The following is excerpted from the best-selling book: Organizing Your Kitchen with SORT and Succeed:
What is your goal? Are you trying to get or stay healthy, looking to set a good example for your kids, or are you just tired of fighting clutter in your kitchen?
If you want to get healthy, the kitchen is a great place to start. Research shows that cluttered kitchens prompted people to eat 44% more snack food than a kitchen that was organized and decluttered.
Unless you are working with a paid professional organizer, do not start out with the goal to organize your entire kitchen. For most people, it’s just too big of a goal to accomplish in the ideal project timeframe of between fifteen minutes and four hours.
Instead, pick smaller goals to organize your kitchen, and tackle them one after the other, perhaps on different days:
Clear the sink
Clear the countertop
Remove or re-organize magnets and notes stuck to the refrigerator door
Baking supplies
Cleaning supplies
Pantry items
Small appliances
Everyday dishes
Grill, picnic and party gear
Refrigerator (inside)
Freezer (inside)
Towels, napkins, placemats and tablecloths
Pick one of these mini-projects, or choose something that’s specific to your kitchen, and write down your goal. It can be a single bullet point. It can be on scrap paper or the back of an envelope. Just write down the one thing you are working on today, right now.
Yes, actually writing it down is the first step to getting started. If you’ve ever gotten distracted while organizing (and really, who hasn’t?), then you’ll appreciate this.
A written reminder can help you stay focused on your project and reel you back into the kitchen when you start to wander off. It’s the equivalent of having that professional organizer or good friend there beside you, tapping you on the shoulder, reminding you to stay focused on what you said you were going to do today.
After writing down your goal for this project, actually get started. You’ve already completed one-fifth of the SORT and Succeed system to organize your kitchen or anything in your home.
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