3 Skills To Effectively Organize Any Space: 3 Organizing Flow Steps

3 Flow Steps™ for TSSI Organizing Personality Styles | ©2014 Sane Spaces, LLC, All Rights Reserved | 3 Organizing Flow Steps

Have you ever wondered what the deal is with getting organized once and for all? Why do some people seem to have it all together? They manage their stuff with ease, enjoy a beautiful, calm environment, and seem to be able to easily take care of themselves. With so much stuff available, it’s essential to stay organized to effectively manage your life!

What if you could:

instantly determine what you need to keep and what you should let go of…
easily figure out what you have, and have what you need when you need it…
buy items purposefully so your space is enhanced and matched to your needs and lifestyle.

Well, you can!

Unlock your organizing problems with TSSI

The key to unlocking your hidden organizing troubles is in knowing how you’re wired up, naturally! And there’s an instant way to find that out. The TSSI is an organizing personality style assessment. It has been proven to help thousands of people gain insight into what they do naturally with time and space. Knowing your natural time management personality type can help you make better decisions about time and live more in flow.

First, let’s examine some of the payoffs of knowing your natural organizing style personality preferences. When you understand what is most natural and build your life and routines around your strengths, you move toward mastery.

Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self–efficacy as one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task. One’s sense of self–efficacy plays a major role in how one approaches anything, even staying organized. So adjusting your mindset is an important first step toward time success.

In fact when you understand that you CAN make better decisions to organize yourself when you have a greater sense of self-acceptance. Therefore learning your organizing personality style types provide you with the opportunity to:

make better choices regarding things.
heighten your awareness of what to keep and what to throw out.
understand items that cause you to feel stressed.
feel more empowered every day.
understand how others may view your disorganized behaviors.
develop effective organizing systems when you live with others.
increase your experience of “flow” as the natural unfolding of life as it happens.

And those are just some of the payoffs. Becoming more self-accepting is the fastest track toward happiness.

“Being in touch with who you are is the single biggest secret of success. Deepak Chopra”

The Three Organizing Flow Steps

With your ultimate happiness on the line, let’s first examine the three major skills that help you navigate time. We refer to these three skills as ‘Flow Steps’.

A flow step is a broadly-defined, objective statement that captures one’s capability in a certain area. We use Flow Steps to define a grouping of the relative knowledge, skills, and abilities required to successfully manage time.

The three Organzing Flow Steps articulate the sub-tasks that work together to improve your ability to get organized and stay organizes in your space. To organize effectively, you need to know your own natural habits that lead to your success.

People who find staying organize easy regularly demonstrate skills and abilities that help them master their space and decisions regarding the items that come into view. Space mastery involves arranging your spaces in an aesthetically pleasing way, assigning value to items you have, and by your ability to tolerate disorder. These three skills are critical to your success with organizing. Let’s examine these three Organizing Flow Steps more closely.

Organizing Flow Step #1 – Arranging Space

How you arrange space is assessed by:

How you choose to display or hide items from view in accordance with your aesthetic preference.
How you choose to arrange that creates a supportive and productive environment.
Knowing what you have and being able to retrieve items with ease.

Regardless of your personal scores, making choices that align actions with your style preference will help you regain or enhance equanimity and flow.

Knowing your dominant Space Style Preferences can help you in every way. Self-knowledge helps you make better decisions about how you arrange your spaces at home and at your workplace.

Organizing Flow Step #2 – Assigning Value

How you assign value is assessed by how you:

Evaluate your possessions over time.
Maintain a balance between what comes in and what goes out.
Determine an item’s usefulness, sentimentality, aesthetic, or monetary value or an items’ overall worth.
Decide what to hold onto and when to let go of items.

Regardless of your personal scores, making choices that align actions with your style preference will help you regain or enhance equanimity and flow.

Organizing Flow Step #3 – Tolerating Disorder

Your relative comfort with the disorder you experience is assessed by how you:

Maintain your environment in accordance with your present lifestyle and needs.
Manage your relative need for order and how you express it to relieve tension.
Identify when your preference is working for you as opposed to against you.
Recognize how this preference can be related to your family or environment of origin.

Regardless of your personal scores, making choices that align actions with your style preference will help you regain or enhance equanimity.

How To Bring It All Together

With your ultimate happiness on the line, knowing your space and dominant organizing personality styles will help you. With this awareness, you will be better able to develop effective systems, storage, item retrieval and spaces that both support and nourish you.

Since organizing your space is ultimately up to you, you need to figure these things out for yourself. What works for others to stay organized, may not really work for you. So, learning more about yourself and what is natural to your tendencies can help you develop systems, routines, and habits that better suit your natural tendencies.

Knowing your organizing and space personality types will help you incrementally develop greater efficacy with getting and staying organized. Feeling more organized and in contrrol is a surefire shortcut to a living a more calm, cool and collected life.

The Six Organizing Style Preferences

Different organizing styles require different solutions. These are just a few ways to use your natural style to create a more pleasing workflow experience. Once you identify your dominant preferences you can begin to take steps to integrate more Flow Steps into your experience.

Read about each Organizing Style Preference:

Everything Out Organizing Style Preference
Nothing Out Organizing Style Preference
Saver Organizing Style Preference
Minimalist Organizing Style Preference
Straightener Time Management Style Preference
No Rules Time Management Style Preference

When you know your organizing personality style preferences, you can creatively hack your systems, habits, and behaviors so you can create sanity and get back to homeostasis easily.

Everything Out™ Organizing Style

The Everything Out organizing style maintains their flow by leaving things out in the open as visual reminders. By leaving things out where (hopefully) they can easily put their hands on them again, they feel more organized and in control. However, when too many things are left out, it becomes hard to find anything. It doesn’t take too long before this style preference begins to work against people. Known as ‘pile-filers’ Everything Out personality types may be fine with their own style preferences and piles as reminders – but others may not function well in a cluttered workspace.

HOW EVERYTHING OUT ORGANIZING PERSONALITIES CAN ORGANIZE MORE EFFECTIVELY

Everything Outs (EO) do well when they survey their desks and living spaces often to make sure that visible items are only those they use and/or are pleasing. When possible, Everything Outs should schedule consistent times for maintaining their spaces. Many times simply setting a maintenance schedule can be the most effective strategy to help Everything Out personalities feel more organized.

Another key to success for Everything Out style personalities is to use color. You may be attracted to certain color strategies to help you maintain your organizing systems. So a successful and consistent color strategy helps you assign different colors for a clear purpose. Use it in your space, as well as in your digital universe. Color coding files and online appointments can work wonders to help you feel more organized.

ABOUT VISUAL CUEING

An instant organizing hack for Everything Outs is to build systems based around visual cueing. This means your systems need to show what you have at a glance. This may go against some minimalist approaches to getting organized, but visually aligned systems will keep Everything Out styles organized for life.

So, when considering storage products this organizing personality type feels most organized when they can see what they have. Therefore use clear or translucent storage containers whenever you can to keep things in view. Clear containers (think lucite and acrylic) allow you to see and automatically know what’s stored. Taking an instant visual inventory helps Everything Out’s know what you have and avoid overbuying. However, if you’re already laden with opaque storage options – colorful labels will work as a great remedy. Many Everything Out’s even prefer an actual picture that captures stored items, or an itemized inventory list.

Nothing Out™ Organizing Style

The Nothing Out Organizing style personalities equate a clear surface with a clean and organized mind. Nothing Out’s will clear their surfaces and put things ‘away’ to feel more in control. They dislike and avoid messiness in their visible and public spaces. In their attempt to maintain an orderly appearance, they’re most often drawn to organizational products that hide things from view.

Because they dislike mess, they often “stash” items away without a storage and retrieval system. Because of this tendency, it’s necessary for them to maintain organization even when systems are not visible, Nothing Outs find it beneficial to create workable filing and storage systems for both active and longer-term projects. This style finds computerized planning and scheduling tools very appealing.

HOW NOTHING OUT ORGANIZING PERSONALITIES CAN ORGANIZE MORE EFFECTIVELY:

Because they dislike mess, Nothing Out style’s may “stash” items away in haste… to tidy up, or when feeling out of control. However, without adequate storage and a reliable retrieval system, this organizing style preference can get overwhelmed and feel very disorganized behind the scenes. Because of this tendency, it’s necessary for Nothing Out personalities to maintain organization even when systems are not visible. Using the 3 organizing flow steps as a starting place can help.

Saver™ Organizing Style

Savers think that virtually everything might come in handy someday. They don’t subscribe to the idea that the ‘value’ of things changes over time. Savers see their accumulations as insurance of something to come and feel secure as a result of these tendencies. Savers often feel they “may need it one day” – and use this as a reason to save, store, and sometime stock-pile items. An items’ possibility is a reason to keep “perfectly good” items they “paid good money for” even if they have no use for them now nor in the foreseeable future. Some Saver tendencies may have developed in families of origin, where saving meant survival. These Savers may have behavioral and psychological triggers connected with their things.

LEARN HOW SAVER ORGANIZING STYLE PERSONALITIES CAN ORGANIZE MORE EFFECTIVELY

Minimalist™ Organizing Style

Minimalist organizing style types thrive on only having essentials. Minimalists dislike clutter and avoid it at all costs, often throwing perfectly good items out in haste to avoid messiness. Excess causes Minimalists to feel out of control. You will not see minimalists stopping at tag sales and clearance bins. They typically pass up “free” items and rarely pick up materials unless they have an absolute need. Minimalist dominant styles prefer to live in the “now” and let go of past items if they’ve served their purpose. And, while they appreciate the value of memories but do not connect those memories to “things” nor keep things for sentimental reasons.

LEARN HOW MINIMALIST ORGANIZING STYLE PERSONALITIES CAN ORGANIZE MORE EFFECTIVELY

Straightener Organizing Style

The Straightener style types love the appearance of straight lines and tidy piles. Aligning items help them feel a sense of control. A Straightener loves nothing more than neat piles, even if they don’t know what’s in those piles. And they will straighten items, even when there are no categorical distinctions within piles.

Straighteners are famous for ‘tidying up’ other’s spaces. They’ll get caught straightening things they don’t own. Additionally, they’ve straightened stuff others would ignore.

For instance, I’ve straightened items in a public waiting room (more than a few times!) Straighteners crave neatness. They may straighten to tidy up, yet still feel disorganized if they only focus on neatness. If Straighteners fail to organize before straightening, they’re still disorganized. Therefore they sometimes “look” more organized than they actually feel.

LEARN HOW STRAIGHTENER ORGANIZING STYLE PERSONALITIES CAN ORGANIZE MORE EFFECTIVELY

NO RULES ORGANIZING STYLE PERSONALITY

No Rules personality types tend to look disorganized to others. Even though they may know what they have and be able to find it when absolutely necessary, this

personality style typically struggles due to their lack of systems. Their disorderliness tends to trigger others who may call them “packrats”. Because of this, this style personality more than others my deal with ridicule and the shame that results. This negative cycle may exacerbate their tendencies and make things worse. No Rules personalities may actually have gaps in their knowledge and/or organizational skills. Alternatively, they may be nonconformists (or less mature…) and may simply rebel at the idea of structure and control. Sometimes this style revs up when people experience a sudden change, transition, illness, or overwhelm in their current (or recent past) life situation.

LEARN HOW NO RULES ORGANIZING STYLE PERSONALITIES CAN ORGANIZE MORE EFFECTIVELY

Why Some Systems Don’t Work and Others Do

The best organizing systems that last are those designed to match their unique space, behaviors, family, work, and needs. It’s important to understand the source of disorganization. Disorganization as a result of life transition and change is situational vs. chronic disorganization. That’s good news because life situations can change. It’s harder to change habits and behaviors associated with chronic disorganization.

Even if you try to implement the organizing flow steps, the truth is, any organizing personality type can become overwhelmed. And when you’re overwhelmed and chaotic, you’re unmotivated and stuck. This is where professionals can be a great investment.

If this is you, think about hiring a pro before you take this on. Professional organizers specialize in chronically disorganized clients. You can find them at the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (ICD). They’ll help you design reliable organizing methods and easy-to-maintain storage systems.

HOW TO EFFECTIVELY ORGANIZE FOR YOUR DOMINANT STYLE PREFERENCES

In order to get organized, it’s helpful to assess these 3 organizing flow steps. You can easily learn all about your Organizing Style Personality Types with the Time & Space Style Inventory. Another important aspect to stay organized of course, is to learn to better manage your time according to your preferences. Like the Organizing Personality Style types, there are six Time Management Personality Types to help you manage your time.

The Time & Space Style Inventory™ (TSSI™) evaluates your time style preferences and how you can stay organized for life. By learning your dominant and strong style preferences, you can make the most of your space. Learning your flow formula will make it easier to get organized for life. You can choose to take actions that increase flow in your life.

3 Organizing Flow Steps

There are 3 organizing flow steps for any organizing style.

Taking time to arrange items according to your style helps us all. Your aesthetic approach is important.
Secondly, how you value items matter. In fact, you need to re-evaluate an item’s value over time, to adequately value your collections.
And third, the most common hurdle is whether you can tolerate letting items go when they no longer useful.

These are the 3 flow steps to move any organizing style forward. Little changes matter when organizing. And when you take tyle-specific actions consistently, you create flow in your environment.

So What?

So what can you make of all these styles? Regardless of your dominant Time Style Preferences, you may still struggle at times. Regardless of what life throws at you, the solution can be simple. When you understand your natural Time Management Personality Style Preferences you can work to ease ‘time tension’ in your life.

With heightened awareness, you’re better able to make choices that reduce your stress and move ahead with ease and harmony – and live your life in flow. Setting yourself and your systems up to live in flow, makes you more productive and satisfied by working from the inside, out.

There are six style preferences each for time management and organizing your space. The Time & Space Style Inventory (TSSI™) will help you pinpoint your unique flow formula and better understand what is happening when ‘tension’ occurs in your daily living. When you figure out your dominant personality style preferences, you’ll be able to remedy your spaces and time habits for good by taking the flow steps that will ultimately ease your tension.

Click the link for more information about the Time & Space Style Inventory, leave a comment below, or email us at cena@sanespaces.com