Tidied up my garage

Before tidying up.

I’ve never been particularly good at keeping my things organized. I’ve always wanted to, but it never would really happen. As a kid my room was always a disaster. My shop was reflecting this quality recently. I kept coming across references to Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I gave it a read and tried to follow her methods as best I could while tackling the mess in the garage.

Categorize things.

I think one of the most powerful pieces of advice in her book was to take everything off the shelves and group things by types. So power tools go into one area, extension cords in another, tools in another, etc. This helped to prevent me from shuffling things around the garage from one pile of things to another. When you can see everything laid out in this way it helps you realize how much room you need to make in order to store it and helps you find and eliminate duplicates.

After tidying up.

Another great piece of advice from the book is to make things easy to put away instead of making them easy to take out. This feels backwards until you realize how much time and energy it saves to clean up after a project. For me this is exactly how things would become scattered all over the place. Instead of being too tired to think about where everything goes its almost like things naturally fall back into the places they’re supposed to live.

I highly recommend you give the book a read and see if you can apply some of these simple ideas to help organize your life.