Organizing Never Ends

And the family gene for it skipped me over

Organizing just comes naturally to some people — like my grandmother, who passed the gene on to my sister, while skipping over my mother and me. My sister is more like our grandmother, and I’m more like our mother. I’m super organized about some things, but other things just escape me. I’d love to be organized in ALL areas, and I keep working toward that. Which side of the fence do YOU fall on?

One realization I’ve come to over the years is that it’s very, very difficult to organize things if you have more stuff than will fit into the spaces you have for it. For instance, if you can’t fit all your clothes into your closets and drawers, where do you put the things that don’t fit into those spaces? If you have more kitchen items than will fit into your kitchen cabinets and drawers, what do you do with the extra things?

My answer in recent years has been: get rid of the excess. I’m one person, with My Cowboy in tow. Can we actually ever use all the things we’ve accumulated over a lifetime? Probably not. Some of it — lots of it — needs to go. And over the last couple years, a lot of it went.

It’s also difficult to become organized if you have difficulty making decisions, and in some areas, I do have lots of difficulty with this (such as paper items). My indecisiveness is the root of a lot of my procrastination. Is it easy for you to make decisions? If not, does this cause you to procrastinate?

Because I’m not 100% an organized person, I sometimes feel like a fraud offering up organizing advice, but the advice I’m handing out is usually advice I need to follow my ownself, and I’m gonna share it on here because, if you’re like me, maybe it will help you, too. And mostly, I offer up advice specific to our sewing/quilting areas because that is my biggest remaining organization issue. And by having some of you along with me on this journey, it helps keep me accountable, and I make better progress than I would otherwise.

I never jumped on the Marie Kondo bandwagon because we live on a farm, and there are lots of things we need around here that in no way, shape, or form spark joy for me — like a stash of animal medications!

So I needed to come up with some other method of organizing that works for me. I know we need less stuff, but I also realize that we have to keep on hand lots of stuff we only need occasionally, such as a collection of baby bottles and various nipple types in the event we need to feed baby animals, various types of bandages, syringes, and needles, medications for all the animals, windbreaker pants, heavy winter coats, mud boots, chore gloves and hats, ice melt, ice scrapers, stock tank heaters, battery chargers, horse tack, feed containers, fence-fixing supplies, spare parts for various equipment, etc. And So. Many. Random. Tools. We live pretty far from town, and there’s not always time (or money) to run into town to purchase what you need when it’s an emergency.

I had mulled over in my mind the theory of minimalism, but didn’t see how that could work for us here . . . until I read an article on minimalism that outlined how minimalism looks different for every person. Aha!

Minimalism isn’t a race to see who can own and get by with the least amount of stuff — it’s a method you can use to free your space of the things that are unimportant to YOU. Don’t worry about what others are doing in the form of minimalism — decide what it means for YOU, and strive to reach that point. Your version of minimalism will not look like anyone else’s version of minimalism, and that’s OK. You may not have a farm, but perhaps you have small children still at home. Your world will look drastically different from mine!

It’s very freeing.

I read a lot of information from this site: Becoming Minimalist.

He also invites guests to contribute to his blog, and an article by one of his guests, Jay Harrington, caught my eye. To quote Jay:

At its core, minimalism is a powerful means to an important end. Without an end in mind, practicing minimalism can feel like a rote exercise devoid of any larger purpose. (Read the full article HERE.)

I have often struggled with exactly what my purpose is. But even if I don’t completely know what my purpose is, I do know two of my reasons for having less stuff are 1) to make it easier to move, in the event I might need to, and 2) to not leave my daughters with a huge mess of things to take care of should something happen to me. Those two things are my driving force for getting organized, my current purpose for trying to be more minimalistic.

Once you have a solid compelling reason to become more organized, it makes the process a bit easier. Easier, perhaps, but not necessarily speedier!

My biggest remaining hurdle is my sewing stuff and the mess that is my studio.

I’ve been offering up Studio Organizing Challenges to my readers for the last 11 years (2026 will be my 12th year of challenges), and every year, it seems like I’m doing the same things over and over again. Spoiler alert: I AM doing the same things over and over again!

But in doing those same things over and over again, I can look back over the years and see that I have indeed made progress.

It has also made me realize that organizing is not something you do and then it’s forever done. It’s an ongoing job. You have to keep at it, or things can quickly get out of control all over again. So I’ve come to terms with the fact that I will always be organizing something, and that it’s just a part of life. But I also know that having less stuff and consistently becoming more organized over time means that it gets easier and easier to stay on top of things and keep them organized.

So that’s why I plan to continue offering up my Studio Organizing Challenges here on Substack indefinitely (for free), and I hope you’ll join me on my continuing organizing journey. My plan is to kick things off sometime in early June, since I’ve been in a bit of an online reorganization all year. I’ll be offering one challenge a month, that we can all work on for that month to see if progress can be made.

I also have this affliction that causes me to need to make things into a game for myself or I won’t do them. Well . . . to make the Studio Organizing Challenges a bit more fun, I made myself a set of cards. They were so fun, I ended up offering them to my readers.

It’s a cute little deck of 30 cards packaged up in their own little black tin. Each one has an organizing task on it, and we’ll occasionally use them to do fun things with the challenges. And if you have the tin, you can use them to do your own challenges if once a month is not enough to suit you, or if you don’t like or need the challenge in a particular month, or to do them as a challenge between you and your quilting friends.

Please note: The cards are NOT mandatory to take part in the challenges. The tasks will be presented regardless, and always for free. If you’re interested in having a set of cards, I have two sets left in my Etsy Shop.

Be sure to check back in to see what we’ll be organizing next! And if you don’t want to miss any of the challenges, you can . . .