Break it down now and you’ll get it done later

I just finished an office reorganization.

I started the reorganization because I had overflowed items from my office into my guest and master bedroom.

These mainly were items that I wanted off my desk or didn’t have a home for, so I moved them out of the way and into other rooms.

I was tired of having things all over the place and moving them when guests were using the guest bedroom.

So, I decided to tackle the project of reorganizing my office, pulling those things out of the places they didn’t belong, and finding everything a new home in my office.

So, I broke it down into pieces, very, very small pieces.

This is what my to-do list for this project initially looked like:

I knew I wanted to sort items into boxes to help figure out what needed to go where. So you see the categories like pens, pencils, post-it notes, paper and binder clips, a box for small items, and a box for larger items.

And you can see I allowed myself 2 hours to sort through the things from my master bedroom and 3 hours for the guest bedroom. While I purposely guestimated more time than I needed, I was very surprised to find I drastically overestimated the time required to sort those items.

Sorting the items from the master bedroom took me 20 minutes, and the guest bedroom items took me 40 minutes.

It seemed like such a huge task to sort those items! I was sure it was going to take a while.

That’s why I broke it down, so that it didn’t feel like a huge, overwhelming project that had to be completed immediately. Instead, I could just focus on one small task at a time.

Once I sorted my closet, desk, and other randomly placed items into my boxes, my office looked like this:

As you can see, I had a rather large mess lot of items to put away again. I did wonder what I got myself into, but I took a breath and tackled one part at a time.

Putting everything away did take longer than I anticipated, but I had the project started. It felt doable because I broke it down into working a couple of hours here and an hour there.

It looked like this:

And finally this:

But what does this have to do with you?

A project is anything that takes more than 1 step to complete.

Break every project into smaller, manageable steps.

For me, sorting through items in 20-minute increments made it very doable and easy to get started. I felt like I was making progress.

Again, break your projects and goals down into smaller steps.

And, if I wasn’t the type of person that could organize my office like that, I could hire someone to help me out. There are many very talented professional organizers out there that could have come in and helped me sort through everything and ensure the project was finished and done well.

If you need help figuring out how to break a project into smaller steps, hire someone to help you with that.

A project like “cleanup/organize office” feels enormous and unmanageable, but “do this 20-minute step” is much more doable, and you can wrap your head around it.

Everyone’s situation is different, so if you want some help in this area, reach out, and let’s talk.