The One Reason You Won’t Reach Your Home Organizing Goals This Year

Out of all the goals you wrote for this year, finally organizing your home is one of the big ones you want to reach. After all, organizing your home will save you time and keep you from feeling stressed out and frazzled. But there’s one big reason you won’t reach your home organizing goals this year, and it’s not what you think.

While decluttering your stuff is a big part of it, just decluttering doesn’t mean everything will automatically stay organized. Unless you make an effort to do a little bit of cleaning up every single day, you’ll always have clutter piling up.

If you want to reach your home organizing goals this year, you need to focus on creating organizing habits.

Why is creating organizing habits so important?

Why do you have a habit of brushing your teeth every day? You probably want to avoid things like cavities, rotten teeth, and bad breath. 

You’re avoiding unpleasant things too when you have organizing habits. Instead of paying money to fix your cavities, you’re paying money to replace lost items in your home. In exchange for needing new teeth, you’re wasting your time searching for things or telling other people where to find them. And the bad breath? You’re constantly dealing with feeling emotionally drained by seeing piles and random things all over your house.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Your goal is your desired outcome. Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there.”

If you want to avoid extra trips to the dentist, brush your teeth. If you want to avoid a constantly cluttered house, implement small daily actions like the 5 listed in this post.

How to create a habit.

Creating a habit takes time and intention. In fact, stating your intention to create a new habit is the best way to make it happen. If you can be extremely specific with the time, place, and steps you need to take to create a new habit, it creates less tension in your brain so it actually gets done.

A couple of years ago, my goal was to start exercising regularly. I decided to create a habit of exercising every Monday and Wednesday morning at home using the BBG program through the Sweat app on my phone.

72 weeks later, and I feel lost if I don’t get in that exercise.

If you’re creating a goal to have a clean kitchen, you could spend 10 minutes clearing off the counter after finishing the dinner dishes each night. After a while, the habit will become more natural and you can start working on another one that will help you reach that goal.

If you want to learn more ways to create a habit, I recommend picking up James Clear’s Atomic Habits and Grethen Rubin’s Better Than Before.

Forget what you’ve heard about “it takes 21 days to make a habit.”

Remember how long it took you to start brushing your teeth every morning and every night without your mom needing to remind you? It takes a long time for your brain to make an action into a habit. 

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement,” James Clear says. He explains that habits help you get 1% better every day, and it works just like interest compounding on your money. You won’t see the improvements right away but over time you’ll get results.

If you want to reach your home organizing goals this year, focus on creating organizing habits. Yes, declutter and organizing is important, but you get the results you’re looking for when you focus on small habits every single day.

Start working on your first organizing habit using this 10-Minute Daily Tidy Checklist.