Kitchen Organizing Tips : learning to let go

The purge can stop you right in your tracks. To keep the momentum going when you are organizing Your Kitchen these techniques from the Worksheets provided with the Kitchen Organizing Video Set will help you over that hurdle when making decisions on what to keep or what to let go of .

Organizing The Kitchen: Letting go of the Past

Purging things from your kitchen can happen in two ways: Fast or Slow. It’s up to you.

Kitchen gadgets

Decision Tool #1: Fast Purge

The Fast Purge requires that you sort through everything beforehand, using the techniques shown on The Sort worksheet.

Once you’ve sorted everything:

Go through every pile you’ve sorted
Ask yourself if you actually use it or plan to use it.
Make the decision in the moment, using the decision tools from the Organizing Basics worksheets.
Get rid of it right away (donation, recycling, garbage) if you don’t use it.
If you do use it, put it aside for re-organization later.

Decision Tool #2: Slow Purge

The Slow Purge doesn’t require any initial sorting and if the idea of re-organizing the space terrifies you, this technique (which actually takes months) might be a good slow way to warm up to organizing.

To Slow Purge your kitchen

Buy removable sticky dots.
Put a dot on every item in the kitchen.
As you use an item, remove the dot.
After a period of time (3 to 6 months?), pull out everything that still has a dot on it.
Decide if it’s worth keeping (like turkey platters – only used on holidays).
Get rid of the unwanted things right away (donation, recycling, garbage).
Add the keepers back in with the in-use things.

Schedule a re-organization of the keeps and the in-use items.