Welcome to Part 2 of my decluttering operations order. If you missed Part 1, you can read it here. Below is what I’ve written up for my son’s bedroom. In the Army, we would not only deliver this as a briefing but an operation could involve rehearsals and a demonstration using what’s called a sand-table or terrain model kit. I need to execute this soon because his room is a disaster and seems to just be getting worse. To be fair, he did try to clean it up a little recently and we were able to see more of the floor than we’ve seen in a while. I’m asking for feedback before I do this so feel free to make comments below or send me an email if you have a suggestion for something I missed. Situation: Your bedroom is a complete shambles. It’s impossible to walk from the door to the other side of the room without stepping on something. The floor is covered in Legos, sheet music, Nerf darts and lots of dust. There are clothes on the floor and the desk because there’s no room in the closet. The closet is full because there are clothes that no longer fit and/or you don’t like to wear. Mission: Together we (who) will clean up and remove excess items from (what) your bedroom (where) so that the floor is clear making it easy to clean and it will be a place where you can practice your music without distraction while being safe from tripping on objects (why). Execution: This operation will be executed in several phases: Service & Support: To keep this simple, we’ll just list the items that we’ll have on hand: Command & Signal: As always, mom is in charge of everything. She will have the final say on pretty much everything, especially the disposition of all clothes. I will be the one helping with the room to keep things on track. Safety: Believe it or not, safety is one of the prime reasons to clean up this room. There are multiple reasons for that. First, my son has allergies. With a messy room things get dusty and it’s very difficult to clean. Second, even without being in a rush, it can be a life-risking undertaking to walk through the room. Never mind what could happen if there was an emergency and you had to run out of the room. You could easily trip on something and knock yourself out on the desk. So that’s pretty much it. I’ll try it out and then report back on how it goes. I’ll also refine it based on any feedback received and post the updated version. Thanks for reading. In the Army, we have a format for mission planning called an Operation Order, or op-order for short. When I was learning to be an officer, it was called the Five Paragraph Operation Order, even after the Army added a sixth paragraph for safety. Since my mission is decluttering, I decided to make a basic op-order for the process. In this post, I’ll describe an op-order and then put a rough one together using my son’s room as an example. Later, I’ll put it to the test and let you know how it goes. Here are the main parts of an op-order with a short description of each. The full Army version has many sub-bullets for each. See the link above for more details.
A Note on the Execution ParagraphIn the Army, we used a method called backwards planning to develop a timeline in the execution section. Backwards Planning is just a cool sounding term for something that most of us do every day when we figure out what time we need to get out of bed in the morning so that we get to work on time. I always thought it was ridiculous how much time we spent learning and practicing this process because it seemed so obvious to me. Unfortunately, I’m often surprised to find how many people just do not get the concept. Backwards planning starts with a specific time that you need to be somewhere or do something. Then you work backwards from there taking into account what activities need to happen before that critical time and how long each of them takes. Some tasks can be done in parallel and some cannot. It’s that simple. For example, you need to be at work by 8 am. OK. The last thing you do before leaving might be to pack your bag and grab your coat, etc. That takes about 5 minutes. Breakfast takes 15 minutes. 20 minutes for a shower. At least 10 minutes to pack lunch. Don’t forget the fact that you like to snooze the alarm for 10 minutes every morning and that it takes an average of 30 minutes just to get to work. Add all that up and it looks like you need to get up about 6:30 am. In ClosingI didn’t want to make this too long so I’ll save the actual op-order for later but I think that in general the Army is on to something when it comes to planning out how to accomplish a large task and share that vision with others with the operations order. I’ll let you know how it goes as soon as I can test this out and I’ll post my written op-order. I’m coming up on my one year anniversary since my first blog post so that might be a good topic to celebrate with. Thanks for reading. If you have time, please share this or another post on your favorite social media outlet and feel free to subscribe to email updates below. A few days ago, my youngest son was surveying the kids’ playroom filled with toys and announced to my wife, “Mom, you know what the great thing about having so many toys is? If someone breaks in, they can’t possibly steal all of it!”Needless to say, decluttering fever hasn’t exactly become an epidemic at my house. I haven’t given up hope though because they are slowly coming around. How and where do you get rid of toys?Recently, we’ve been able to remove a few large items like the plastic play structure with slide that my youngest got for his first birthday. After selling it on one of the local Facebook groups, we can again see some of the floor in their playroom. We purchased it used on Craigslist for about $50 and sold it for $30. It still looked new and we put the money in his savings account so that it will be a gift that keeps on giving. We had an even larger one in our backyard that was left by some former neighbors. That one also went on Facebook but since we didn’t buy it, we donated the money to the local ACS Relay for Life event. Keep it localI’ve come to like the Facebook garage sale groups and definitely prefer them to eBay and Craigslist. The ones that we use are closed groups for people who live locally and since we live in a small town, we often end up having some sort of connection to the purchaser (my neighbor’s hairdresser, for example). The bonus is that it’s free unlike eBay and I don’t concern myself with shipping. Sometimes, people even put things on the curb with the garbage and post it on the Facebook group just to say it’s there if anyone wants it. Back to the toys…Now that they have some floor space, they recently set up their large hex-bug track. If you’ve never seen hex-bugs, they’re little vibrating robots that are about an inch and a half long and if you don’t have them contained by something, they will probably disappear under your oven or couch. I didn’t realize just how much track or how many hex-bugs they had until I saw it all set up! Without much space to play with them, it all usually sits at the back of a closet. I’ve also noticed the kids started playing with their remote controlled cars again. I’m trying to drive home the point that as they remove the things that they don’t play with, they have more room to enjoy the stuff that they really want to do. Have a long-term vision and share it with your kidsI’ve also been sharing my vision with them of the future state of that room. It really is a large room and could be used for so many things. It has a brick wall at one end with a fireplace and on the side wall is the sliding door that opens out onto the patio. So far the rule has been that they just need to keep a path clear for me to get to the door so I can grill dinner and there have been many times where I had to make my own path. My vision though, is a few large comfortable chairs near the fireplace, a hot tub sunk into the floor, and maybe a pool table. This hardly sounds like a minimalist dream, but I’m OK with that. In my vision, there isn’t much else in the room except maybe a TV and mini-fridge. I could see myself hanging out there with family and friends a lot and that’s ultimately what it’s all about. Looking for more ideas?Take a look at an earlier post I wrote with more ideas on where to get rid of things, without just tossing them in the garbage. While you’re here, you might as well leave a comment, share your favorite post on social media, or even get crazy and subscribe to my weeklyish newsletter. Thanks for reading. Things have been crazy lately and I haven’t had time to write anything in a while. I can’t believe I haven’t posted anything in a month! Anyway, as I’ve been working through purging excess things from the house, I thought I’d make a tongue-in-cheek top ten list of my favorite places things seem to accumulate. Here they are, in no particular order:
Thanks for reading and if you find any of my posts useful, then please let me know and please share them. You can also subscribe to a weekly email summary of my posts. I will not share your information and will not inundate you with a barrage of email. You want to pare down the amount of clothes in your closet but don’t know where to start?Here’s my method to set up your closet so that you can easily figure out what you don’t wear. This requires a little bit of setup and won’t give you the answer overnight, but as the weeks and months goes by you will develop a clear picture of what you really wear and what you can get rid of. Here is how my closet is set up. Starting in the middle of the closet rod are a few empty hangers. If there’s a lot of empty hangers, it’s probably time to do laundry. All of my empty hangers are right there together, not scattered throughout the closet. These serve as both a divider and also to reduce the weight on the middle of the closet rod. To the left of the empty hangers are my shirts and to the right are pants for work, church, etc. To the right of the pants are the few pairs of jeans that I own, followed by workout clothes. Keep going to the right and you’ll see my two suits and then my sport coats. Now, whenever I put away laundry, I grab an empty hanger from the middle and hang the shirt or pants up so they are next to the empty hangers. That way, the items in the middle are what I have worn most recently. This helps me rotate so I don’t keep wearing the same shirts all of the time to work. I know that if I look farther to the left, those are the shirts I haven’t worn in a while and the same goes for the pants farthest to the right. This also makes it easy when it’s time to purge. Shirts that you don’t wear very often automatically work their way to the far left of the closet and the same goes for the pants. They will be to the right, next to the jeans. Another thing I did was to hang a divider on the closet rod last fall. You can buy clothing rack dividers like these clothing rack dividers fairly cheaply if you want to divide your clothes up, but I haven’t had the need. You can easily make one with whatever will hang there. Use some cardboard or plastic like the lid to a butter or cottage cheese container would be perfect. Just make a cut from the edge to the middle and then cut a hole large enough for the closet rod. I’m actually using that weird hanger that came with the garment bag in our luggage set. Whatever works. This makes it a piece of cake if you write a date on it and set a time frame like 3 months, 6 months, a year maybe if you want to hit all of the seasons and just get rid of everything on the other side of that divider. Right now, after about four months, there are just a few short sleeved shirts on the other side of mine. If they are still there after the weather warms up, they’ll be donated. I believe the best solution is to just have fewer clothes. I’ve been purging my closet frequently lately and plan to continue. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that way off to the right in my closet, past the suits and sport coats, are several old Army uniforms. I’m really not sure what to do with them and haven’t been able to bring myself to part with them yet, but I will. What do you do if your closet is a complete mess and so jammed with clothes that you have to pry the hangers apart when putting away laundry? In that case, I would just pick a place to start and add in some dividers to create your sections. As you wear something, put it in between the dividers. It’s also pretty likely that things you don’t wear often have already worked their way to the outer ends of your closet so that’s a good place to start purging from. Be brutal. If you really don’t love something get rid of it. If you really like that shirt but don’t have anything to wear it with, you probably should just get rid of it. If you love it that much, leave it out and give yourself a week or a month to go buy something that matches it that you also love. If you don’t get around to it, then you don’t love it as much as you thought you did. Get rid of it. |
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Copyright Dave Lubke and www.davelubke.com, 2022
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