Organising isn't the spice of life but it surely is the meat and potatoes to have the life that can be chock full of spices. Many people find organizing boring or time consuming. Most of the time those same people lack vision of what they'd like their space to represent or they don't know where to get started. How can one spice up organizing their home or spaces in their homes who view the task as worrisome and uninteresting?
At a recent NAPO (National Association of Professional Organizers) conference I learned about the wonderful and grand tool of a mind map. It's great for the non-linear thinker or even the linear thinker who may have lost their way in their beloved list making. What is a mind map? Well imagine a word or phrase or topic you are attempting to explore. For our sakes, let's say you want your guest bedroom to serve a dual purpose of a boudoir-away-from-home for your lovely guests and reading room while you're not entertaining overnight lodgers. Without much thought, you could put "My guest bedroom" in the middle of a piece of paper (the bigger the paper the better). Then make off-shoot verbs, nouns, adjectives, or whatever comes to mind when you think guest bedroom. For instance you might simply think "sleep" from that might follow "comfort", then "pillow", "rest", "reading", "well-lit", "soft"... well, you get the picture. Go crazy! Get into it, write words surrounding this topic until your mind feels like it's smoking through your ears. Well, not THAT hard but how about until your paper is surrounded by wonderful and beautiful ideas you never really thought you'd come up with initially if someone just plainly asked you, "So what do you have in mind for this space?"
Now here comes the hard part. Look around the room you want to transform and ask yourself: Are any of the words on my mind map translated into this room/space? Probably not right? Hence, the reason you are looking to transform the room in the first place. But now you may be better able to see things in the room that don't fit into the image you've portrayed on your map. You may have said "sleek" and if Fluffy's cat condo is in this room/space you might get an "ah-ha" moment in relocating Fluffy. Sorry Fluffy, you might have to take one for the team.
One major thing that you might find it a little hard to believe that I've never seen someone put on their ideas of what they'd like to see in a room is the word clutter. So if you've got a lot of clutter going on it's definitely time to get rid of it. "Well how do I do that?" You ask. You've tried before you say? Well now that you've gotten a vision for your room de-cluttering may go a little smoother than in the past. By using a mind map, you might just find out why and how to put the spice into organizing and in your room which may just happen to be your bedroom.
Live in the Washington DC Metro Area? I invite you to schedule a FREE organizing consult with me! Go to: http://goo.gl/nf8V9 and fill out the online form.
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