Simple Organization Tips to Conquer Chaos and Get Organized

Struggling to stay organized? I used to feel completely overwhelmed—until I found these simple organization tips that changed everything. Learn how I conquered my chaotic life and built an organized routine that actually works (even if you’re a procrastinator like me!).

I have never been an organized person. The tedium of finding a home for everything has always left me drowning in decision fatigue, either to the point of nausea or with seventy unfinished tasks scattered around me. It wasn’t until we started buying a doozy of a house that I realized I had to get my poop in a group and figure it out.

The Move That Taught Me a Hard Lesson

The last time we moved, we had only a month to pack—two weeks of which my husband and I spent battling COVID, a lovely parting gift from our son. That left us with just two weeks to pack everything, load it onto a truck, and haul it across the country. Because of the distance, there was no option to leave things with family or get an extension. The hard move-out date was the hard move-out date. If it wasn’t boxed up and on the truck, it wasn’t coming.

That chaos stuck with me. So, when we started the house-buying process two and a half years later, I vowed to learn from my mistakes. The moment our inspection was done, I started packing. That same approach carried over to other parts of my life. I’ve always been a world-class procrastinator—not because I’m lazy, but because I’m terrified of messing things up. But suddenly, these weren’t just projects I could push off indefinitely. They were “do it or lose equity” decisions, and I had to get it together.

Comparing Myself to the Naturally Organized

For years, I envied my friends and family who managed their lives like pros. They followed schedules effortlessly, finished projects, and knew exactly where all their important paperwork was. Meanwhile, I was over here struggling to remember if I had changed the laundry over.

I put myself down constantly. If they can do it, why can’t I? What’s wrong with me?

After trying and failing at every organizational system I could get my hands on, I decided to figure out what actually worked for me. At the time, we had just taken on a fixer-upper, three more cats (on top of the one we already had), our geriatric dog, all while changing my son’s school and unpacking. Everything was a mess. I was a mess.

The Surprisingly Simple Answer

I was so overwhelmed, broke, and unimpressed by the organization gurus of YouTube and TikTok that, out of desperation, I turned to AI for advice.

The answer was so frustratingly simple, I wanted to kick myself for not realizing these simple organization tips sooner:

• Don’t focus on perfection.
• Break tasks down into the smallest possible steps.
• Work on them as consistently as possible.
• Journal to brain-dump the mental clutter.
• Make a list of daily tasks and irregular chores.
• Build habits around that list instead of trying to force someone else’s system.