Late Winter represents a transitional time of year when the Winter holidays of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s and Valentine’s Day have passed, and we set our sights on the warmer weather that brings Spring and Summer holidays. With a brief lull in celebrations, it’s the ideal time to organize your household and get a head start on Spring cleaning.
From decluttering to photo storage, following are proven tips for getting organized before Easter, the 4th of July and summer barbeques become the priority.
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Update Your Address Book
Updating your address book is a tedious task that we all love to avoid, but regret our procrastination when a milestone celebration rolls around or holiday cards need to be mailed again. The holidays are when most of us collect updated addresses and contact information for family and friends, after greetings are sent and returned with the well-recognized “Return to Sender” stamp.
Dig out all those returned envelopes and text messages with updated addresses, and organize them into an address book for future use. You’ll be glad you did when it’s time for your next event that requires an invitation, or your late with your holiday cards and need to get them out quickly. To make it a more rewarding experience, purchase a beautiful new address book that you’ll be motivated to use and keep updated.
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Declutter
Decluttering is another way to get organized after the holidays. With typical holiday chaos, it’s easy for piles of mail to accumulate, new toys to get stacked on top of old toys, and holiday decorations to stay out for a bit too long. Decluttering, cleaning and organizing your house—one room at a time—will ultimately ease your stress while also freeing up valuable space in your home.
Purchase a few declutter bins and create organizing lists to prioritize both rooms and categories of possessions. Use the declutter bins strategically, placing items of the same or similar categories into the bins so you have an easy way to move them around your house and put them in their appropriate places. Organizing holiday décor should be the first priority, as those items are typically the quickest and easiest to locate, organize and store away. After your decorations have been tackled, move onto that pile of mail and magazines that accumulated throughout the holidays. Separate junk mail from “real” mail, paying careful attention to important items. While it’s tempting to put the important mail aside to address at a later time, avoid that temptation. While you’re focused on this decluttering category, see it through 100 percent and address whatever is needed as it relates to those pieces of mail.
Finally, move onto what is probably the biggest clutter-causing category—the gifts you received throughout the Winter holidays. If you received gifts that were an upgrade or replacement to something you previously owned, get rid of the old versions. For everything else remaining, find logical places to store them that you’ll remember when you need or want them.
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Digitize Print Photos
An organization-related stressor that lives in the back of our minds is our cherished family photos and memories from the holidays. How should I organize holiday photos? How can I protect them? How should I store them? These are the questions we ask ourselves as we’re looking at our photo prints and thinking about how important they are for memories and future generations.
The easiest and smartest way to ensure your memories are both organized and preserved is to digitize them. Take your photos and home videos from the most recent holidays, and combine them with photos and videos from the past. This can include home movies and film reels passed down from your parents and grandparents, too. Send them all into a company such as iMemories, which specializes in digitizing analog memories so they can be viewed on any device at any time. A digitization service such as this ensures your original prints and movies are returned, but also offers lifelong digital preservation of your most treasured moments. If there is one task on your organizing list that should be prioritized, photo organization is it!
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Clean Out Your Bedroom Closets
The category of possessions that gets the most out-of-hand, and therefore causes the most organization-related stress, is our clothing. Many people accumulate new articles of clothing throughout the year, but don’t purge old clothing items and shoes they haven’t worn in years. The Winter holiday season perpetuates this problem, as many people receive clothing as gifts. This adds to already bursting closets and adds a new level of difficulty to locating specific items. Therefore, your late Winter cleaning and organization should include a closet purge.
The good news is that thrifting is at an all-time high, so your old clothes will be put to good use by others. Instead of tossing them, bring them to your local Goodwill or another worthy cause, and they’ll quickly become someone’s favorite new articles of clothing. The other option, considering the expense of holiday gift-giving, is to bring them to a local consignment shop and cash-in on the hard work you put into cleaning out your clothing closet.
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Jot Down Holiday Reminders
By the time late Fall rolls around again, we’ve forgotten the details of the previous holiday season. What worked well, which homemade foods everyone loved, which pictures we missed taking, and whose parties we enjoyed the most become distant memories. Set aside 30 minutes to jot down some holiday notes in a cute, new notebook. This should include mistakes you made in holiday preparation that you want to avoid in the future, which recipes were a hit with your family and friends, what you wish you would have done differently in hindsight, and anything else that will help you navigate the next holiday season more effectively and efficiently.
If you tackle each of these five items in late Winter, you’ll find your Spring cleaning process will be much easier. Following these post-holiday organization tips means all the clutter will be gone and the organization tasks weighing on your mind will already be completed, so you can focus on deep cleaning those spots in the home that are ignored the rest of the year.
