Getting Started: Identify Sources of Clutter
As you tour your house looking for areas that need to be organized, the entire process can seem overwhelming. The good news is that you can make steady progress by committing as little as 10 minutes a day to organizing. Here are a few tips to help you tackle the beginning stages of your organization:

• Purge your home of unnecessary items. Families need to be as tough as possible when it comes time to get rid of clutter. Organizers suggest periodically evaluating whether something’s actually serving your family any more. For instance, hold up an item and ask family members when they last used it. If it’s been a while, do they still need it? Is there someone you can give it to?
  


• Freeze your buying. Unless you want to end up with things shoved in boxes and baskets, you shouldn’t buy tools for organization until you’ve gotten rid of the things you don’t need anymore and decided on a system that will best meet your family’s needs.
  


• Keep it simple. If you want even your youngest kids to help, you’ve got to make the system simple enough that even they can follow it. Choose color-coded bins for specific toys – better yet, affix pictures of the kind of toy that goes in each space to each bin. Above all, don’t make your system so complicated that you can’t maintain them.

Getting Your Family on Board
Organizing a home is a team effort; it cannot involve constant fighting between parent and child about dirty laundry or messy bedrooms. Here are some ways to ensure that all family members participate:

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