If there’s one thing that makes life easier when you get super busy, it’s having the PIA gene. It’s a special ability to see a job right through to its natural conclusion. This is something for which tidy people have a natural affinity and that others can only admire and wonder about.
No, not really. It’s eminently learnable and it’s not a gene, it’s a muscle. As with any muscle, it get stronger the more you use it. PIA is, quite simply, putting it away. You go out to buy groceries. When you return you bring your shopping bags in from the car, put them on the kitchen bench then quickly go through and put the cold goods into the fridge or freezer. The rest can wait. True, but not if you want to use your PIA muscle. Doing the job to its natural conclusion means putting everything away including the shopping bags.
Here’s another example. Doing the dishes. ‘Doing’ is shorthand for washing, drying and putting away.
Clothes need to be washed, dried (I prefer to peg on a line outside then bring in), folded/hung, ironed as necessary and placed in wardrobes or drawers. These are not difficult jobs. Parts of them are time consuming, but not hard. To make the chore easier to fit into your schedule, you might divide it into washing and ironing. In that case, clothes that require ironing need a temporary, specific home until that task is completed.
Just about every repetitive chore we do is not really one task but a series of small steps that need to be accomplished in a certain order. There are a few sticking points with this whole scenario. Some people are inherently lazy and just won’t do more than they have to do at the time. This actually creates more tension, more mess and more work for your future self, so get past this attitude and go the extra mile which may take mere seconds and will definitely save time in the long run. And don’t use the excuse that you’re too busy. You are almost never too busy to do tiny actions.
The biggest hurdle, in my opinion, is within the PIA part. Not the actual action involved in PIA, but the ‘A’ itself. For this to work, you have to have an ‘Away’ to Put It. That’s the secret tidy people have. Every solitary little thing has its very own ‘away’. And here’s the paradox: Although putting it away is right at the end of the sequence, the ‘away’ part needs to be decided at the beginning.
Spend as much time as you can spare finding the perfect home for things. Some kinds of items can be roughly organised into a certain basket. Others need a designated space—so precise you could draw around its base like those shadow boards for tools. The message here is that this is the exact spot for this thing. When the item is not in its home, that space is empty. If closets and cabinets are already bulging, they’re the problem, not the thing that doesn’t have a place to call its own. If you don’t use certain closets or cabinets because they’re a nightmare to open, that should be a red flag telling you this needs your attention—preferably with a rubbish bag and donation box close by.
If you have to clean out a whole cupboard (or multiples thereof) to get to that happy place where you have exact spots for all your items, this is going to take time. But once that work is done, PIA is so easy you don’t need to exercise your mind about it ever again. Just exercise your PIA muscles and your countertops and tables will be clear, your demeanour will be calm and your next task will be that much easier.