So, have you ever looked at a space in your home and just become instantly overwhelmed and just want to turn around and not even approach it? Well, today I want to give you three concrete examples of how to do something I call the approachability hack.
Let's dig in. a wise person once said everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid well fish quit trying to climb trees while getting advice from well-intentioned monkeys it's time to jump in the water and learn how to swim with the current of your life i'm joy a professional organizer mom of four and fellow fish brain if you're looking for a place to get understanding,
encouragement, and ideas for your home that actually fit how your brain thinks, then I'm glad you're here. Let's ditch the type A advice and embrace what makes our brains and our homes unique. Together, we could have a joy-loving home. In case you're new here, welcome. I'm Joy, and I am the unorganized professional organizer behind this podcast, I have for a while, if you're new.
Sort of talked about all these different rules that are in organizing spaces that if you have ADHD, I suggest you break them and think about them differently. And if you have not run across the specific episodes where I talk about that, I think over the course of the first 200 episodes, every 10th episode, I would dig into one of these organizing rules that I thought were worth breaking.
So if you like jumping around and just getting a taste of what this podcast is about, just go back and listen to every 10th episode and you'll see how I do this. So today is similar to that. This approachability hack that I want to introduce is going to break some of these rules. So it is being in motion without being productive first that allows us to actually eventually be productive and without one we can't get to the other. So let me dig in.
So today's hack involves making a space more approachable so that we can actually attack it because sitting in overwhelm is not actually creating any help for us. So step one, we're just going to look at the space as a whole. Recognize its existence, and take a photo. We need that photo because our brains will forget the transformation and we need to have proof to give ourselves after the fact so that we can actually see that accomplishments are being made.
Okay, so step one, just take it in, take the photo. Step two, you have to give yourself permission to not make any hard decisions. You are stepping into this space and being like, I have no expectations of myself. I have no agenda that has to be accomplished. I am just going to enter the space and do something. All right? So that is step two. Step three, we are going to rearrange. And it's funny because as I have said two episodes ago, I'm a big fan of Dana K.
White's. she would call this stuff shifting, which she does not advise. And I agree that there is not a tremendous amount of merit and just stuff shifting. But this is why I think it's okay to sort of break this convention and this advice to just touch something once and make decisions on it. So for one, paralysis is not progress of any kind. So walking into spaces, feeling overwhelmed and turning around is our absolute bottom, right? There's nothing happening.
So the gift of giving ourselves permission to just, I'm not accomplishing the world here. I'm just going to go in and rearrange a little bit, allows for motion. And if I have said it once, I've said it a million times, motion is what creates momentum. So giving ourselves permission to step in and just, move some things around. It will feel a little hopeless at first, and that's okay. That's okay.
But the second reason I think this is worthwhile is our brains are not wired to instantly be able to start making decisions, right? I can't always touch something and know exactly where it's going to be moved to. And I need to warm that muscle up. And sometimes just the act of moving things around and accidentally stumbling across something that is easy, that requires very little thought, will start to add some oil to that very rusty action in our brains and allow us to start.
Accidentally making decisions. This is actually one of the things I love about Dana K. White's five-step no-mess decluttering process is that her first three steps actually require no decision making. And that's why this works. I'm just saying it slightly differently than she is saying it.
So what I would love to do is have you step in and mentally decide, I'm going to create a little bit of space in some capacity and clean that little bit of space, even if it just means that I'm stuff shifting stuff out of the way and making a different pile bigger.
Because when we see a space, however small, and we clean up that space, even if it's wiping down the baseboard that was suddenly discovered or just kind of running dust cloth over a surface, if it's any form of making that little segment, you know, vacuum the little space of floor that appears. It allows us to feel what that space could potentially become. And it motivates us to feel like, okay, space is desirable.
Maybe I can get rid of a couple more things. Maybe I can do two more inches worth. Maybe I can expand this little, perfect little niche that I opened up and help to start growing from here. It's allowing you to see a place to quote unquote start and work from that spot outwards. A lot of times I get asked where to start, where to start, where to start. Sometimes you have to create a space to start and that's what this approachability hack gives you.
It allows you to jump in, move some things around, get a tiny little clean spot and now you have a space from which to approach what your next method of attacking is. So I want to give you some actual real concrete examples of how to do this in a space. Let's say you walk into your kid's bedroom and it looks like, you know, tornado rolled through. And you're like, take a deep breath. Where is my approachability hacked to this?
My advice in any bedroom is, If you can, I hope, you know, if you have two sets of sheets, this is ideal. Strip the bed, make it with some fresh sheets, and then throw a, like, let's say your kid's bed is a twin. Throw a big queen-size flat sheet over top of the whole freshly made bed. Then, your kid can help with this, start scooping everything up from the floor and tossing it onto the bed.
Then, if your kid is old enough, this is a great time for you to say, can you find some things on the bed that you know where they go and go ahead and get those put away? While they're approaching that, you can be vacuuming the floor that you just uncovered. You can start to dust some things in the periphery.
You will be providing a sense of body doubling for them so that they stay on task while you're in there cleaning up some of the periphery around the bed, the beauty of doing it this way is once you, and you can jump in and help if they're too small or, you know, jump in and help so that it's actually clear by bedtime. But the gem of starting with that freshly made bed and then burying it in clutter is that you know when you get to the bottom of it, there is nothing else to do.
You are actually met with this reward of this freshly clean bed and at least all the things that had been on the floor were all taken care of. And if that momentum leads you into, okay, now we're. Take care of the nightstand too, and oh, look at the top of the dresser, and oh, your little desk over here.
It may or may not lead to all of those things, but you'll be surprised once the momentum starts because you made it approachable by first cleaning and freshening that bed and then finding the floor.
And you didn't have to make hard decisions at first by finding the floor, by putting every single thing away on the floor as you went, you found the floor immediately, had this, breathing space of the floor being cleaned up, and then it was much easier to start approaching each item on the bed individually because you knew the whole task of approaching it was to getting to the bottom of the bed again.
One example. Example two, and this is a shout out to one of my group members who I did not ask for permission to use her name ahead of time, so I will just leave her anonymous, but she knows who she is. She had this big cardboard box full of papers that she's been wanting to get through. And during one of our Work With Me Wednesday sessions, she actually gave herself permission to, she had some empty binders and a three-hole punch, and she said, I can't look at this box as a hole anymore.
And this is the whole inspiration for the podcast, so thank you, that she sat during our Work With Me Wednesday session and hole-punched and put into binders this whole box worth of paperwork. And she's like, I know this is silly. I know this is silly because I should be like evaluating, but I don't have the brain space to evaluate this box as a whole. And I was like, no, this is great. I love what you're doing because what she
was able to do is now it fit into three separate binders. She was able to get rid of the box that had just been sitting under her feet at her desk. And she's like, now when I have the brain space to go through, I just pull one binder down at a time. I'm looking at one page at a time and I will have one spare empty binder. And if it's worth that, I'll move it over, holes already punched. And if I don't need it anymore, I'll throw it down in the recycle bin.
And it allows her to look at it one paper at a time. And you might say, well, Joy, she could have done that right out of the box. She could have. But when it's all. And I'll use the words with air quotes loosely, organized into three separate binders, if she pulls it down and gets through three pieces of paper and then puts it right back up, It is out of her mind. Sort of nagging invisible brain space that that box is still under there. It could take her months to get through this.
And every time she sits down at her desk, it's nagging her that it's right at her feet and the box would be getting emptier and emptier. And yet it feels like the same amount of space to get through. And now she's just made it more approachable. Again, it's taking something that common advice says, do it once. We're making it quote unquote harder because we're adding a step, but the adding the step is what takes you from paralyzed to approachable.
That's the whole point of this hack. It's not meant to make sense to people who say that's not efficient. It's meant to make sense to our brains, our lovely little fish brains, and we're going to roll with it. Third example of this, concrete example, your kid's playroom. It is often unplayable because stuff is everywhere.
I use this method all the time when I had littles, is I would literally bulldoze, bulldoze the entire playroom into a corner, and I would throw a giant quilt over it, and I would vacuum and clean up all the little different storage type items that I had, whether it was the play kitchen or the little ball sorters or whatever.
And then whenever the kids were not in there, although often if you gave them one ball an empty space, they loved being in there all of a sudden, I could lift the quilt up, pull one thing out, and decide, oh, I know right where I want this to go because I've just cleaned the whole bookcase off, and I've cleaned the whole you know sorter item off and I've cleaned the kitchen out so every time I come up with food I can put it straight into the kitchen versus trying to do it in the midst of
the mess and just walking it over and setting it at the kitchen because it sort of would go there even though there are now checkers on the kitchen and there's I don't know a baby doll in one of the refrigerators and there's a instead of constantly feeling like I'm I'm moving one thing to there and there that to there, and then they're going to play with it again.
Bulldozing everything into a corner and cleaning up so that I have a place to work, towards so that when I do pick it out of the bulldoze pile, I'm putting it away once. We know that's not forever, but once in the moment, it becomes so much more approachable. And if you notice how well your kids play in a much more empty space, maybe it'll give you the courage to get rid of a lot of their toys because honestly, evidence says they will play better with plus toys. All right.
That's a whole nother podcast. I'll stop there because this one's gotten longer than I expected. But if you are looking for something to get yourself going and jump-started, consider this productivity hack. I think you may discover that trying to create some approachability may help you relieve your paralysis. Until next time, continue to choose joy.