It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the whirlwind of shopping and entertaining that comes with the holiday season. Professional Organizers in Canada offers these tips to help you de-stress and free up your time to enjoy the festivities.
Prepare your home for entertaining:
1. Concentrate your efforts on the areas that will have the biggest impact. Don't worry about storage and pantry areas or the "private" rooms such as your families' bedrooms. Concentrate instead on the "public" rooms: the dining room, the living room and family room and the bedrooms and bathrooms that will be used by guests.
2. Clear away as much of the non-essential day-to-day clutter and year-round decorative items as you can, replacing them with seasonal decorations and special touches.
3. Tuck away projects and hobbies that will not be used over the holidays and replace them with games, books and seasonal music that you and your guests will enjoy.
4. Clear some space on the vanity and in the closets where you will be accommodating guests, so that they can make themselves at home and be as relaxed as possible.
5. Ideally, you will have cleared away the clutter well in advance of the holidays, but in the worst-case scenario, if you need to stash stuff in boxes at the last minute and relegate it to the basement, that's fine, too. That will also give you a good place to start when you embark on your new year's resolution to "get organized."
Organize your holiday shopping with some time management and planning:
1. Make a budget, make a list of people you want to buy presents for and decide on an approximate dollar amount to be spent on each person - don't wait until your credit card is maxed out in December.
2. Spend some time online or going through catalogues to come up with several possible gift ideas. Online shopping can save you a great deal of time and can minimize the temptation to spend above your budget, picking up impulse items as you stroll through the malls.
3. For gifts that you wish to buy in person, divide that list into two or more excursions so that you don't have to wear yourself to a frazzle on one shopping trip.
4. If you can, shop at off times such as weekday mornings or Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, when the stores will be less busy.
5. Alternatively, set yourself a goal of buying one gift each day on your lunch hour or perhaps stopping at one store each night on your way home.
The aftermath - make sure everything is organized for next year:
1. To avoid being the house on the block that still has decorations up well into February, it is helpful to schedule a day when you will take care of this last holiday chore. Try to do it during your time off; you will have a lot less energy to tackle the chore once you are back at work or school.
2. Review your decorations. Are there any decorations still in the boxes that you didn't bother putting up this year? These are the first you should consider ditching or donating. If an item is sentimental but you still wouldn't be caught dead displaying it, take a picture of it before you toss it and keep the memory, not the item.
3. One way to store your decorations is to keep all the similar items together (wreaths, candles, linens, serving ware, etc.) or group them by colour. Another approach is to pack away all the decorations by room (living room, kitchen, foyer, etc). This works best if you tend to use the same decorations in the same room year after year and gives you the option of decorating or un-decorating one room at a time.
- Courtesy of Professional Organizers in Canada (POC), a non-profit association representing more than 500 professional organizers.
