Home Organization - Edited by Laura Wheeler

The Four Step Way to Take Charge of Your Life

The Four Step Plan has four different areas that are interrelated and progressive, which will help you to focus on making long term and lasting changes.

Emphasis is not on quick changes, though if you follow this plan you will see improvement right away. We are more concerned with giving you the tools and information you need to be able to make permanent changes. This type of change is slower, but avoids discouraging repeated failure, and rewards you with unexpected benefits along the way. Changes made are made permanently so you won't have to start over again because you burned out.

Expect to see improvement immediately. But do not expect the whole house to fall into order until you have been working at this for 3-6 months. Longer if you stop and have to start over.

We suggest you start with steps one and two. They can be learned and practiced side by side. They will lead into step three, which will grow to be able to accomodate step four. Do not try to do all this at once. Please understand that if you do too much, it is worse than doing too little, because you will burn out and fail.

1. Building Life Changing Habits

2. Decluttering and Doing 5 Minute Swift Attacks

3. Creating Lasting Routines for You and Your Family

4. Moving up to Improvement and Beautification

We could also call this the Turtle Plan. Slow but steady!

This plan was developed by a mother of seven kids. If I can go from chaos to a reasonable level of functionality and cleanliness in our home in less than a year, and make personal improvements in the same time, then there is hope for ANYBODY! We still have a long way to go, but I knew we were onto something when a friend who had been in our home a few months earlier came in one day and said, "WOW!"

So here's to your first "WOW!".

FlyLady.com is a website for organizing the home and more. The plan works for many people, and she recommends many of the same things we do here. Her plan is more specific, and requires that you do things her way a little more than this one does (we won't insist that you shine your sink), but has worked for countless people. It also helped me when I needed encouragement, but most of what we present here was learned long before we encountered FlyLady.