Have you ever heard that crash in the middle of the night and thought, OMG, who is in the house?! What the heck was that? Only to find that your closet had fallen down? That you had so much crap in there, the thing just busted right out of the walls??? Well, that has happened to me once…okay, maybe a few times…

Today’s blog post is about organizing your life, making order out of the chaos, and cleaning out the closet and the junk drawers, so you can be more productive. Organizing your life will give you more time for the things you want to do, and you will be able to breathe and enjoy your space.

If all your stuff in your life and home is disorganized and stuffed to the brim, that is a great indicator that your brain is too.  My wonderful amazing hubby claims that he knows where all his stuff is in his organized chaos, but I beg to differ.  I am forever getting the, “Where is this and where is that?” from my entire family!  All Moms out there can relate, right?! Clearly, they have no idea where anything is located, and they waste a lot of time looking for things.  The nutty thing is they could have just put them away in an organized fashion and gone right to them. When my spaces are clean and organized, I am so much more productive!

I am a list maker and A task master.  Some people call me Tyla Tornado, in a totally loving way, of course! I used to have a terrible tendency to completely tear apart a closet, or room, or other ridiculous thing, only to almost want to cry because I made a huge mess and now I had to deal with it. Does anyone else do this? I know many of you probably do.  It would take me hours and hours and sometimes days to fix whatever mess I unraveled. It was so overwhelming and exhausting, I would vow that I was not doing it again for a very long time…like years. It was not a good way of handling things.

I realized only in the last year or so, as our businesses were spinning out of control, our family was too busy, our crazy schedules were just too packed that my list…my forever ongoing list…was never going to get done. I would never have time to get my life in order! So of course NOTHING got done, things got added to the list, and I was stuck. Because, if I couldn’t get the thing torn apart and put back together in between trade shows, meetings, salon clients, family, etc,…then forget it. Not gonna happen.

I also came to realize that if my spaces were all jumbled up like this, so were my thoughts. That forever-never-ending-list was looming in my head all the time and distracted me from what I really needed to do. So,I decided to make some changes– baby steps, if you will.

One thing is that I LOVE crossing things off my list. I actually sometimes write lists just so I can cross off every single thing I can actually accomplish. Ridiculous? I know! However, I also realized that I really didn’t have to be the ALL-or-NOTHING-girl. I could be the chisel-at-it-in-small-controllable-amounts-so-I-can-finish-it-girl, too! Whew, now that’s an impressive title! So, I started making tiny lists –things I could really get done without wanting to cry.

I call this the “three bag rule.”  I hear the same story all the time, all day long at my salon. Everyone complaining their closet is too full, and needing to be cleaned out but they just DONT HAVE TIME. Uh, yes you do. You really do. Take  three garbage bags in your closet. I use the giant black ones because I am a total over achiever. Ha! And even if you have the time to rip the closet to shreds and go crazy… DON’T PANIC. Just fill the three garbage bags. Stuff them full, whatever you need to do, but only do three. Get them out of there! Take them to the car so you can donate, or consign…anything.  Now you can cross that off your list! It really gives you such a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

You can do this fairly quickly and it does not overwhelm you. But, it clears out a lot of junk that you don’t need, and then you free up brain cells that can be used for much better things like building your empire. Bah ha ha ha ha!

Apply this rule to anything, like the kitchen, for example. One day, i just did the pantry while my hubby was playing golf. Three bags of all his junk food… Ridding our house of a little bit of junk that day was super satisfying, and low and behold, I crossed that task off my list. Again, brain cell freedom! I do the same thing with the junk drawers — just one or two at a time.  Somewhere along the way, I realized that the whole place was cleaned out and organized! I did not want to cry at any time during this process and everything on my list was DONE… amazing!

We can use this in a lot of areas of our lives. Just move closer and closer to our goals, one baby step at a time. One day you will realize you are there!  And, it wasn’t overwhelming, and you accomplished so much!  So I encourage you to clean out one junk drawer a week, use the three bag rule in your closets, and chisel your way to freedom in your homes and businesses.

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