Self Help

Problems with organizing your household and handling your housekeeping duties seem to fall into four main categories. Some of them overlap a bit, but I am sure you can recognize them easily and pick out the ones that relate to you most strongly. The usual problem areas are:

1. Storage or Organization. This includes maintaining orderly drawers and closets and the storage of seldom-used items such as Christmas things and light bulbs. Storage is the basis for what is to follow in other areas of cleaning. If you don’t have a place for everything, how can you put it away? Few people see whether or not we have messy closets, but they do see the results of it. If you have to look and look for the phone book, or keys, or whatever, then this area needs work.

2. Neatness. Some people say they are disorganized in their closets and drawers but have neat-looking rooms. This is difficult to understand since, personally speaking, the same things that made me messy inside the closets, made me messy outside them, too!

A neatness problem is best identified by our feelings when people drop in on us unexpectedly. Much visiting has been done on the front porch because we aren’t ready for
unexpected callers. Many invitations have not been issued because it would take too much work to clean and organize. Does this sound like you too?

3. Paper. Where do all the papers come from? Children bring them home from school. Newsboys deliver them. The mailman brings his stack. Magazines come. We pick them up in stores. And occasionally people stick them under our windshields when we are at the store. But we don’t mind, do we? Papers have such fascinating stuff on them. Some of them have ideas, and messy piles are very practical. Papers can also be very important. They can have to do with taxes, children’s school activities, and so forth. We are especially infatuated with papers. And we love to keep them.

4. Bills and Banking. This is an area of life that requires organization or it falls apart. A bill makes no demands for a while, so it is easy to set aside and forget until it has gone into oblivion. Banking is the same way. The statement comes so quietly and so neatly packaged that the tendency is to let it stay closed up in its little envelope. At least that way the canceled checks will all be together in a pile somewhere. So long as they are there somewhere we are comfortable. But that doesn’t quite solve the checking problem, now does it?