Spending hours of your time every night cleaning, picking up, and reorganizing can be overwhelming, especially when you would prefer to be relaxing. Determining your biggest organizing pain point, then implementing a system to take away that stress, leads to organizational habits that eliminate nightly overwhelm because things are already in their place.

Check out these five tips for creating habits to prevent you from having to reorganize and exhaust yourself every night.

1. Deal with paper immediately: Mail and school papers accumulate quickly! Open mail when entering the home, tossing obvious trash, setting aside things that need immediate attention, and storing/filing items you want to keep. Create a filing system for school papers by child and attention needed: invites, artwork, need signatures, etc.
2. Make your bed: It is proven that the way you start your day, impacts your feelings, thoughts, and actions. The accomplishment of making your bed as soon as you get up instantly boosts your mood, you feel organized and uncluttered, and you are encouraged to clean/tidy more or complete other things on your ‘to-do’ list.
3. Do an end of day walk through: Spend a few minutes (no more than 15) every evening walking through your main living spaces to do a quick sweep of obvious trash, out of place shoes, blankets, or toys, and to clean the sink. It creates a continuous cycle of tidying so that it’s not a weekend span of deep cleaning and reorganizing.
4. Control dump zones: Dropping shoes, mail and papers, jackets, keys, and bags at your home’s entry point is common, yet also a cause of clutter. Install shoe racks, wall hooks for bags, jackets, and/or keys, a mail tray, or bin for papers to eliminate that drop-zone clutter. Remember, creating a system of putting things in place eases the stress of pileups.
5. Prioritize self care: Everyone wants quiet/alone/relaxing time! That can’t happen if you are constantly picking up, cleaning up, looking for items, and being frustrated due to your surroundings. Your environment influences your state of mind, which impacts your ability to enjoy leisure and self care…the ability to just be.