The Home Edit: Stay Organized: The Ultimate Guide to Making Systems Stick

Raise your hand if you’ve ever filled an entire shopping cart with clear bins, turntables, and sets of canisters in each size, expecting them to transform your life overnight, but the items still ended up where they didn’t belong.

Or if you’ve scrolled through our Instagram feed, taking screenshots of pantries and closets with items perfectly arranged in rainbow order, having every intention to re-create the look at home, only for those images to become buried deep within your camera roll because you think, “Why put in all that effort if my kids are just going to mess it up?”

Which could be why you decided to pick up this book in the first place. You want to be organized but can’t seem to get there or stay there. Here’s the truth: If you want your systems to stick, you have to make organizing a lifestyle. Embracing that reality is the only answer.

But don’t worry. We’re not here to make you feel guilty, lazy, or bad about yourself. Rather, we’re here to help you get back on track and be your biggest cheerleaders. (Just don’t be alarmed if one of us attempts a toe touch at some point.)

Do our homes ever get messy? Yes, of course they do! Every house gets messy, particularly when you add spouses, children, and pets—i.e., any living, breathing creature who is not you. But what we are quick to tell people is that, while our houses get messy, they never get disorganized . . . and that’s something different. Once you have smart systems that can flex over time, it’s not hard to stay on track.

Maintenance is not one and done. We have found over the years that people are . . . not totally in love with that reality. Sure, it’s tempting to set up a system and forget it, but hello? Do you live in a museum? Maintenance is the answer to organizing, and the thought of staying organized is what impedes many people from getting organized in the first place. And we promise you it’s not as hard or scary as you think it is!

So, Let's Talk About How to Use This Book

The chapters that follow will take you through the spaces in your house, on a journey from what is typically the easiest spot (the entry) to the most challenging (the garage). You might already know how much we love a gold star, so we’ve given the entry a 1-gold-star rating and the garage a 9-star rating. (We wanted to give the garage 25 stars because that’s how much we dislike organizing the garage, but we’re nothing if not consistent.) As you use this book, are we suggesting you reward yourself with the appropriate number of stars after you revive each space? Oh, 100 percent.

What this book is: a user-friendly guide, divided by room, complete with checklists and scripts to help you stay organized once you already did the work of getting organized. If you haven’t started organizing yet, this book will get you there.

What this book isn’t: a report card. No one will be graded here! If you’ve been on this wild ride with us long enough, you know that we are very good at exactly one thing. Organizing. Don’t ask us to craft, or cook you dinner, or go outside and play catch. No, like seriously . . . you’d quickly regret it. And just as we can’t tell you the square root of 9 (no matter how many times you repeat the question, or even explain the concept), we don’t expect you to look at a space and immediately know how you’ve gone off the rails. Leave that part to the experts. Us! If you try not to judge us about the math thing, we promise not to judge your closets. Deal? Deal.

If you use this book as intended, you will end up with systems that stick for every room. And if (more like when) things start to slip, pick this book back up again. Or skip to the end of each chapter, where we give you Low-Bar Lifestyle Long-Term Goals, aka your future-focused reality check. Because life is messy. But if you’re honest with yourself and are willing to do just a little bit every day, it never needs to get disorganized.