I love planning and organising and I believe I do a pretty good job organising my life, tasks and all the associated admin that comes along with it. Why then, is my office a mess? I think it's because I have too much 'stuff' and unfortunately the Marie Kondo approach of 'sparking joy' didn't work for me.
Introducing organising duo Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin. With a successful Instagram following in excess of 4 million, this power couple has been organising celebrity spaces and sharing their drool-worthy results on social media. The success of The Home Edit has led to a popular show on Netflix and they've become household names.
The Home Edit Life - The Complete Guide to Organizing Absolutely Everything at Work, at Home and On The Go by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin is their second book and it was an absolute joy to read.
Colourful and presented in a beautiful hardcover, the authors combine a self-help approach with snippets of their own organising preferences and business experiences. Unfortunately this includes quite a bit of name dropping and being Australian many of the celebrity names were unknown to me, but I'm generally not interested in that kind of stuff anyway.
As you might gather from the cover, the authors advocate organising by colour and using colour to organise. They use the acronym ROYGBIV to indicate the order the colours should go in: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Even the book is organised according to colour!
For those new to their approach, the process begins with editing your stuff, then organising your stuff, and lastly sorting it into groups that suit your needs. This often results in storage in a variety of containers and displays in order to make items easy to see and access.
The end of one year and the beginning of a new one is the perfect time to read a self help book and a time when my thoughts turn to planning for the year ahead, setting up my bullet journal and thinking about any goals I might want to accomplish.
According to Shearer and Teplin, you can either have the thing or you can have the space, and I think that's what I need to focus on when it comes to my bookshelves. When they're double stacked and books are shoved in any which way, I don't end up enjoying them as much as I should. To enjoy my favourites, I need to cull. Then come the excuses: but the free little library downstairs is full, I'll save some for friends when I see them, what if someone wants to borrow a particular book, and surely it'll pain me too much to box them up and just give them to the op shop in one big hit?...Eeek!
Reading The Home Edit Life did make me want to edit my bookshelves and arrange them to their best advantage. However, I decided to start with something smaller to begin with and the bathroom cupboard under the sink is looking amazing, IMHO!
The Home Edit Life by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin is recommended for readers needing a little - or a lot - more organisation in their lives, those who enjoy looking at photos of artfully organised and aesthetically pleasing cupboards, drawers and shelves and of course, fans of the Netflix show.
