Breaking Down Clutter: Tailored Organizing Tips for ADHD Brains

In this episode, Asher and Dusty explore the complexities of organizing for people with ADHD. Asher shares insights from his background as a professional organizer and ADHD coach, emphasizing that traditional organization methods often don’t fit the unique needs of ADHD brains. They discuss the difference between situational and chronic disorganization, highlighting that organizing is not a one-time fix but requires ongoing maintenance, especially for those with ADHD. Dusty introduces the concept of chores as cyclical care tasks, helping shift the mindset away from “done or not done” thinking, which can reduce overwhelm and perfectionism.

The conversation also tackles common challenges such as inventory management, limiting beliefs around decluttering, and the importance of customizing organizing systems to individual needs rather than aspiring to unrealistic standards. Strategies such as breaking projects into smaller pieces, sorting belongings into friends, acquaintances, and strangers, and using “partway gone” boxes are shared to help manage belongings thoughtfully. The hosts underscore that organization looks different for everyone and encourage listeners to find practical solutions that work for their lifestyle while balancing priorities and self-compassion.

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Episode Transcript:

[00:02:12] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash.

[00:03:21] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.

[00:04:17] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD.

[00:07:23] Dusty: And just to remind our listeners that December 9th at 8:30 p.m. EST, which is 5:30 p.m. PST, I’m going to be hosting another coffee chat and hang out. It was tons of fun last time. I learned a lot from y’all. So please come and teach me things about whatever topic you like or just come hang out and just chat with me and other supporters.

It’s going to be tons of fun. Also, as a reminder, I have group coaching starting in January. It is on Thursdays from 3 to 5 p.m. PST. We still have some spots available. So go to ADHD studio here or Vancouver ADHD coaching.com and you can find out more about that. So, Ash.

[00:54:10] Asher: Yes, Dusty.

[00:55:14] Dusty: What are we talking about today?

[00:57:05] Asher: Today we are actually going to talk about organizing, which if you’ve been a long time listener of this show, you might know that my career path was actually from professional organizer. So going into people’s homes and helping them organize their stuff to ADHD coach, and that’s really relevant as a place to start for this episode today, because I think one of the most important things to recognize when it comes to ADHD is organizing this stuff doesn’t always solve what’s actually going on.

So when I was a working professional organizer, we distinguished clients into two broad categories situationally disorganized versus chronically disorganized. A great example of situational disorganization was this couple that I worked with. I worked with them every Saturday for eight hours. For three months. They had this huge house that at the time that they moved in, their children were infants.

They had a family member that passed away. And because they had all this space in their basement, all that stuff just came and landed in the basement. The company that they both worked for got bought out by a different company, and one of them underwent a career change and and so on and so forth. There were just so many, like, dominoes falling.

So much life happened to them in the five ish years that they had been in this house, that nothing really got addressed or organized. Things got put in a cabinet and they stayed there. And because the house was pretty sizable, they weren’t running into the barrier of space. Their children were five and seven by the time we started working together, and we were finding baby bottles and infant supplies in kitchen cabinets because they had more kitchen cabinets than they had stuff.

And so space itself never became an issue. So what those clients really needed more than anything was someone to help them know how to tackle the project. That felt like it got so big and overwhelming. But once the space was organized, they didn’t struggle to maintain that organization. And that’s absolutely not true with ADHD, with a client with ADHD, they often will hire a professional organizer thinking, if we can just if we can just get it all organized, then I’ll be set.

It’s that clean slate thinking coming in, right, that we can just that we can just get it organized once, then I will be able to maintain it. But ADHD makes that significantly harder and also means that what organized might look like for you might be different than what you see in a catalog or at the Container Store. You have to organize around what’s going to work for your brain.

And that’s true of anyone, by the way, as a professional organizer, I was always working in a in a coach like way where I was organizing based on what the clients needs were, what what they were going to find most helpful. And I encourage them to think about organizing in that way. So it was this collaborative process, but particularly with folks with ADHD, we have to organize in a way that makes sense for us.

And it can be this really frustrating, paradoxical challenge because most of my clients describe it. I have this to describe the cluttered spaces, creating a lot of mental clutter, creating a lot of stress, creating a lot of strife and clear, organized spaces. Feeling really nice and peaceful and calm. And so it can feel so paradoxical that we more so than other folks, crave organization but struggle to maintain it.

[04:37:24] Dusty: Yeah. And like that’s something that a lot of my clients deal with for sure. And something that can be like a little frustrating to me is, you know, because I do a lot of posting on social media. And so I’m on social media a lot, and especially TikTok is like rife with like, tips and hacks and like organizing tricks.

I think one thing that’s hard for me as a coach is like, there’s a plethora and there’s no end to, like, advice for people with ADHD about how to organize. But my experience, and maybe you can speak to this, I feel like this is kind of what you were saying is every person with ADHD needs something different, so what works for one person isn’t going to work for another.

And then so these hacks and these tips and tricks just end up being even more disempowering. Or they might even kind of reinforce harmful things. Right? So for example, you just said, you know, that for a lot of people, clutter is very stressful. I find that to be the case as well. But even I think it was and I’m not trying to call anyone out here, but I think it was like Doctor Edward Ned Hallowell.

I saw a TikTok from him saying like, oh, people with ADHD like need piles. And he was I saw this, some piece of content from him saying that he likes to have his, like, piles around because he needs to be able to see his things. So he’s kind of there reinforcing that, like, oh, it’s okay to have piles of things and leave them out.

Whereas like for other people, you know, piles are like really bad, or really distracting. Right. And so my experience is, you know, the hard part of organizing, you know, once you get past all the shame and all the effort that it takes and making the time for it and and just being brave enough to approach it is that there’s no real it’s trial and error.

Right. And what works for one person may or may not work for you. And so it might take you a few tries to figure out the right way to organize your things. And that’s really challenging because I definitely think there’s a lot of that. You know, people want to be one and done right.

[06:23:26] Asher: Yeah. It’s the idea of the magical land of caught up. We don’t think about maintenance as part of the organization process, but that’s actually probably the most critical piece because stuff is always coming in to our spaces. Even if you are like me, I am a relative minimalist. I am very anti-capitalist. I don’t spend a lot of money on things that I don’t need.

I’m very thoughtful about what I do purchase. Even in my case, stuff comes in to my home all of the time, right? So stuff is always coming in. There is always going to be a need to maintain, to go through, to reevaluate. And the folks with ADHD are really prone to that all or nothing thinking, particularly when it comes to organization, that if I do it once, I’m done right, I’m just done.

[07:19:29] Dusty: Well. So, Asher, are you familiar? Have you seen much of the work of Casey Davis or domestic blisters on TikTok? She has that book, How to Keep House. Well, drowning. Are you familiar with her, like, philosophies and advice and stuff?

[07:32:00] Asher: I’m not.

[07:33:06] Dusty: Okay, so one of the things I think that she did that was really revolutionary, very helpful for a lot of people, is she started talking about chores as care tasks. So she kind of like mentally reframe them as like care tasks. But also she said care tasks are ongoing. They’re cyclical. Right? She said, like, if you get in your car and you feel you gas up your car, you’re not like, disappointed when your car is empty.

You’re not like, oh, how could this have happened? Like, you know that your gas, the fullness of your gas tank is a cycle. It goes from folded partially empty to like, totally empty. And then at some point you gas it up again and she said that like the way that we tend to think about our dishes and our laundry and our our house care task, like organizing is kind of like you’re saying, like it’s it’s either done or it’s not done.

But she said we should be thinking of it more as like a cycle. Like, yes, once all the dishes are cleaned, it’s like an ongoing cycle until the dishes need to be done again. It’s a it’s a cyclical thing that’s always going to keep recurring, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always like perfect or imperfect. It’s like in somewhere in the cycle.

And there’s a bit of like a cognitive reframe here that I think was really helpful to a lot of people with ADHD, where they were always feeling like the laundry is done or not done, the dishes are done or not done. And then now we start to see it as part of like an ongoing cycle. It’s never it’s never done.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s always not done. It’s in a, it’s a, it’s in a state of flux always. And it’s something that is going to have to keep happening more like a habit or a routine than like a one and done kind of thing. That seemed to be really helpful for a lot of people. And she’s got a couple of other.

She’s more about tidying than she is about organizing, per se, but I think the two go hand in hand. Right? Because like what you’re saying is, yeah, we can organize it, but there has to be there has to be sort of like maintainable routines that that mean that the organization is honored and that things get put where they’re supposed to be.

Because if you put the wrong things there, or you don’t put things where they go, even after you’ve made homes for them, the organization does nothing. Everything’s just going to devolve again. So there’s like this secondary piece around the maintenance and how we think about the maintenance is starting to think about it less. Is this either done or not done, clean or not clean.

But there’s ongoing cycle of care tasks.

[09:39:10] Asher: Dusty I really like that. And I think one of the things that can also help bypass is perfectionism. I think a place where social media has been really toxic to things like home organization, decor, maintenance, etc. is setting these really unrealistic expectations that your home should look like something out of a catalog. And here’s the thing if you’re actually living your life in your house, it’s never or it’s very rarely going to look or be that way.

There’s always, as you said, going to be a bit of a cycle. There’s going to be things that are a little out of place. There’s going to be things that you just my kitchen right now is a disaster because I made a big dinner last night, and I was late enough in making that dinner that I chose not to do the dishes.

And there is a time where every time I went into that kitchen today, I would beat myself up for that. But where we’re at now, it’s sort of a recognition of, yes, I do need to tackle this tonight or at the latest tomorrow, so that it doesn’t explode into like a wall of awful amount of dishes. But this is not what I’m focused on right now, and that is okay.

And dinner last night was delicious, so that is fine.

[10:55:06] Dusty: Well, and we need to acknowledge here too, because I think this disproportionately impacts 85, 82 years or women with ADHD because there’s that expectation of that. We’re the ones keeping the home clean and like okay, you can do it. And I have done it. Okay. And let me tell you, depending on how messy your house is, who lives in your home, how messy you are and how much stuff you have, which I call inventory management, it’s a different amount of effort to to keep your home sort of maintain it that, you know, Instagram worthy level for some people.

If you if you live in a small home and you live alone and you don’t have that many things, maybe it doesn’t take that much time. I live in a five bedroom, two level house with three children, three adults, three dogs, one cat, one bird, and I’m messy. And some some of the people who live in this house own a lot of things.

So I’ve done it. But the thing that we aren’t acknowledging here is like, where could that time go? And quality of life, right? When I’m more concerned about maintaining a clean home, I’m not engaging with my child. I’m not spending quality time with my kids. They’re just seeing me clean. There’s they want to play games with me. I say, I’m too busy.

I’m not spending time making music. I’m not spending time working on my business. I’m not spending time relaxing. Right. It’s a matter of priorities. You can prioritize having a clean home above all else, but is that really worth it? When it takes up like that much of your time and energy?

[12:12:20] Asher: Precisely. Dusty. And now I want to actually, like, pivot and talk a little bit about what it might look like to organize to your own ADHD. I’ve got a really great example from a client that I was working with a couple of years ago. She and her husband each did their own laundry. That was a that was a household agreement between them, in part because of her ADHD laundry challenges, and she was stuck in this really awful cycle where all of her laundry would end up on the bed in the guest room, which was fine until she had a gas coming.

And then it felt like this completely awful, overwhelming task. But her closet didn’t feel conducive to getting the laundry into the closet. So we had kind of a twofold problem of first organizing the closet a little bit, the walk in closet that she had. But then there was some habit stuff in there. And interestingly enough, what the solve ended up being because so much of her challenge was taking the time to hang things up, she found that really onerous, and the solve for her ended up being that things that needed to be hung up, which was not most of her wardrobe on a day to day basis, did get hung up.

So if she wore a dress out on a date night or whatever, something that that needs to go on a hanger or else it’s not going to be wearable again because it will be wrinkled. Hence why she would lay things out flat on the guest bedroom bed as an alternative would get hung up. But her daily wear clothes were very wash and wear wrinkle free because she worked in elementary school.

And so we started with one basket and ended up with two. One for tops and one for bottoms. But two baskets in her walk in closet, one for her work tops, one for her work bottoms. And that was a system that she was able to maintain. But in order to get there, surprisingly had to break down a lot of limiting beliefs about what she should do.

You know, I’ve got this nice walk in closet. It should be a certain way. Well, who says it has to be that way? Right? And actually, her and her husband have separate walk in closets because his closet is very neat and organized and esthetic. And that might be because that’s what he needs. But not everyone needs that. Right.

And if you don’t need that, you don’t have to aspire to someone else’s standard. They’re something that does matter to me in my own closet. Is that all my hangers match? I don’t like the visual clutter of a billion different types of hangers. So many, many years ago, I invested in a set of nice hangers so that all of my hangers match.

But I don’t need my closet to be more esthetic than that. That was something I needed and invested in, but I don’t need my closet to look catalog ready. When you open the door on the floor, like my shoes are all scattered on the floor. When they get chucked back in the closet, they literally get chucked back in the closet.

But I know that both shoes are in there. It’s not a big closet. I live in a small house. They’re easy enough to find, so I don’t care if a pair of sneakers is sitting on top of my paradox or whatever else. I don’t care if they’re a little piled up. It doesn’t bother me, so I don’t need to aspire to someone else’s standard there.

And it will probably. It will almost surely prevent me from putting my shoes away if I feel like I have to find a perfect little spot on the floor for them to sit next to each other, versus being able to just open the door and chuck them in the door.

[15:41:15] Dusty: Yeah, that’s it’s so interesting that you kind of say, like, you know, that you don’t need to aspire to someone else’s sort of organizing goals. And I think that actually I have a question for you because as a coach, I think that’s actually been really a big challenge for me in helping people with this, because what makes it hard for me to be a tidy person, and I’ve historically been quite an untidy person, I’ve realized is like really specific and quite different than a lot of my clients.

So me, I’m like always too busy. I’m a chronic over committer. So my biggest issue is one not knowing where or how to put things away and then to not having time. And I’ve been able to really solve a lot of those issues by going quite minimalist with a lot of the things that I own. Because when you have fewer things, you have to find fewer homes.

You know, you have one pair of shoes, you have one home for the shoes. It takes way less time to put the shoes away, especially if the home is accessible. Right. And so by by really paring back the amount of things that I own. And then just like making homes for those things, even though I don’t leave myself a lot of time, it’s made it a lot easier for me to clean up after myself.

Right? And so I’ve solved a lot of my own mess challenges that way. But what I’ve found, ash and I want to ask your advice on this is many, many of my clients are like really kind of pack rats. They own a lot of things. And so they have a lot of inventory management. So even when we’re doing the the organizing process and they’re trying to figure out how to organize their stuff, it’s really challenging because they often have more things than will fit in their space, or it’s a big job and a big challenge I have because you mentioned limiting beliefs.

And so I think there’s a lot of beliefs here around, like getting rid of things. And obviously like I’m not trying to tell people to be like minimalist because it’s not right for everyone. And again, this is somewhere where like, it’s interesting because I’m quite different that a lot of my clients this way. And even here’s an example.

My roommate is a lot like this. They, they have a lot of items. And yesterday I asked them to go through our front coat closet with me because the coat closet is packed. There are two coats that are in there that are mine. One leather jacket and one raincoat. I don’t even have a winter coat. They had like eight different coats.

Like literally it was 8 or 9 coats. And I said to them, do you really need 8 or 9 coats? And they said, well, each coat is for a different purpose. So they had like one per purpose. I don’t even I will literally wear like just like I will. I’m the kind of person who, like, never has the thing that I need.

I just make it work. I don’t. I’ve never thought about having a coat for like, every season. Like it’s just never occurred to me. And if I have one coat, I’ll just wear it in all seasons so that that mindset doesn’t really like occur to me. But for a lot of my clients, again, they they’ve acquired a lot of stuff for different reasons, and they find it very challenging to declutter or get rid of things.

And again, I’m not like trying to push them to get rid of more than they want to get rid of. But, you know, I’ve done a lot of my own research on sort of like, you know, I’ve read a lot of the like the Marie Kondo and the whole matter. And it seems to me that in all of the, organizing advice, there is some step where you have to kind of like either you make more space for the things that you have, but if you have too many things for the space, at some point you do kind of need to like pare back if you have too much stuff.

And so what I want to know from you, ash, is like, if you have a client who’s struggling with that inventory management, with just having too much stuff to manage, and it makes the organizing process really, really, really slow, laborious, or like just this job that is too big. What do you find helpful for clients in in working through that or managing that?

[19:14:15] Asher: The very first step in a situation like that is to figure out how to break down the project, right? Particularly if we’re talking about, like, the clients I was talking about earlier. If we’re talking about a huge house where disorganization is in every single space, then you just have to figure out how to slice off a piece of it.

Right. So in your bedroom, your closet, you might organize that separately from organizing your dressers. Or if there are a lot of like loose things or stuff on the floor, you might start with, you might just start with surveying all of the stuff that’s out on the flat surfaces and kind of deal with, let’s deal with the stuff that’s not out, and then let’s go into individual storage areas and deal with the stuff that’s in those things.

And the model that I have continued to use this, I use this when I was an organizer. I continue to use it with my clients. When we’re talking about organizational topics in coaching to this day is from Julie Morgenstern, she wrote organizing from the Inside Out. She’s a well-known figure in the professional organizing world, and the acronym is Space Spacey.

And here’s what each word stands for. S is sort. So if, for example, if you’re dealing with like a guest room, that became the catchall for stuff that you don’t know where it goes. Or one of my clients, was prone to what she called doom bags and doom boxes, right? The quick clean up of the guest space means that all of that stuff gets thrown into doom boxes and doom bags and shoved into the guest room closet.

The idea here is just to pull things out and sort them in a way that makes sense to you, and by the way, that to you there is really important. If I’m working on a closet with a client as an organizer, it might be as simple as shirts and pants, or it might be like my one client who had five distinct categories of t shirts, all of which made sense to him.

There were his undershirts. He wore a suit and tie to work every day, so plain shirts that are well fitted to go under a button down shirt. There were his sports shirts. Saint Louis is a is a big, sports town. So if you go into the cards to the Blues or the Billikens or any number of other teams that we have, those those shirts for those purposes, athletic wear.

And then there was going to the hardware store. That was my favorite category. So that was like the cozy thing that I’ll throw on if I’m doing bumming around the house or doing errands on a Saturday or Sunday and then, interestingly enough, he had this category of comedy t shirts that he never wore, but it was a it was a valued and beloved collection of his.

Right. So that was not only its own category, that was one that ended up not making it back into the closet. And the thing that can be tough to deal with, with ADHD, with our all or nothing thinking is especially if you’re dealing with a room like a catch all room where you’re finding unopened mail alongside Christmas gifts that you haven’t done anything with for 2 or 3 years ago, alongside whatever else, it can be really frustrating that this part of the process kind of makes a mess.

First, it doesn’t make the mess any better, it just puts the mess in better organized piles. But once you’ve done the sort, then it’s easier to do step two, which is purge. So if you if I just pull items out of a client’s closet one at a time and say, do you want this? Do you want this, do you want this?

They have no contact just for whether or not they want that article of clothing. But if we have all of your sweaters together and we’re looking through them one by one, it can be easier to you. A you can see how many sweaters you own and you can contextualize which sweaters do I wear a lot and which ones do I not?

One little hack that I like to use with clients who would have trouble with decision making in this realm is friends, acquaintances, and strangers. So if you’re thinking about something like sweaters or coffee mugs, it’s a great example here because everybody has too many coffee mugs, right? Friends are your favorite coffee mugs there at that. That’s like your number one.

Number two, that’s if that coffee mug is clean. That is the one that I am going to grab and have my coffee in every single morning, because it is my favorite coffee mug that that coffee mug or those couple of coffee mugs are your friends. Acquaintances might be the ones that are good enough if the other ones are dirty, or the ones that you like well enough to have around.

If you’re having people over and serving coffee, the ones that are special to you for some other reason for clothing acquaintances can look like yes, I might only wear this once a year, once every couple of years. I might only wear this if I get invited to a wedding, or have to go to a funeral, or have some very specific sort of event.

An acquaintance could be something like an ugly Christmas sweater that really only has a purpose once a year. And then strangers. Strangers are, I don’t know, the last time that I’ve used or worn this or I don’t know when I’ve last interacted with, use or had a use for this particular item. And so the deal I would make with my clients if they were open to it as your friends are an automatic keep, right?

We’ll worry about we’ll worry about the storage aspects later. Even if you have a lot of friends, we will worry about how we store these friends later. Strangers are an automatic donate and acquaintances are kind of up for negotiation. So that’s also when you do start to and this is getting to the next step a which is a sign a home.

You know, if we only have this much closet space for sweaters and you have twice that amount of sweaters, well, you’ve got options, right? You can store some of your sweaters somewhere else. Or we can go through this process again and downsize further. And that’s where you really get into what are the individual goals here? Because for some clients, maybe storing the acquaintances in a guestroom closet or in a basement, it is a perfectly viable solution and something that they are willing to do.

Or whereas for someone like me, if it doesn’t fit in my closet, I might as well not own it. If it is living in another. And I even have a really small house, like it is not a big deal for me to walk into. My kid’s room has two closets and so one of those closets is kind of our coat.

Extra closet is not a big deal for me to walk in to her room and and grab something out of there, or to walk downstairs and grab something out of storage down there. But if it’s not out, I don’t know that I own it, and I’m just never, ever going to wear it. Right? So when you get to the assign a home, that’s when you can start to evaluate how much have I kept and what space do I have.

And if you’ve kept more than you have space for, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to downsize further, but that’s your opportunity to evaluate. What are the tradeoffs here? Is it worth it to store it in another space, or do I want to make another pass at this and downsize further from there? See us containerize. And notice this comes pretty late in the process.

A big thing that I have noticed with ADHD folks, particularly when I was going into homes and organizing, is we tend to buy the containers first. We tend to buy the containers without knowing what our organizing goals are. And so when I was doing hands on professional organizing in almost every house I worked in, I would start a quote unquote Container Store of all of the containers that we were finding in different spaces that had never been used, and we would shop from those first once we got to this step.

But again, you’ve assigned a home. Now you know something about what containers you may or may not want to have. And I I’m a fan of containers. In some instances my kitchen drawers I have, I have drawer dividers in every single one of them, even though that makes less overall space because it makes it easier for me to put my hands on whatever cooking utensil I am looking for in that drawer immediately.

So I am willing to sacrifice the space and to spend the money on the containers to have that. But you may find that you don’t need it. And so that’s why we assign a home first, live with it for a little while, and maybe make do with what you have. I’ve used things like shoeboxes, old cell phone boxes actually, because they’re really sturdy.

Cardboard can make great drawer organizers kind of kind of playing around with what you have first and then evaluating what the need is and acquiring those items if needed, and ears equalize. So E is the the moment of truth. Where does does the clean laundry make it into the dressers and into the closet where I’ve designated it to go?

Do do dishes and utensils make it back to the spaces that they are supposed to go as new stuff is coming in. If I buy a bunch of new clothes and my closet space starts to get tight again, might it be time to make another pass and evaluate? And or if you’re somebody who’s storing clothing in multiple places to rework how you’re doing that to make space in your primary closet?

[28:32:27] Dusty: Well, that’s it’s really good to hear, like your whole in depth process. And I’ve heard that somewhere before too. The whole like friends, acquaintances, strangers. My question is, what are some of the. Because I’ve encountered some limiting beliefs around the whole, like getting rid of strangers, right? I think that people feel wasteful if they’ve spent money on it, or it’s gifts, or they just feel like I get a lot of like, but what if I need it someday?

How do you handle that?

[28:59:06] Asher: Well, and this is where I’d like to put the emphasis on what space are we organizing and what’s the goal for this space? Okay, so if you have a two full closet and you want your closet to be more useful to you, then working through that acronym, when we get to assign a home, we’re only going to put the things in the closet that are currently relevant to you, right?

So the end result is an organized closet. Now, if you have things left over that you don’t yet know what to do with them, that’s okay. That’s okay. Right. It’s okay. And you may just need to find another space to store those items until you decide what you’re going to do with them from there. Because you’re right, there is that limiting belief of being wasteful of of somebody gave this to me, and I think it’s a really individual process to go through those things.

But I find that once you have that organized space, once you have a space that’s working well for you, that alone can make that easier. When I was doing professional organizing, I can’t tell you how many times that we started with a two cell pile. All right, my client’s going to have a garage sale, or they’re going to.

They’re they’re going to make sure it gets to somebody who’s who will really love it and is going to use it. And then over time, as a space, other spaces became more organized and buyers. That pile kind of grew and impeded our ability to organize the space that that pile was living. And perspective would sort of change from there.

One other trick that worked for me a couple of times the clients who really struggled is a partway gone box. So pack it up like you’re going to donate it, tape it up, and if you don’t look at it again in six months or a year, then let it go. So kind of committing with that’s a way to kind of experiment with that commitment and approach it without having to make the decision right then and there to donate the items.

And again, that doesn’t mean that you have to find some space for these boxes and things to live. But that can be a really helpful concept in terms of getting used to what it’s like to not have those things and then evaluating with fresh eyes. Do I really want to drag any or all of this stuff back into my spaces when I haven’t missed it in months?

[31:26:29] Dusty: That’s a really good point. And I you mentioned there like once you get a space working that I think there’s a reinforcing mechanism there. I saw this really good TikTok. There’s this one woman who’s an organizer on TikTok, and she had a really good tip that I’ve often shared with clients because for me, I realized, like what it comes down to is people are worried about the potential pain of like not having something they need, but they’re not looking at what it’s already costing them now to not have an organized space.

Right? Like there’s all this pain of like how much work it’s going to be in the stress it’s going to cost you. And yet they’ll choose that over the, like, hypothetical, you know, pain that they may or may not experience by like getting rid of something and then not having it when they need it. And so this organizer her name I think her name is Alison Lash, I think.

And she said, think of your possessions like roommates and ask yourself, are they paying you rent? Right. You know, you mentioned, your client with the, comedy t shirts, right? He gets value out of them. He doesn’t wear them. They’re taking up space somewhere that could hypothetically be taken up by something else. But he gets value out of them.

And so that value is the rent. Whether it’s a high use item or something that has nostalgia or like emotional meaning for you, that’s the rent. But if it’s something that you never use that isn’t usable, maybe it’s something broken. Maybe it’s something that needs mending, maybe it’s something that doesn’t fit that well, but it’s taking up all this space that then impedes your ability to get better organized.

It’s almost like a roommate who, like, lays around on your couch all the time, like eating your food so that you can’t use your living room. But it’s freeloading, right? You wouldn’t let a person take up all this space in your house and, like, bring all their crap into your house and, like, make it so that you couldn’t use whole rooms of your house if they weren’t at least paying your rent.

But we do this with our stuff. There’s whole rooms in our house that we can’t use because they’re filled with stuff that we don’t really need, that isn’t contributing in any way to our joy. And so in a way, that stuff is not paying us rent. And I think that that is something that has been a useful mindset for, for my clients to think about it almost like in terms of money, because it is it is about like costs some kind of value.

Right? And that’s it. You know, I find, I find often clients are worried more about the potential pain than the pain of not being able to have people over or feeling like there’s this never ending organizing process. And it’s it’s interesting because for me, I find that I’m quite ruthless about getting rid of things. And I guess maybe, like you’re saying, like I’ve had the experience of once I’ve gotten rid of things and gone quite minimalist with a few things, it becomes so easy to take care of my space that it’s like sort of a positive, self-reinforcing mechanism.

But it’s also, you know, our last episode was on humility. Like, as a coach, I’m humble enough to know that, like just because that worked for me doesn’t mean that that’s the right choice for other people, that I don’t necessarily experience the same level of distress or the same meaning that other people have around their stuff and why they keep it.

So I’m always on the lookout for like, all the different mindsets and the different approaches, because ultimately something will work for everyone. But it’s so interesting to me how people need such different approaches to make sense of how they organize their space or find a happy medium for themselves with their physical situation.

[34:39:23] Asher: Absolutely, Dusty. I have done organizing work both as an organizer and a coach for clients, where I would be distressed by the result because that’s not the result that I would be looking for, but where the client was very happy with the results, including this real estate agent I worked with years ago who had this crazy busy life.

She she had this business that was really busy and she was also very involved in pet rescues. So she had a lot of a lot of suppliers for that. And that ever changing, because that’s one of those things that is sort of on demand, what’s needed right now. And so we took the doors off of the closet in her home office and put bookshelves up there, and everything was just sitting out.

And that’s precisely what she wanted. She wanted to be able to grab stuff and go. She didn’t care that it looked too visually messy. That didn’t matter to her. She liked that things didn’t have to make it back to a precise place, because so long as they were on one of those shelves, it was easy enough for her to look at the shelves and grab the things she needed for whatever it was she was about to do, and she was really pleased with how that turned out.

That would have made me crazy. I would not have been able to work in that room, but I am not her and she is not me. So. So yeah, the opportunity here is to discover what organized looks like for you. And if you don’t know at all, start with something that feels relatively unintimidating. Start with a closet, a dresser drawer, a kitchen cabinet.

When we talk about the sort step, you don’t necessarily have to undo your entire kitchen to organize your kitchen, nor nor might you want to, because you still need to use your kitchen. If this is something that’s going to take you multiple sessions in order to do. But upper cabinets and lower cabinets tend to hold different types of things.

And in general you kind of know or you might have an idea of where you want your plates and mugs to live. So maybe just start with one cabinet and see how that goes and see see what that process feels like. And then you can start to expand it out into more difficult places.

[36:46:29] Dusty: Yeah, that’s good advice. And this comes up a lot in my coaching. So I actually was I’ve been really wanting to talk to you about this. It’s really interesting to hear how you’ve worked with clients in the past around it.

[36:56:02] Asher: Dusty. I think that’s a good place for us to wrap for today. But listeners, before we do, just a quick reminder that we would really appreciate it. If you leave a review wherever you are listening to the podcast, please and thank you. We appreciate your support. So until next week, I’m Ash.

[37:10:11] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.

[37:11:14] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.