Organisation Challenge: 15 Minute Clean Up & Recycle

After starting this year’s organisation challenge with a very ambitious task, I thought I’d bring it back a few notches this time and challenge you to something that takes just 15 minutes and can be done every other day or weekly depending on what works best in your home. This month’s challenge is all about doing a little bit of tidying.

What you’ll need:

• A bag for rubbish
• A box for recyclables
• 15 minutes of your time
• Optional: Headphones and Music

How to begin:

Grab the box and the bag and look for somewhere in your home that has things piled up. They could be receipts from your wallet, old notices from school /daycare /work /etc. It could be on your kitchen counter or in your home office or even in the kids rooms. Look for things that don’t need to be kept anymore but haven’t yet made it out to the rubbish or the recycling and add anything that you know doesn’t need to be kept to the bag or the box.

What’s next:

Once you’ve done one space, continue on to the areas where these things tend to pile up and see what can be added to your bag or box. Keep an eye on the time or set a timer if you really need to stick to 15 minutes and keep it up until you’ve reached your time limit (or have got to the bottom of the piles.

Finally:

Take the bag out to where the rubbish is kept so it’s ready to go on bin day and empty the box into the recyclables (and sort if necessary). Then you can tick that job off your mental to-do list and know that there’s less unnecessary things lying around.

Once you’ve done this a few times, it may be a much smaller job than the first time and it will feel good to get some of the excess bits of paper and the like out of the house.

Do you have a system for keeping these little things done? Or are you more like me and like to leave them for a bit and do them in one go later?