Closet organizers create a place for everything.....

Closet organizers are a great invention for creating a place for everything in your closet. They can actually help to create more space and places to put things! However, installing a closet system will only help you gain control of your clothing and other closet items if you put everything away in its place.

A closet organizer cannot change human behaviour, only you can do that!

So this principle is actually a two parter - and the parts cannot be separated.

If you want to achieve control through organized living:

Create a place for everything and put everything in it's place!

See how this principle relates to other principles:

Without a place to put something you cannot make a decision as to where it should go. This leads to procrastination which is of course the enemy of control!

Treasured items cannot be treated with honor and respect if they do not have a home that will preserve them. If you cannot preserve them or you do not know where they are you have no control over what happens to them and there are many things that could happen to treaured items that are not properly stored. Moisture, mould, rodents, and insects can ruin your treasured items if they are not looked after properly!

Without a place to put things sorting like with like seems to be a futile exercise. You will only end up with piles of homeless things!

You will notice that this guideline starts with the word "create". There cannot be a place for everything unless one is created.

This principle is probably the hallmark of organized living. If this principle is not understood and practiced you create barriers to implementing some of the other principles for organized living.

This is often the one principle that is most visually obvious as once it is implemented it results in an immediate noticeable reduction of clutter. It is also what a lot of people think organization is all about.

But just getting storage bins to hold stuff is not being organized because it does not bring about control. If you simply buy a lot of plastic storage containers and fill them up, pretty soon you will have so many storage bins that they will start taking over! And worse yet you might not even know what all these storage containers have inside!

With this approach you have not achieved control, only more confusion!

All the principles of organization are important and must work together in order to achieve organized living.