Transcription
I have a magic trick I am really excited to show you today. I think this is going to blow your mind. We're talking about the container concept, but I'm going to take it to a whole new level. Help you understand why we will categorize and contain the things in our house in a really simple, easy way. It is going to transform your home from feeling stressful, messy, chaotic to feeling completely under control. And the best part is it doesn't have to take a lot of time at all.
And if we haven't met before, hi, my name is Don, the minimal mom. I've been a minimalist for 10 years now, gotten rid of 85-90% of my stuff and I don't miss it at all. I also run a membership community where we practice this stuff and I often show clips of it. We go much more in-depth inside our membership community. So, I'll put details about that where details should be. But today, I'm really excited to share this concept with you of how when we categorize and contain, it makes our whole house easy.
So, I moved into this house almost 2 months ago and just the random stuff started to accumulate on the counter, in the drawers, in the laundry room. Initially, it was okay for a little bit. I was collecting data, looking at what needed homes. But there gets to be a point where your house feels so overwhelming and stressful when everywhere you look, there's these little piles of stuff. But what surprised me was how quickly I was able to get this chaos under control. We have proven steps. And today I'm going to show you, show you, illustrate to you how powerful this is and how much easier it is than what you're actually thinking.
So whenever I look at an overwhelming space, the first thing I tell you to do is to categorize. We don't have to make any hard decisions. We're just sorting stuff out. And what we find is through that process, you naturally find things that you don't need anymore. You can toss or donate that have a home somewhere else. So it has a designated home. It's just ended up here. And so stuff either has a home or it doesn't. So if it has a home, you just put it there. That's not a big deal. Uh, but it was making this feel more overwhelming. And then if it doesn't have a home, now we can clearly see what categories do we have and we can create a home for them.
Now, as I was going through this process with the random stuff that accumulated in our home, I was realizing that a lot of this stuff I just don't know. I just don't know if I'm going to need to keep it or not. But I was still able to put it into rough categories. But here's what I want to show you is the contents of this bin when they are spread all out together. This is what it looked like on my counter. It is a big mess. And this is so overwhelming to your brain. Our brain hates mishmash. Our brain sees the world in categories, in chunks. It wants everything to be predictable. So I'm looking at all this random stuff and I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to need it. Probably not. That's what past history tells me. But on the off chance that I do, I want to make sure I have it. But how do you contain this kind of a randomness, right? And so I sorted it into categories. Then I always look for what is the simplest way to contain it? What is the simplest solution?
Now, when you're dealing with stuff that's kind of random in size, I have random cords and pipe fittings and whatnot. I find these zipper pouches to be very helpful. So I sorted everything into categories and then I contained it using these zipper pouches. And then to go even a step further so that it is friendly to our brain, I put very simple labels on them. And these labels can be removed. I'll link to them of course. But again, I want to talk a little bit more about why, why this is so important. But also the place where this has made the biggest difference are my paper bins. My action and my time will tell paper bins. So I'm going to show you these today to again, using the same principle: categorize and contain. But why this is so important to our brain.
So reason number one, categories are so important is that our brain craves predictability. When I need something, it's in the same place. When I was looking for something random from my house, I knew exactly where to look for it. If I wanted to go back through the paint samples, I know exactly where to look for them. And I've talked about this more recently in the pantry, too. This is why I say your pantry should function like a grocery store. Doesn't mean it's perfect. It means it's predictable. When I walk in there, everything's in the same place all of the time. It's very easy to see where stuff goes. And so without categories, we're always saying, "Where should this go? Do I already have this? Where did I put that?" But with categories, it's, "Oh, it lives here. When I'm looking for it, it's here. When I'm putting stuff away, it goes here."
Now, reason number two, I'm going to use a chair, uh, to illustrate that. And it's reducing mental load through chunking. So, our our brain is always looking for patterns and it's always categorizing. It's putting items and thoughts and different things all together so that it can work more efficiently. So, I have a chair here. And if we look at this chair, and if I go to sit on this chair, you're not worried about me. Why? Because the chair looks sturdy. You can't really see the whole thing. See, it looks sturdy. And I have this pattern of experiences now that when I go to sit on something that looks like a chair and it looks like it's in good repair, that it will hold my weight. So my brain is able to allow me to sit here without thinking because our brain is also always looking for safety threats. Anything that is going to threaten our safety. That's what our brain is for, keeping us safe, right? So, if on the other hand, I went to sit on a chair that looked like one of the legs was broken. Now, if I go to sit on it, my brain be like, "Whoa, hold up there. That chair does not look safe." And so, this chunking or this pattern recognition again is how we reduce the cognitive load of our house or in other words, how we make our home easier. It's through pattern recognition and chunking. So, when I take all those random house things, I put it into one clear spot. Now, my brain can chunk all those items together in one spot. It knows where they are. It knows where future stuff goes. It knows where to turn to if there is something that I need. So, it can take all those random things and chunk it together right here. So, this is now one thing instead of 27. And that's a huge savings energy-wise to our brain. All right. Okay.
And then number three, it removes threats. So again, our brain is always trying to keep us safe. In the olden days, did you say like olden days growing up? I don't know. Is this old days? I don't know what it's supposed to be. In the old days, in the old days, that looked like, um, not getting attacked when we're out in the wild, having enough food to eat. What it looks like in modern times is, did you mail back the electricity bill? Did you do the Amazon returns on time? Did you RSVP to the birthday party or the wedding that you're going to later this month? And so the threats are different now, but we know those things that cause discomfort like a late fee or electricity getting turned off or our kids not getting to go to the event because we didn't fill out the form. And so again, when all of this stuff is spread out on my counter, my brain is constantly scanning. And this is why hotspots are so stressful. This is why this random stuff accumulating on your counters, in your desk, and in your bedroom is so stressful to our brain because our brain is always scanning it for threats. So again, going back to this example, when it was randomly spread on my counter and in the drawer and in the laundry room, my brain was constantly having to rescan it. Is there anything important that got mixed into there? And that's been our experience. Things get layered in and we forget about them. And so by taking a few minutes to sort this out, again, we categorized it and contained it, I also told my brain that there are no threats in here because if there was anything that required action, a form to fill out, a warranty to return, a rebate to send in, anything that required action went to my very specific spot for action items. So again, by categorizing and containing and putting in this very simple organization, I tell my brain that this is safe. There are no threats in here. And again, that's what lends itself to the peace of mind that this creates, but that we often don't realize. This has been very, this is very hard to quantify. You often don't understand why. Why is this random stuff stressing me out so much? It's because your brain is constantly scanning it and running it and rerunning it to make sure that you're not forgetting anything.
Now, where do those very important action items go? And for me, it's into my action or my time will tell container. And so this is my action paper bin. Anything that requires any action in my household, something to mail, return, anything that requires an action, it goes in here. And then in our membership community, we do a home management class every Saturday morning. And this is a time, we have work time where we encourage you to go through your action bin. So it doesn't do it for me, but look, this is important. It is categorized and it's contained. I know every action item in my home is in here. Every action item in my home is in here. And if it doesn't fit in the bin, it's on my to-do list. I have a very good system now for managing this type. I didn't start out this way. We've developed this, right? I'm a messy person through and through, right? And I had to figure out very simple tactics that worked for me. This is something we have fine-tuned over multiple years now. And even I have tried different containers. Um, I've had some stand-up files and that might work for others. If you have a system that works great for you, keep doing it. But for me, I realized it needed to be fully contained. I needed to not have to worry that anything would fall out of it or that things wouldn't accidentally fall into it or get stacked up on top of it. I also like that I can take this with me. So if the kids have something going on and I have to kill time for an hour, I can take this with me and process it and go through it while I'm sitting there. I can sit on the couch with it. So, anyways, I've tested different bins, but this is the one that me like gives me mental relief again because it's categorized and it is contained and I know everything important in my home is in here right now.
And then I also have a paper title toe. So, that's where anything that doesn't require action, but I'm just not sure if I'm going to use it. Recipes. Uh, a contractor left a card on the door. I don't know if I'm going to call them for gutters or whatnot, right? Where would that stuff live in your house in the past? It, a lot of it doesn't have a home. All right, I'm not going to file it away. And so this has been huge. And a lot of this stuff in here I am time testing as well. I'm pretty certain that 99% of this stuff I will never need again. But I don't know what the 1% is that I'm going to need, right? And so I'm time testing it. I have it categorized and contained. And then I'm just letting it sit here. And over time I'm going to know. I'm going to have good data to work with. Did I go back in there? Did I need anything? And a year from now, this whole bin of stuff could probably just get tossed. But right now, today, I don't know. And so that's what we'll say, time brings clarity. And so we just let it be categorized, contained, let some time pass, and then usually it reveals itself. And that's why if you're going, this is all new stuff for me. If you're going through a lot of old stuff in your house, you might already realize that it's been time-tested because it's been in cabinets and boxes and and forgotten about and you've gotten by just fine without it. And so then you might feel confident just letting that stuff go now. And so don't think you're going to have to do this to every single item in your house. You're going to be able to look at the data and be like, "Yeah, we didn't, we don't need that at all." But for the stuff that you just don't know about, if we are categorizing it and containing it, it's not taxing our brain in the same way again, is when it's a random mishmash of stuff in our storage spaces.
All right. Then number four with this categorizing and containing is that containing creates natural limits without willpower. And this is where Dana from Alob comes clean. She talks about the container concept all of the time and looking at the natural boundaries in our homes. And so it could be a closet shelf, a closet, a drawer in your kitchen. There are so many natural boundaries in our home. And sometimes we create it with actual physical containers, too. But we declutter down to what comfortably fits inside the container. And I had discovered this in my farmhouse early on because it was so small and there was no storage, right? And so I realized that in the size of my house, I did not have the luxury of keeping as much inventory as people might have in bigger homes. And so I realized I just had to keep decluttering and simplifying and pairing down to the natural limits of my home or the containers that I was introducing into it. And what was fascinating about that is that restriction actually brought so much freedom. And I would say Dana calls it the container concept. I would say make the boundaries the bad guy, right? The, the limits that are naturally imposed on us make those the ba, the bad guy. And so the container becomes the decision maker instead of us. Okay.
Number five, it creates completion loops. So this week in our membership community, we're working on bathrooms. And I had not put any organization into the kids' bathroom upstairs. So all four of the kids, I have four kids, ages 11 through 16, two boys then two girls, or the girls are the oldest, whatever. Um, and all four of them use that bathroom when they're here with me half the time. And it just was like a dumping ground, right? Stuff got moved in. There was no organization. But I wanted to like collect some data. I wanted to see what was accumulating in there. What were we going to need organization for? I didn't want to just rush in and put organization in. And so, we've been working on that in our membership community this week. And again, I'm able to go much more in-depth in there, right? Um, but there's all this stuff under the cabinet. And from the outside, I, I'm telling you, I still get overwhelmed by things. I'm looking at it from the outside and I'm like, uh, I don't know, what are the categories going to be? So, I followed my steps. I categorized it first, looked at what we had, and then I realized that using, I really like these multi-purpose bins from the Container Store. Target and Walmart has some variations as well, but I'm like, "Okay, at first I started categorizing it by the type of products that were down there, and then I realized it should just be categorized by child." And so, each of them gets a bin like this under there. I started getting it into place. It felt so good. And it only took about 15 minutes. This is something I've been putting off for weeks now. I'm like, "Oh, when we get to bathrooms again in our membership community, I'll go through it." Now, I had to, right? It didn't take that much time at all. We've often made organizing to be very difficult. We've built it up in our head like, "Oh, I'm not good at organizing." There's either people that are like good at organizing and love it, or those who don't. I was never in that category. Um, I just said, "Oh, they're type A. I'm a more creative type, right?" But now that I understand organizing, it's so much easier. We just need a way to contain our categories, right? And then you find some bins that work well enough. Nothing's perfect, but they work good enough and you run with it, right? As long as it's categorized and contained, your brain is so happy. And I couldn't believe what a difference 15 minutes and a couple bins made in that bathroom area. It was remarkable. And I got to fully complete that project. And that felt really good to my brain.
Now, I'm excited to talk about number six. And that is that this idea of categorizing and containing it separates identity from our stuff. But real quick, I do want to circle back to this idea of the crap basket and why that can be such a powerful tool too. Okay, so inevitably when we go to categorize and contain, there are going to be random things like you might even have a category of random crap I don't know what to do with. It's not worthwhile to create this kind of like category and to contain it. It's literally the random cords. Everything comes with a charging cord. And now other stuff like the kids get and I don't know if they're actually going to want it or not. And I don't actually want to ask them if they want it cuz then they may be like, "Oh yeah, I'll keep it." Even though the data is telling me they have forgotten about it for over a week and don't actually need it cuz they haven't come looking for it, right? And so it's a way to contain all of the random stuff that's not worth creating a permanent category or container for in your house and to time test it. Again, time brings clarity. And so, I'm going to time test it and see if I actually need any of this random stuff. And so, I call it a crap basket. I think Cass calls it a clutter catcher. That's maybe a little nicer. And I'll tell you what, the reason I like crap basket is because most of the stuff is crap and it's not worth our time. And that's where I don't want you to spend a lot of time on things that don't matter, that are actually very inconsequential. Everything in this basket could fall off the face of the earth and it wouldn't matter. I don't have my passport or my social security card. All of my bills, things I need to return that would have like a financial consequence are in here. So, it's just the stuff that we are getting bombarded with on a daily basis, especially if you have kids in your house, that really doesn't matter. And I don't want us to take a lot of time on because again, if it is contained and if my brain knows that there are no action or important things in here, this can get set aside and it will not be stressing out your brain. Your brain is not going to be running it in the background and that is the goal of categorizing and containing to give our brain a break. We are so stinking overwhelmed right now if you are running a household, so overwhelmed. And so we throw it in a crap basket. We tuck it away. Then if the kids are like, "Oh, mom, where'd that cord go that came with whatever?" I'm like, "Let me go in the basket. I'll get it for you." Very few things ever get retrieved out of here. But if you need them, they're here. And then time brings clarity. And over time, or as it starts to fill up, I sort through. I'm like, "Don't need that. Forgot about that. No one came looking for that." I feel very confident then letting those things go. Anything in here that I'm still not sure about, I let it stay in there. And so it's a very quick process because I'm more removed from it and time is giving me some really good data. So don't underestimate the power of this type of container in your house as well. Honestly, these two things will completely transform your house. It'll feel like a different house if you start containing things in this type of way and if your brain knows that the truly important things are safe and sound. Now, like I said, you still got to go through it, but at least you know where all the most important things. And I tell you what, if you were going through an especially hard season of life, this saved me over the last couple years. I was not doing a lot of things well. I was so glad for very low inventory, but knowing all of the most important things were here and they were contained and when I needed them, I knew exactly where to look for them. This truly is what got me through without dropping balls or having all kinds of late fees or or whatnot, right? At least when like I had my life a little bit in order. And so these types of containers can actually really transform your whole entire house.
All right, but this last one is probably my favorite. That when we get in this habit of categorizing and containing, we're able to separate identity from stuff. Because for most of us as women, this stuff, especially unorganized, messy stuff, is really messing with our head and how we see ourselves. Clutter tells us we suck. Like, clutter tells us we suck. You're not a good mom. You're not a good wife. You're not a good partner. You're not a good housekeeper. You suck at this, you suck at that. It is always nagging at us because again, our brain never gets to relax. Our brain is always working in the background scanning for threats. And so when we simply start categorizing and containing, we have the same amount of things to do. They're just much easier and it's much clearer to see what we have to do. If you will categorize and contain your pantry, when you walk in now, it's very simple to make your grocery list. It's very simple to see where we have too much inventory that we probably want to use up and where we don't have enough. Oh, we're out of cereal. Oh, we have a lot of bread. Oh, we have a lot of canned goods right now that we should probably start using up before we get any more. Oh, we have a lot of pasta. We don't have a lot of pasta. Right? When we categorize and contain it now, very quickly at a glance, we can start to see what we have. And the problem is a lot of our homes are not set up naturally this way, right? Like my pantry is just wide open wire shelving. That is really hard for our brain to process because everything just runs together. And that's why I put these white containers in. They're not perfect. They're from Target. I'll put a link. Um, but they, they categorize and contain. This one's for bread. This one's from cereal. This one's for chips. This one has baking stuff in it. This one has all the drink mixes in it. It's very quick and easy for me to see what we have and what we're low on and what we need more of. Same with our closets often are a mishmash. Now, I'm still working on getting my closet organizer into my closet. But part of the reason that I selected this, this one, this closet organizer from IKEA was because it has different containers to it, different limits, and I can put more of my dressier clothes and then more my casual clothes. So, all of the categories aren't running together, and it's very easy to see what I have. But most importantly, by categorizing, items become functional groups and not identity statements. And I don't even think you'll understand the relief that you feel until you've done it in a few areas of your home. Again, we're really hard on ourselves. And it's not us, it's the clutter, it's that we've never been taught how to manage this amount of inventory. Oh my goodness, there is so much coming in all of the time. And so, we need very simple systems. Systems that we can stick to even on our worst day when life goes off the rails, when it's a little lifey. We need very simple systems. You don't have to be a pro at at organizing. All you need to do is categorize and contain and use containers and stuff you have in your house already. It's not the cute basket or the whatever container that's making the difference. It's the boundary that it creates. It's the boundary that it creates. And I know for those who are more perfectionistic, you want to know all of the categories ahead of time. The perfect container. You want to organize it once and never have to do it again. Unfortunately, that's not how this works. Now, a lot of these containers have become my favorite over the years just because they're very versatile, but often we do have to pull stuff out and figure out what the categories are, then decide what's going to be the best type of container for it. So, I know those, I'm not, I'm not, I don't generally tend to be very perfectionistic, so I don't always, I just want to be like, "Just, just do it, right? Like, just take action, right?" But I know for those of you, you're going to have to kind of push yourself past knowing the perfect system. You have to get into it, see what the categories are, and then decide on the containers. It's just how it is. I promise you, if there was another way around it, we would have found it like in our membership community. I would know what it is and I would tell you exactly how to do that. But unfortunately, we got to categorize it, sort it out a little bit, see what we're working with, and then we can find the containers.
Okay, I think you got it. And but the other day I did need to reference, uh, the property line map in here for the people doing the lawn or whatever. And the guy came to the door and he's like, "Oh, do you have that property map that was left in your kitchen or whatever?" And I'm like, "I do." And I know exactly where it is. And I went and got this and I brought it out and he's like, "Oh, wow. That's really nice organization." Like he appreciated. I'm like, "I know. Look at me." Right. And it feels so good. This has never been me in the past, but it feels so good. And I want that type of freedom for you. And most of all, I just want your brain to be able to relax in your house. I want your home to feel safe. I want it to be a place where you can rest, recharge, and reconnect with those who are most important to you. That's the goal. This is just a way to get there. So, I really want that for you. And I'm confident that if we, uh, keep spending some more time together, that you're going to get there, too. All right. All right. Well, if you haven't done so, I hope you subscribe so we can spend more time together. If you need even a little bit more support, if you want to check out our membership community, just $22 a month right now, spring special. And over the summer, we're doing Clutter Camp. It's going to be off the hook. It is going to be so good. But it's sometimes helpful to get in now, uh, learn the ins and outs of our community. It is so awesome. And then hit the ground running for Clutter Camp. It's going to be really, really good. But again, this is the type of stuff we do every single day inside of there. I love you. I hope you have a really good day. And I'll see you again soon.