Organize Your Home Day

What the day is

Organize Your Home Day is observed on January 14, in the stretch of January when the decorations are down and the house looks worse than it did in December.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The pattern it addresses is familiar enough to have an industry built on it.

The industry sells storage, and storage is usually the wrong purchase. Buying containers converts a pile of undecided objects into a tidy row of undecided objects, which looks like progress and changes nothing, because the volume of things in the house is unchanged and the decisions have been deferred rather than made. This is why organizing rebounds so reliably and why the same cupboard needs doing every January.

The approaches that hold up share one feature: they force a decision about each object at the moment it is handled, rather than allowing it to be relocated. Whether that decision is framed around what earns its place, what would actually be replaced if lost, or simply what has not been touched in a year, the mechanism is the same. What varies is the wording.

Two practical findings are worth more than any method. Things migrate to where they are used, not to where they are meant to live, so a storage plan that fights the household's actual habits loses. And a space that is completely full stops functioning, because putting anything away requires first moving something else, which is the point at which people stop putting things away at all.

The other honest note is that a tidy house is not a moral achievement, and the standard set by photographs of empty rooms is not a standard anybody lives at.

How to take part

• Do one drawer properly rather than a whole room badly.
• Decide on each item as you touch it. Do not make a maybe pile.
• Buy the storage last, once you know what is actually staying.
• Leave deliberate empty space, because a full system stops being used.
• Put things where you already drop them instead of where you think they belong.
• Take the bag to the charity shop the same day, or it lives in the hall until March.