Prioritize Organizing-Shoes
Prioritize Organizing-Shoes
You can achieve a more organized life in 5-minute increments.
Today’s 5-minute task is to corral your shoes. Firstly, ask yourself where your shoes live. Do you store them all in your closet, do some of them live by the front door, or are they all over the house? If your shoes were to live somewhere, where would you like them to be? Pick a specific spot. Do you have a shoe rack, bins, or boxes where they will be stored?
Secondly, it’s time to pair them up, and sort them into different styles; heels, flats, business, casual, sports, etc. Furthermore, sorting will allow you to find what you are searching for more readily in the future. It’s one of the biggest benefits of being organized.
Finally, remove any shoes that don’t fit, are badly worn, or are outdated from your wardrobe. Accordingly, if you haven’t slipped them on your feet in a year, get rid of them. Great! You did it. Was it painful?
As the season changes, do this quick organizing project perhaps twice a year. Instead of flip-flops, exchange them for those winter boots!
Try it – Prioritize Organizing-Shoes in 5 minutes.
You can achieve a more organized life in 5-minute increments. Click To Tweet
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Janet Schiesl
Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.
She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.
Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.
Janet Schiesl
Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.
She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.
Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.
Very good tip! I like the 5 minute approach. I’ve been breaking down organizing in our house in small bits, and it’s been less stressful. But now I need some advice on working with the husband. I try to do a small 5-minute organization, and he launches into a flurry of things that takes an hour or more, killing my plan of doing something quick and then moving on. His philosophy? If we’re going to do something, do it all! Any advice on helping him to go along with the 5 minute thing?
Juli, it’s great to focus on 5 minute projects. By completing small projects you can catch up with the back log or maintain the organization you already have. Many people are overwhelmed when thinking about a big organizing project. I guess your husband is not. I would not tamper his enthusiasm, but schedule the projects for a time when you are available and are sure you can finish what you started. Men tend to think of organizing as a project that can be done once and never again. Women tend to think of organizing as a chore that will need to be repeated to maintain.
Shoes! I have them stored in a few spots, and the system works. But lately, I’ve been thinking about letting go of some I no longer wear. It’s like everything else. I probably wear 20% of my shoes most of the time. The other 80% I either never wear or rarely wear. Some of the rarely I’ll hang onto because they are special occasion shoes. But there are others, like the red pumps I haven’t worn in years, that I must ask myself if I need to keep. I like them a lot, but heels aren’t as body-friendly as they once were. Decisions, decisions. I appreciate the prompt.
That’s great Linda. At least you know that you have to let go of some, not necessarily to make space for new ones but to give away of things we are not using anymore or don’t fit our wardrobe need is a huge task by itself.
Oh, the dreaded shoes! I have more sandals than winter shoes. But you just reminded me that I need to pull out my summer shoes and add my winter boots to my shoe organizer. Thanks.
Perfect time to switch shoes for the season. We are having another summer like weather today, it is another sandals day here.
I suspect shoe management depends on how fashionable someone is. I’m not fashionable at all, so the only shoes in my house are ones that fit and flatter, go with my outfits and are comfortable. I have a few pair of work shoes, two pair of everyday shoes for summer wear, light sneakers for kicking around and a couple pair of workout sneakers that do double duty as “weather gear” considering we don’t get snow or severe weather. I have one emergency pair of “dress” shoes, which I haven’t had to wear in about a decade. (I no longer have a life that doesn’t allow for ballet flats.) All shoes are in my closet, arrange by seasonal wear, except two pair of shoes at the top of my stairs (leading to outdoors) that I can quickly slip into to run outside.
This is one of the areas where I was surprised when I became a professional organizer; growing up, everyone I knew kept their own shoes in their bedroom closets. Winter boots were taken off at the garage door to the utility room/mud room, unless you were a guest and took off your booths at the front door. The rest of the year, people generally took their shoes off when they entered their/any house (unless there was a formal party). So I was initially mystified when I moved to the south and saw homes with baskets or mats piled high with shoes, or shoes randomly all over people’s homes. I feel like shoes need to live in one place so you can see what excess exists; gathering everyone’s shoes together in a pile makes it hard to find anything! Taking 1 minute to put shoes away daily means you don’t ever need more than 5 minutes to keep things orderly!
Very well said Julie, I like your idea of “shoes need to live in one place”. Might be different for many people depend on the space they have in their house and wether they have a garage or not. The early we teach our kids to put their shoes away and where they should go the better.