Around here at Hectic Manor, we’re trying to make 2016 the year of Doing Things Right. We’re making a concentrated effort to identify problems before they happen and proactively deal with them. The goal is to have fewer emergencies that could have been avoided. In an ironic way, it seems like we may be preparing for bigger emergencies to take their place…but that’s for a different post.

Unfortunately, being proactive about things seems to take more time. For instance, in the past we’ve taken all the Christmas stuff down, jammed it back into boxes randomly, hauled it downstairs, and stacked it precariously behind closed doors in the basement. Then in late November or early December we would haul everything upstairs, trash the main level of the house while decorating, and generally have a huge cluster on our hands for a week or so. To say that this perpetuated disaster was disruptive to our lives would be an understatement…but it never seems to get better.

When we are in the midst of hauling things upstairs, I’ve made the statement that we “ought to make this better”, but we’re so busy doing the work that we never take the time to even think about what would make things better. Even if we had, I’m pretty certain that we wouldn’t have acted on it.

But 2015 was different. I actually set aside some time to think about why our Christmas decorating and take-down were such a mess. I proactively identified problem areas and even solicited comments on how it could be better.

There were definitely two camps in the household. The first camp was the we’ve always done it this way bunch. They strongly believed that the system was the system, and it was a waste of time to think about changing it. All that thinking time could better be spent on hauling boxes and stacking them in Jenga-like piles. To them, this was the way life is. You just live it.

On the other hand, we had a small minority that joined me in the continuous improvement group. They saw that things could be better, and even had helpful input on how we could have an easier time of both the decorating and the breakdown after Christmas. In fact, they saw the value in avoiding the annual emotional breakdown that often happened when we were trying to stow away the boxes of decorations. This was the bunch that I aligned myself with, and we went to work on our planning.

As we brought the boxes upstairs in early December, my small team helped label them. We used a Brother labeler to mark the boxes. We have a really big house, and a lot of Christmas decorations. The number of boxes that we use for those decorations is outrageous. We anticipated that labeling the boxes would make it easier to bring them up in groups, rather than in one huge, overwhelming event. The added benefit would be that we could decorate the house in phases, reducing some of the disruption of our regular lives.

When we hauled the boxes downstairs, at least one of the continuous improvement team was helping to organize where the boxes were stored. This time, the idea was to make it easier to haul boxes upstairs during the take-down phase. Again, we were trying to reduce stress through organization.

Quite honestly, we won’t know if this new organizational plan will work until very late in the year. I’m hopeful that we’ll have a much less stressful Christmas decorating season because we’ll know what to bring up at which times. We’ll also know the contents of the storage containers, so that should make things better. Only time will tell…but I’m hopeful.

The added benefit is that later this summer we will be purging and reorganizing our storage rooms in the basement. It will be much easier to identify all the Christmas containers and keep them together now that they’re clearly labeled. In fact, the success of the Christmas stowaway process gave me the idea to try and finally attack the storage rooms in a systematic manner.

How about you, have you had any big projects that helped with your household organization? Anything that made a difference? I’d love to hear about it!