40 Times People Took Organization To The Next Level And Got These Satisfying Results

There are two types of people—the ones that do everything they can to delay cleaning up their home up to the very end until they see a tumbleweed of dust heading from one corner to the opposite corner of the room, and another type of people who were born (or passionately learnt) loving organizing their space, and there’s just so much we can all learn from the latter.

So in order to find out how to take your first steps into the organized world and lifestyle that sparks joy, and leave all the chaos behind, Bored Panda reached out to Alice Bauer, a Konmari™ premium consultant who works in Switzerland and Austria.

“The best motivation to start is to envision yourself with your ideal lifestyle,” Alice stated. You may want to ask yourself: “How do you want to live? Picture this as precisely as possible with every detail. What kind of atmosphere should your home have? What do you want to see first when you wake up in the morning? What is your morning routine? What do you do for fun? Do you love to cook and like to cook for your friends in the future? How must your home be to support you best on a daily basis?”

This self-reflection is the beginning of radical tidying up, which is a lifestyle change, according to Alice. “Create a vision board and add adjectives to amplify how your ideal lifestyle should feel. Warm, light, open, or welcoming, cozy. I love to work with vision boards together with my clients so that they can come back to their vision whenever they feel like it.”

But Alice warns that tidying is a demanding process where you constantly make decisions about what to keep. “There are good days and you feel absolutely great, your self-esteem is high and you go smoothly with the flow; on the other hand, there are difficult days when you cannot motivate yourself properly and your goal is far away,” she explained.

“Then the magic of the vision board comes to play and reminds you exactly why you’re tidying. You want to change your life—somehow,” she added.

Alice’s trick is to try and tidy up by category instead of location. “The majority of my clients all used to tidy by location, which in my opinion is nonsense. Instead, tidy by category so that you can get an overview of how many pairs of scissors you actually own. You cannot get how many you have if they are scattered all over the house.”

Moreover, when tidying up, you have to stay patient. First, you decide what to discard, and only after, you work with the items you’re left with. “After completing the sorting of all categories, you think about storing what you are left with. Not earlier. That will teach you how to be patient and patience is exactly what you need to finish the process.”