody that brings their laundry to the sorter is actually gonna sort things out. Or you have to have one big hamper where everybody throws their stuff and then one person, or, you know, if you rotate the responsibility, there is somebody that is actually designated to sort out the laundry. Okay, so a lot of times I hear people say, I hate doing laundry. I go to the laundry room and everything is just all together and we have a laundry sorter. Well, that is a big task. And you're actually adding on more work if you're the only person who is concerned about it. If you've got three people in the house and everybody's just dumping their stuff in, you're sorting it as you go to do the laundry anyway. So my simple solution is get rid of the laundry sorter. Okay. Have one hamper in each room. So if you have a primary bedroom, you can have two hampers, one for each adult, and both hampers live in the walk-in closet or they live in the bathroom, whatever's convenient. Most people don't have a laundry chute, but I have seen newer homes that they're bringing back the laundry chute where everybody just dumps their stuff in a chute that's either in the hallway or off of the bathroom, and then it all goes down to one place. But the biggest thing is that if you are somebody that is doing more loads of laundry for one person in the house, because let's say you've got somebody in sports and they only have two shirts. So you're constantly washing the shirts to make sure that there's one clean for practice or a game, or you've got a spouse that has a uniform and that has to be washed or taken to the dry cleaner. You may have to make one person more of a priority than the rest of the household, at least for a season. Whoever that person is has to be given the responsibility of making sure that their items get to the right place so that whoever is doing the laundry can sort through those things easily. Okay. So if you have two adults and one child and that child is in sports and you have to make sure that those shirts get washed, then you say, okay, listen, all you have to do is make sure when you take off your uniform shirt, you walk it down the hallway and you put it in the big laundry hamper by the washer. And then that's the only thing that you enforce with them, especially if it's a kid. And here's another thing. We're gonna have an organizing for kids episode coming up. It's gonna be at the start of summer. It's gonna be amazing. You guys are gonna love it, trust me. We're gonna go through a lot of kids stuff that we haven't, we've barely even touched on kid stuff in the past on this podcast. That's gonna change in the next few episodes, okay? But I'm telling you right now, if you have a laundry issue and you have a child involved, you need to give them one task. Okay, so other than making sure their laundry stays off their bedroom floor, you need to make sure their laundry stays in the hamper. And then if they have a sport, you say, listen, all of your laundry goes in your hamper, but your two t-shirts, anytime you have a game, your game stuff has to be walked down the hallway and put in the big hamper so that I will remember to wash them. The other simple solution I'm gonna give, and then we're gonna move on to the next topic, is you wanna make sure you are doing some kind of load of laundry every other day. There are gonna be some days where you get up, you get your kids to school, you go to work, you pick them up, you come home, you make dinner, and then you start an evening routine that consists of either homework or maybe you have to get some more emails sent. And there's just kind of like this rush in the evening, and then everybody's trying to find PJs and get showers, whatever your bedtime routine is, you're just lucky if everybody eats after school, after work, and gets to bed at a decent time. I do understand that happens. However, you need to make sure you've got a couple of nights during the week, and then you're gonna pick both days during the weekend if you do this. If you only have two nights during the week, then both of your weekend days you're gonna have a load of laundry, but you need to make sure that you have a load of laundry in. You wake up, you put a load of laundry in the washer, and then when you get home from work, you put that little laundry in the dryer, and then you don't have to have it folded. You don't have to have it done. You just want to make sure that it's not still damp before you go to bed. The only goal is to make sure it's dry. And then the next morning, you can tumble it up, you know, make sure. I always like to heat up my laundry before I fold it. So I toss it around, fold it, get it in a basket, and then it's this whole assembly line. So here's the thing: if you've got money to throw at the solution, you hire someone. A lot of times, people use their babysitters while they're there to do a load or two of laundry, to fold some stuff while they're watching the kids. Some people will hire cleaning people and say, hey, can you also do some laundry? I understand that this happens in different households. However, if you don't have money to throw at the problem, then the solution is less. You need to try to work with less. You need to get rid of some stuff. And yes, you can survive with only 20 shirts, 20 pairs of pants. And I'm not someone that followed the whole organizing thing. There was a time period, I think it was like seven or eight years ago, where people were counting the items that they had. I don't even know what it's called. Just people were telling me about it. I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I don't think there has to be a specific number, but I like the idea of trying to limit the items that you have in your closet. I only own like maybe four pairs of shoes, and they're all different. You know, I've got like boat shoes that I slip on in the summer, I've got flip-flops, I've got running shoes, and I have like one pair of like neutral dress shoes. And then in the winter, I have like a pair of boots, but I try to just keep it so minimal that I don't have to worry about where all of my shoes are and how I'm gonna fit them all in the closet and how I'm gonna organize them and keep track of them. Like I've seen mud rooms where there's like 30 pairs of shoes for each person, and the whole room is just filled with like one shoe that's that doesn't, it doesn't have a pair. Like, I'm not even really sure where the pair is, and they don't know either. So reducing your items to where you know, hey, we've all got clothes to wear to school, we all have clothes to wear to work and to practice, but we've got a lot of extra that we don't really know why we're hanging on to these. So we've got to let them go. Okay. But the simple solution for those of you who use a laundry sorter and it's not helping, just ditch it. Just it's it happens. It's not you, it's a habit thing. And unless you've got everybody involved and it's something that's actually working, then just say, you know what, this just doesn't work for us and it's causing more of a headache. Just have one big hamper that everybody can bring their hamper to. Everybody dumps their hamper out and it goes back to their room and you're done. Okay. Like I said, keeping up with sports, uniforms, those become top priority. Make sure those get brought to the actual laundry room and let them know listen, this is gonna help me because we're gonna get stressed out if in two days neither one of your shirts is clean. The next thing people talk about is their car. I can't keep my car clean. Let me say this: a lot of people decorate their car, and I don't know what that's about. You don't have to have a car full of stuffed animals and fragrances and chapsticks. Like I keep one chapstick in my car just because I use chapstick so much. But it's like I've got my chapstick and my keys, and then I keep a bunch of napkins in the glove compartment because I'm from the Midwest, and apparently that's what we do. But tissue, napkins, a chapstick, I've got my glasses for when I drive, I've got my keys, I've got my purse. I keep a little carrier bag in the trunk, and so that way if I get groceries and they're all in smaller bags, I can put it in the bigger bag and carry it in and usually one trip. But you don't need to keep a lot of stuff in your car, even if you have kids. Most of you who have kids are traveling with a diaper bag, and that goes in and out anyway. I keep a little dolly, it's called a backpack dolly. It's awesome. If I get like a case of water and I want to wheel the whole thing in, I just, you know, set up this little dolly and it's got little bungee cords and it holds onto the water, and I wheel it in and then I fold it back up and then I put it in that little carrier bag to go back out to the car. So it's fine to have stuff that you carry in and out. It's fine to keep stuff in the back of the car, like your trunk or the back of your SUV, or you know, the back of your truck. As far as emergency stuff, if you have, you know, emergency like jumper cables, if you have a car vacuum, if you've got a tire pressure thing, I bought a thing off of Amazon where if my tires are low, I can air it up myself. Other than that, maybe just a small roll of paper towels and a couple of waters. And if it's not winter, you know, you don't need to keep like a big winter blanket, um, like an emergency blanket in the car if it's the middle of summer. You want to make sure you keep a couple of waters. But other than that, other than having like, we have an organizing pouch that kind of goes in between the seats to where I can turn around and put a couple things in it when I get in the car. And then on the other side, my son in the back seat can put a couple things in it. But you guys, the amount of items that people let live in their car, and a lot of it, like I said, is decorative. It's it's a lot of it's a lot. It's a lot of stuff in the windshield, like the the dash. You shouldn't have all that stuff up there that's dangerous. I mean, any law enforcement person will tell you you shouldn't have a bunch of stuff up in your dash. Don't keep notebooks up there. Carry a briefcase or carry some kind of backpack or just some kind of little bag. If you have to carry like a clipboard for work, try to actually have a bag that goes in and out of your car. And if it lives in your car, have it live behind the driver's seat on the floorboard or something. The biggest thing that people say is I can't keep my car organized. Well, you really shouldn't have that much to organize, to be honest. You shouldn't carry a flashlight. If you have like a few ketchup packets, if you're someone that's like, oh, I get so mad when they don't put ketchup in my bag. Well, get a Ziploc bag, put a few ketchup packets that are left over from your current drive-through order, put those in the console. You can put hand sanitizer in the console, you know, keep a pin in the car. But a lot of people really try to decorate their car. And it doesn't make any sense. When you get home at night, even if you have to make two or three trips to the car, if you brought things home, take them in. You don't need stuffed animals just hanging out in the car. I know a lot of the Jeep people have the rubber duckies. That's, I don't even know what to say about that. Like, I know that's your thing. So I'm not coming down on you guys. I'm just saying the people who actually say, I don't know how to keep this car clean and organized, keep a little organizer trash bag. They sell them where they just velcro to like the back of your seat. And even if you don't feel like taking in the trash from that day, you can at least collect it and put it in that little car trash bag. And then the next day you take that little bag in and dump it out. You know, just like you would dump out a trash can from a bedroom or a bathroom. You know, you don't have to clean out the car every single day to where it's detailed, but you have to maintain. It's just like with the laundry throughout the week, you have to maintain. Okay, so look at it this way. For those people who said laundry and their car are the two things they struggle with. Look, look what you've already accomplished. If you have money to throw at the situation, go get a car wash membership. Okay. We had the best car wash in Indiana. They kind of suck here in Nashville, but whatever. But some places you pay $25 a month, you maybe pay closer to, you know, $35 or $40 if you get the interior. But if you're someone that says, I just no matter what I do, I can't keep my car clean inside out, whatever. If you're paying for a membership and it's close to your house, and every few days you can go through and get a free car wash. Um, you can get your car washed anytime because of your monthly membership. Just do it. Just, you know, throw money at it. Go get your car washed, get in line for the interior clean. You know, the kids jump in and vacuum it out and wipe everything down. If that's what you need, do it. If you don't have the money to throw it at, which a lot of people don't, then try to keep like one of those car vacuum cleaners. You can get them off Amazon for like $20. You know, get an extension cord, you know, sit in your driveway for just 30 minutes and vacuum out the inside of your car. You know, do that once a week. But the biggest thing is just trying not to let things live there. And I listen, I know people get tired. I know people are trying to carry in kids and groceries and everything else. But the bigger habit is not letting yourself get comfortable once you walk through the door one time. Sometimes you need to make that second trip, sometimes you need to make the third trip. And then the final solution is if none of that helps, then you need to have less. You just need to have less that you are transporting around. I have a little cooler for especially the summer. If I pick up groceries and I've got a few cold things and I'm not going home right away, I have a little cooler that I put in the back. I've got my little carrier bag. I have a crate that has all of my emergency car stuff in it. And then sometimes I have a crate that has just like extra like cleaning stuff for when I go to organizing clients' houses. But for the most part, that's everything that lives in the back. And my son is in the back seat, I'm in the front, he has room, the seat behind me, I have room, the seat in front of him. It's it's one of these things where you have to be that person that does not live in your car. If you travel a lot, try to keep your stuff in a bag. Try to actually have bags for the items that you're toting around. And you may have to get an actual tote with a lid that snaps on, um, because those you can actually stack in the very bag. You can have kind of like a bigger tote or a taller tote and then a smaller version. And so if some items you have to take from job site to job site, they're at least contained and there's a lid on them and they don't slide around everywhere. I would try that out for a few days. I would try to just get one organizing item for your car. If you absolutely have to carry stuff around with you, actually get an office bag. Like get some kind of travel bag, a briefcase, some kind of laptop bag, get a tote that's just for the car. You just put all car items in it. But for the most part, not that much should live in your car. Okay. That's your simple solution. And if you have trouble keeping it clean and you can't throw money at it, then put it on the calendar once a week. I have to spend 30 minutes on the car. And really, that's all you need to do. If you quickly wash your car in the driveway, you vacuum it out. It's a 30-minute commitment. Trust me, it will make a world of difference to just commit to that. Okay, so we've covered laundry, we've covered the car. Let's talk about the drop zone when you come in the house. That tends to be another big problem that people have. The whole thing with a drop zone and with a junk drawer, the junk drawer kind of fits into this category too. You have to care enough about your items to create a place for them. So when you get home, you should have one specific place that you put your purse. You should have one specific place that you put your keys. If you're somebody that's like, well, I've got all this extra change, then you may have to go old school and get a piggy bank. You may have to have a drawer organizer with a section where all of your loose change goes in there until it goes somewhere else. Paperclips, we have an episode on paperclips. A lot of people have too many of one thing. Now, this isn't necessarily for the drop zone, but I'm just going to give you an example. I only buy cotton balls, oh my gosh, maybe three times a year. There's no such thing as getting a small amount of cotton balls, okay? I use one cotton ball every night to take my eye makeup off. And I would say probably three days out of the week, I don't even put eye makeup on. So it takes me forever to go through cotton balls. And I actually get irritated because when I go to store them, I keep seeing this big, stupid bag of cotton balls. And I've had different organizers over the years where it's like, okay, there's my little acrylic thing with the lid. And then you can only shove so many cotton balls down there, and then you still have the bag. And I also do this thing where I put cotton balls into like little travel bags. So I probably have like 12 cotton balls in each little travel bag. And then I keep those travel bags kind of like in a little toe. And then when I go to travel, I grab one. But get very comfortable with donating things that you don't need. And I'm talking about brand new things. So if you get, for instance, this is what I do with cotton balls. If I get cotton balls, I will immediately portion them out. I'll take about half the bag and either portion them out into smaller bags that I can use easily, or, you know, maybe you fill up your acrylic container and then you've got part of the bag left. I will actually take that bag and put it in my little donation bag. And you're probably saying, okay, who is donating cotton balls? Well, I am. And I've known people at two different mission type places, two different donation places that have said, when you donate hygienic supplies, they will portion them out, whatever's left. So let's say you get a big thing of Q-tips and you fill your little container with Q-tips. Let's say you get 200 Q tips and you have filled your container with like 40 of them, and you're like, these are gonna last me for three months. Take the opened little box of Q-tips and you can put it like in a little bag. You can wrap it up in its own little plastic bag. That's one way that you can reuse your plastic bags. Or you can put them like in a Ziploc bag so they don't fall out everywhere. But what you're doing is you're keeping everything, you know, somewhat hygienic. I mean, they are hygienic if they're brand new. You've opened it. Yes, I understand you've opened it. But what you're doing is you are passing along the higher quantity that you don't want right now. Because I know for me, I don't mind turning around and paying, you know, $3 for 200 cotton balls a few times a year because I basically section off what I think I'm gonna use. I donate the rest, and then I'm not mentally looking at them all the time. Like I'm the cotton balls that I'm gonna use are in their own little special small space. Then I'm not looking at this random bag off to the side, or now I've got to put that bag in a different basket. It's not very much, but it can feel like a lot when you've got a lot of those little situations. Same thing with socks. If you buy a package of, let's say, 20 pairs of socks and you only need like seven or eight pairs, donate the rest. If you start using your seven or eight pairs and you're like, you know what, I could probably use a few more pairs of socks, go buy another package of socks. But if you know, if you if you're getting something in bulk and you don't need something in bulk, that's just how it came, don't feel like you're stuck with it because chances are what you're paying per quantity of that item is already very low because you got it in bulk. Plus, a lot of you don't have a problem donating, period. You're like, oh, if someone were to ask you, hey, can you go pick up a package of washclaws and go donate them? You'd be like, sure, because you offered to help. You're like, hey, can I donate something? Yes, we need washclaws. Okay. So you go buy a package of brand new washcloths and then you take them to the donation place and you're like, here's a brand new package of washclaws. You're basically doing the same thing with the things that you already have to buy. You just don't need that quantity. Okay. Now, how does that translate to the drop zone? I have found that a lot of people who have a drop zone in a junk drawer have way too much of something. And like I said before, if you go back to the paperclip episode, this is another example of most people don't need a hundred paperclips. Most people aren't using paper anymore. But I know sometimes I will use, I'll need like a random paperclip. Even if I'm resetting a button, you know, you unfold the paperclip, and now you've got a little pokey thing that you can reset, a teeny tiny button on some little toy that your kid has, and you're like, I just need something small and pokey. So you grab a paperclip. So let's say you keep 10 paperclips out of a package of 100, and then you donate the 90 to a school, you know, or you put them in your donation bag. And so now all of a sudden the donation place is gonna have cotton balls, q-tips, and paper clips, and they're happy because maybe their office needed paperclips. Maybe they know of a family that just needs basic hygiene items. And I see this too. Some people will get free health and beauty items from either a giveaway, maybe they've purchased something and something was thrown in and they're like, well, I'm never going to use that. I've got my favorite XYZ, but they hold on to the item because it was free. And then it sits there, you know, in their bathroom cabinet for like five years and it expires and they throw it away. Get really comfortable with getting rid of that stuff and with portioning things out and donating. And again, this is how it matters in your drop zone. When you walk in and you've got all of your stuff, and you put it down in your mudroom or you put it down by your front door, and then you go to all of these other areas of your home and everything is full. Your bathroom closet is full, your bedroom closet's full, your kitchen drawers, you've got one big junk drawer and that's full. Creating space and all these other areas is gonna help your drop zone because a lot of times when you come in, the drop zone is getting messy because you haven't created a place for those items. And part of the reason you haven't created a place is because there's just no space left. You have no space to create a very customized place for the item that you're bringing in. Okay. Now, if you all of a sudden buy a new bag that you're keeping your clipboard and your notebook in, and that goes back and forth to your car, maybe you do need to create a space by the front door. If you don't have a mud room or you don't have like a front table, maybe this is your sign that you do need to create a space. A lot of people still do the basket thing on their steps. They have a basket at the bottom. Everything that goes upstairs goes in that basket. And whoever's going upstairs carries the basket upstairs. It gets empty, it comes back down to the bottom of the stairs. If you will do that, that still works. There could be some kind of little drop basket for random things that go upstairs. It could be a some kind of hamper. It doesn't have to be a permanent solution. I just think a lot of people come in and they leave all of the shoes that they own by the front door. They leave all of their coats. If it's summertime, you don't need a big heavy winter coat in that front closet if you don't have room for your items that you bring in. If you bring in stuff and it just you throw it on the floor because there's nowhere else to put it, but you have a big winter coat in that front closet in the middle of July, then that's when you need to rotate that stuff out and you need to make room. You can put organizers in that front closet to where you can actually slide bags, like your work bag, a diaper bag. Um, again, cube organizers. It's a great, great solution for that. Okay. So we've covered laundry, we've covered the car, drop zone, junk drawer is the same thing. Go through the junk drawer if you have tons of batteries. First of all, check to make sure the batteries work. People do that all the time where they're like, oh, I've got plenty of batteries. And then there's like a storm or they have to use a flashlight, and they realize that they only had maybe two working D batteries and they needed three, right? So you need to spend time actually figuring out, okay, everything that we have in here, what is all of this? We've got batteries, we've got paper clips, we have pens that don't work. I was at a client's house and all I had to do was write down a number. I had taken a measurement, okay. All I had to do was write down one number. And I had a little notepad and I had let someone brow my pen and it went missing. And I said, Can I borrow a pen? They had eight pens laying on the kitchen counter. And they said, What color do you want? I said, It really doesn't matter. I said, just as long as it works. I kid you not. We went through eight pins, none of them worked. None of them at all. Couldn't even get a clear line out of any of them. And I'm like, toss them right now. I'm not leaving this house until you toss all those pins. And then they started opening drawers, and there were drawers of other pins. And I'm like, okay, let's let's start pulling out pins. And so after like maybe 20 pins, we found one that worked. And I said, okay, keep this one out with your planner. Go through the rest over the next couple of days, go through your drawers and tell me out of maybe 40, 50 pins, how many of them actually worked? And I know, I know this stuff gets mundane. I know that you're sitting there thinking, I have so much to do. I don't have time for this. But it catches up with you and it catches up with you fast. And like I said at the beginning of the podcast, a lot of people sit there and think, oh, I've got to create all this time to deal with my stuff. When it should be the opposite, it should be, I need less stuff, so I have more time. And I haven't watched a lot of people at the end of their life, like some people have. Some people have said goodbye and watched people pass on, but I've heard many stories and I've watched two people pass on. And both times, neither one of them said, I wish I had more stuff. They say, I wish I had more time. Right. And I know a lot of you are feeling that. And I think that's why I'm getting irritated because there's so many things I want to do. I get irritated if I see just one box of Kleenex. Even though we use Kleenex. Like everything that we have, we use. But even that irritates me because I'm like, I wish we didn't need a box of Kleenex. Like it's to the point where I actually have to stop and take a breath and say, okay, I think some things just aren't working in the new place. Now that I've got some new organizers coming in, I'm going to donate some of my old organizers that were from the other place. I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and I'm going to have to do something different. And so we all have to make adjustments, especially if we move. And again, you know, we're in the middle of the moving series. And so for those of you who are trying to figure all of this out and you're moving, this is a great time, instead of throwing money at it, to really condense down and to try to have some better habits before you go to move. Because then it is going to cost you less. You won't need as many boxes. You won't need as many man hours. You are going to have more time and you're going to have less stress. So we covered three big things. I really thought I was going to get to four or five in this episode, but we're running out of time. So I just want to say this. We're on the 99th episode of labeled organizing. Episode 100 is going to come in the next week. I'm going to say this again. For those of you who are committed to organizing your life, I encourage you to subscribe to the bonus episodes, to the premium content. The minimum contribution is only $3 a month. You're welcome to give more at any time. If you've gone through one of the series and you're like, wow, this was like five hours of content that I needed. I know that must have taken a lot of time. I'm going to contribute more. I do appreciate it because it allows me to get episodes out quicker. You don't have to. And you can certainly keep listening to the free podcast. But what I will say to you is we're coming up on a hundred episodes. I have talked a lot about many different topics over these last 100 episodes. If you came in episode 80, 60, 75, 15, if you've hopped around, whether you go back to the beginning or you just try an episode that you haven't listened to before, I encourage you over the next week to try to pick two episodes that seem interesting to you that you have not listened to before. Because as we roll over into a hundred episodes, things are going to start getting deeper. And we're going to have a lot more specific niche episodes that I think a lot of you are going to be like, wow, like I don't have the time to listen to it right now, but I'm going to this weekend. And I want you to feel like you're caught up on some of the basic stuff I've talked about in the last two years. It's taken me two years to get to a hundred episodes. And so I encourage you to go back to listen to some of these other episodes. Um, like I said, the paperclip episode. Um, we've talked about car organization before. We've talked about travel. We've talked about hoarding. We're gonna talk about moving. When we get into the summer, like I said, we're gonna cover more kids stuff. We're gonna talk about going off to college for some people. We're gonna talk about summer vacation. So there's gonna be a lot of stuff. I want you guys to get to a place where you're less frustrated with the space around you and you have more time and you have less stress. And again, go back and listen to the episode called The Answer Is Always Less because big announcement next summer, summer 2027, I'm gonna come out with my first book on under the labeled organizing name. That's called The Answer is Always Less. And I've been working on it. Um, it's something that I haven't been able to put a ton of time into because I've Trying to get back to posting regularly here. But it's really going to focus on those of you who truly like the idea of becoming minimalist, but you're scared and you're not really sure how to get there. And this is going to be a very detailed book, and it's going to be a lot of okay, you're starting here. Remember those choose your own adventure books from when we were kids? For those of us who grew up in the 80s, we had the choose your own adventure. It's like, okay, this is what's happening now. Do you go down this path or down this path? And so it's going to kind of be like an adult version, and kind of like how I did today. Where it's like, do you have money to throw at it? Or you know, you don't. But that's going to be something that I'm going to be working on over the next year. And until we get to that point, there's going to be a lot of tips and bits of information that I'm going to put in there that I'm just going to kind of sprinkle along the way over the next year. And I want you guys to pick up on that stuff because I really think that a lot of you who think you have really, really big problems just need to realize that there are simple solutions. And I know I only got through three of them today. But if you can look at your problem and figure out what's not working, say this is my current solution. It's not working. I need to toss it. And then in one of the episodes in the past 99, I have probably mentioned something that will give you an idea of how you can move forward until we get to those specific episodes coming up in the next year. But I think you guys are doing great. I know a lot of you are going back and listening to some of the older episodes. I realized that in the last week or two. I appreciate that. I think some of you, it's time to level up and go to the bonus content and listen to a lot of the stuff I've talked about there and get ready for episode 100 because, like I said, it's coming up in the next couple weeks. And from there, some really exciting stuff is going to happen, stuff that we've never talked about before. And I think you're all ready for it. I think I'm ready to talk about it. So I hope this episode was helpful. Please make sure to go to our website labeledorganizing.com. Go to the Etsy page labeled organizing to get digital downloads and your emergency bag tag. If you haven't already, tornado season is pretty much almost over, but that doesn't mean that we don't have other emergencies that will pop up. Some people are going to be having babies this summer, and you want to make sure that someone knows that that's your emergency bag to go to the hospital. Other people just need to have a bag where they put their most important things in case there's ever a fire, in case you ever have to evacuate.