Real Life Organizing: Clean and Clutter-Free in 15 Minutes a Day by Cassandra Aarssen Published by Mango on April 18, 2017
Genres: House and Home, Nonfiction
Format: Paperback
Source: the library
Real Life Organizing offers clutter free storage solutions and advice that can help you create a Pinterest-worthy home on a small budget: Learn how to organize your home, simplify life and have more time for the things you love. Organizational expert Cassandra ‘Cas’ Aarssen, the guru from YouTube’s ClutterBug channel, reveals her tips, tricks and secrets to a clean and clutter free home in just 15 minutes a day.
Simplify your life: Cas walks you through the steps you can take to create a beautiful, organized, clutter free, and almost self-cleaning home ─ a DIY Pinterest home. Simplify your life. You do not have to get rid of all of your things, you do not have to be a yoga loving minimalist, and you do not have to radically change your lifestyle or personality in order to simplify your life and have an organized home. The truth is that you do not need to actually be an organized person to live like an organized person...
After you’ve read Real Life Organizing, you too will be able to live a more organized life without having to give up your sanity.
(excerpted from publisher's blurb)
Review
Aarssen’s cheerful, breezy take on organization hits most of the same high notes as other organization and decluttering books: get rid of stuff you don’t use or love, use containers for storage, make it easy to put stuff away when you’re done using it, and so on. She divides people into four types of “Clutterbug”: Butterfly, Cricket, Ladybug, and Bee, depending on their style of disorganization and clutter and the reasons behind it. She makes suggestions about storage and organization style based on those types. I would find her divisions more useful if I didn’t fall squarely in three of them on the included quiz, with equal scores in two and the third only one point less. (Cricket and Bee, followed by Butterfly.)
I did come away with a few fresh and practical ideas for organizing, a better understanding of some of what stands in my way, and one golden quote that’s going in my arsenal for times when I’m trying to purge the clutter: “You’re not deciding which child to keep; it’s just stuff.”
If you enjoy Aarssens’ approach (which I do), she also has a series of videos on YouTube. Just search for “Clutterbug.” But the book is worth reading for the way it pulls everything together, and for the handy set of planner pages and checklists in the back.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
- Take Control of Your TBR Pile Challenge (March 2018)
Angela
I wish there was a way I could discretely get a book like this to my husband and actually get him to read it; he doesn’t understand the concept of putting something away when you’re not using it, and he doesn’t like throwing anything away!
Angela recently posted…Can’t-Wait Wednesday: All The Ever Afters
Lark_Bookwyrm
She talks about those kinds of Clutterbugs in the book. You might get some ideas that would help you help him… though pretty much the only solution to the “not throwing anything away” syndrome is to learn to throw or give things away.
Berls
The quiz sounds interesting, I’d be very curious to see where I fall. I’m a pretty organized person at home, it’s my classroom that’s disorganized. But it’s more organized than a lot of teachers. I just need to purge, but it’s hard to let things go at school when you never know if you’ll need it and then end up buying it again. I do love that quote though!
Berls recently posted…Just a Few In Death Reads… I’m an addict y’all!
Lark_Bookwyrm
I know the feeling, and it’s why I hung on to some things for so long. But I don’t need some of the stuff I used for homeschooling, for instance, and someone else could be using it.