LITTLE things that help keep you organised?

[starrychime]

There's a lot of threads about cleaning routines, 15 min sessions etc which I love to read but never get round to following (one day, one day I will!)
Wondered if anyone has some little hints and tips that make things just a little bit easier about the house?
I use paper plates for morning toast, lunchtime sandwiches etc as I HATE washing up (no washer) - and it keeps it down a little bit.
Also keeping a small Ikea drawer sorter in the bathroom with DD's bobbles and clasps so they're to hand in the morning helps a bit.
Anyone else have any little tips?

I line the bin with five bin liners, it saves having to put a new one on every time. I always pick up a baby wipe when the phone rings and wipe down the dado rail or skirting board or plugs and light switches.

Brilliant thread!

I've already upped my game recently - taking out the recycling and not leaving it on the kitchen side to pile up.

Tomorrow I'm going to sort through DS's toys in the lounge. Stuff everywhere and bits & pieces all mixed in together.

Tonight whilst I'm watching the tv I'm gonna sort my handbag and DS nursery bag. I've loaded the wm ready for the morning.

I'm following the don't put it down put it away mantra and to not leave a room without taking/moving something.

Any tips on cooking for one? Lots of recipes are for 4 and it bamboozles me.

I have also made a list of things to buy! Eg storage!

I'm also going to buy scissors and dog out the trillion rolls of tape and sort out the wrapping paper storage and add birthday cards too. Whenever we buy paper we seem to buy tape!!

We now have store cupboard list of all the herbs, spices, pasta, noodles, cooking sauces and mix. I'm hoping this will stop overspending or duplicating purchases!!

Loving all the ideas and suggestions!

We direct debit EVERYTHING possible, never any bills to pay and a regular nice surprise if we have overpaid something.

I have the big book of everything, which is a monster diary that everything, invitations, appointmnet slips, cat worming due, everything..gets written in or stuck in and is consulted several times every day.

Never ever ever pair socks. There is a communal sock drawer and if people want matching socks, they can fish a pair out for themselves.

I am a great one for giving stuff to the charity shop. The trick is to find one that is park-outside-able and take a bag in most weeks.

Oxfam do nice cards for about 99p, I buy 30 at a time of various sorts and keep them in a card basket with folded wrapping paper, Sellotape, scissors and a pen.

The trick with all tidying and organizing is Similar things go together. All books in our house, DCs, ours, old, new, big small ALL live in one room. They can be taken out for reading, but that is where they always go back to. All socks live in the same drawer (see above).

I would love some help with making me actually PUT things on eBay. I don't know why I find it so hard to get motivated to do it. Also need help with taking stuff to the tip, it is heavy and awkward and the tip is MILES away. Can't get myself motivated to do it.

redglow I am definitely going to take on board the baby wipe while on the phone tip.Having just spent 57 mins on the phone that'd been an excellent double up on time!

Has anyone got any top tips on floors that need cleaning a lot (washing/mopping as opposed to sweeping) without having to keep a wet mop indoors at all times or going through dozens of cleaning wipes?

ooh i would like to know that aswell wrt floors skinny. my floors look dirty as soon as i wash them.

well this evening i emptied out the cupboard in the kitchen that housed all the DCs' crafty stuff and a select few toys. it was a tip and no-one could ever find anything so i have sorted it all out and binned all broken and no longer usable (pieces missing) toys. it's now all neat and ordered. pens, pencils, rubbers, rulers, sharpeners, crayons and chalks all in separate jars/tubs. paper in a basket instead of loose in the shelf and toys in a small rhino tub that fits in the cupboard isntead of just shoved in. it looks great!

Ooh Skinny - I have wooden floors throughout plus 4 kids and a bloody dirty fat dog so my floors are a mess. I just bought a £30 steam mop from Argos (reduced to £20) which is fab. Quick sweep and spot cleaning with a cloth for a couple of days and then a Hoover and steam when needed. Takes no longer than a sweep and dries instantly. The 'pads' from the steam mop go in the washer. Has saved loads of time and house looks dead clean!

Skinny always clean the taps when on the phone too it's a really fiddly job that you can do one handed.

Mushroom that sounds like the answer to my prayers!

redglow,good idea.Really I suppose anything that just needs one hand,but possibly ideally something that you may not necessarily get round to otherwise, would suit,I suppose!

keys on rack by front door.

Shoes and coats always always always in the same place. No running around in the mornings searching!

Redglow, your multiple binliner idea is wonderful!

I keep various things in my pantry cupboard on shelves in separate small cardboard boxes (no room on counter for racks). There is a baking box that contains all the spices, bicarbonate, etc, that I use for baking, a dinner herbs and spices box with things I use for dinner, a box with packets of jelly and instant mixes, lemsip etc., and one with things I seldom use like birthday candles, seasonal decorating sprinkles. I take out the whole box when baking or cooking dinner and put it all back when I'm finished. Small containers of things like ground nutmeg don't get misplaced when the DCs cook something because they go back in the right box. I hate wasting time looking for things I know I have or going out and buying something I thought I had run out of only to find it was simply in the wrong place or whatever shelf someone could reach.

I do multiple bin liners too! Except I use carrier bags, because the bins are all small, so they get full quickly and don't have time to get stinky. We don't have a kitchen bin, just a carrier bag on the door handle, so that goes out most days. (I try to remember to re-use my carrier bags at the supermarket, I manage it about 50% of the time, but we still end up with millions.)

I also tear up junk mail that's blank on the back into quarters, and it has a place where it lives, which is next to the pen pot, so whenever I need to start a list I have a piece of paper and pen handy.

In the last couple of months I have been making sure I do the washing up twice a day - after lunch, and then there's only cooking & dinner stuff to wash - I do that whilst DP is putting DD to bed. That's now become a habit, which I am glad about, because it means that I get up to a nice tidy kitchen every day. (I don't shine my sink though. I wipe round it, that's clean enough for me.)

I have been thinking about getting a page a day diary to plan housework tasks, but I already had a blank A4 notebook so am using that. Each evening I write in it what I'd like to do the following day, and tick off the things I have got done that day, as well as writing in anything that I did which I hadn't planned, eg sweep the porch, which never occurred to me until this week. So when I look at it, I can see at a glance how long it is since I changed the bed, etc. (I haven't yet managed to implement a same-day-every-week habit - I'm working on that.)

My tips are not to procrastinate, ie, deal with things straight away.
Everything ready the night before
All School uniform ready by Sunday evening
Always be ready to leave with time to spare
Have an emergency stationery drawer (lined paper, roller ball pen, pritt stick, pencil, protractor, ruler, etc)

Love the suggestion about the bed linen in the pillow case. I will be doing that from now on.

Fab thread! :)

keep a cool box or one of those insulated bags in the back of the car - then when you buy cold/frozen food, you have time to do some other jobs on the way home, if you need to.

Javotte-what is a clothes folder board?

I'm getting into the habit (sad I know) of getting showered and dressed as soon as I get up and doing the same for DS otherwise end up still in our pjs mid morning and I've done nothing whereas if I'm dressed I feel I should crack on and do something.

I can't stick to doing the same thing on a particular day either. Wish I could but it never happens!

I've been meaning to dust our bedroom since Monday and it's still not happened! Will do it today.

About to reorganise our duvet covers and put things in pillow cases, although it will confuse the hell out of dh (Not that he is in the habit of making beds ). Great thread!

Can someone invent me a laundry system.

Me, DH, ds1 (6) and ds2 (3).

We have tumble dryer in our en suite so can't run it overnight and I don't like it being on when I'm out during the day in case house burbs down

It's the putting away that loses me. I sort but then they've gone to bed and I can't put away. So it stays on my bed into bedtime, then gets moved and then gets left/ unsorted

I feel like if I could get into a rhythm everything would be OK.

I use the home routine app on my iPhone as my checklist for household stuff.

I use pocket informant for all my projects and work to do lists. I run DH's company, plus my own division of his company and also have my own company. I'm also a school governor and a volunteer mediator. All of these have their own sections with a to do list for each. They are colour coded and I can see them as one big list or broken down by company. It's not cheap to download but it's the best app I've seen for diary and to do list management.

Something that saves me a few minutes is a kettle in our bedroom. We keep coffee in our room and take up two insulated mugs with milk in each night. The first one up makes coffee and we drink it as we get ready.

whoknewthat, I put laundry away during the day, whilst DS plays upstairs. It only takes 5-10 mins (I wash every other day so there's never a massive load to put away) and he plays quite happily for 10 mins whilst I do that.

My mother had a '70s book called "Sidetracked Home Executives" which some people swear by (just look at the reviews on Amazon). Personally, I found it alarmingly chauvenist (at one point one of the writers recalls how her husband told her "I didn't think you loved me because the house was such chaos" ) but it did have some good tips, including a note-card system for getting organised which sounds quite a lot like the 'bring forward' system mentioned by others on here.

My favourite tips:

• Keep a set of cleaning things on each floor or in the room where they get used

• Time how long jobs take (especially the ones you don't like, eg cleaning the loo). It's often less than you think. That means that when you've got, say, 8 minutes before you need to leave the house you can say "Ok, which job takes less than 8 minutes?" and get it done.

• Work out (A) all the jobs that need to be done in, say, an average month, how often you'd (ideally) like them to be done, and how long they take. Then work out (B) how much time you would actually have available to do them. If B won't fit into A, then you're fighting a losing battle. Admit it and work out how to deal with it, eg. cut down how often you do stuff, get the rest of the family to help or pay someone to do some of it - ideally the most time-consuming bits.

whoknewthat, I sort into piles according to which room it goes in, and leave each person's pile of folded clothes outside their bedroom door. Within the pile it's sorted by which drawer it goes in, so in the morning I pick up the pile as I go in, open the curtains and chuck stuff in the relevant drawers as I goad the reluctant offspring into life. Takes seconds.

whoknew I struggle with this too.
Perhaps having a labelled basket for each person for clean washing is the answer.
Then you could sort the dry laundry at night as you do, put it into each person's basket and then put it away as and when you get the chance.

I used Ikea bags, the large blue ones, to sort washing that goes in the machine and also to tidy folded washing away. Just about starting to get dd1 who's nearly 5 to sort her own clothes back into her drawers, so I just leave the blue bag on her bed with her stuff in. (Her clothes drawers look like a bomb has hit them because she changes several times a day, so it does not matter if she puts things in neatly as long as they are roughly in the right drawer for her to find again... Thank God for school uniforms cutting down her choice in the week! )