198: Overcome this Organizing Stumbling Block for Powerful Results

Allow for Evolution: The Antidote to Perfectionism in Your Home

I want to talk about a stumbling block that can quietly stall out even the most motivated organizing efforts: perfection. That pressure to get it right, to find the one correct solution before you’re allowed to act, shows up constantly, even in people whose homes look nothing like a perfectionist’s.

Perfection shows up in surprising places

This came up recently in one of my membership’s Work With Me Wednesday sessions, where we body double each other through tasks over Zoom. One member described her cupboards as fully organized, but she had things sitting out all over her house because she was still searching for the exactly right way or spot to put them. She wasn’t avoiding the decision out of laziness. She was stuck trying to find the perfect solution before she’d let herself act at all. That’s perfectionism holding her back just as much as it holds back someone whose whole house is visibly cluttered.

The answer is allowing for evolution

Allowing for evolution means accepting that whatever system you set up right now is allowed to change later. Think about how much your own life shifts over time: baby gear gives way to toddler gear, then to the on-the-run years of school and practices and games, then to a quieter house that still isn’t quite empty because everyone keeps coming home. Your interests shift too. None of that stopped just because you became an adult. If you set up a space assuming it has to work forever exactly as designed, you’re fighting against how life actually moves.

Treat abandoned hobbies as experiences, not waste

This shows up constantly in decluttering sessions. Someone will pick up a full set of knitting needles and yarn and say they can’t get rid of it because they spent so much money, what if the interest comes back? I ask them to reframe it: what if this had been an event instead of a hobby? When you go to a concert or a show, you don’t expect to keep every physical trace of it forever, and you don’t consider the money wasted just because the night ended. My daughter and I went to the Eras Tour together, and out of everything from that night, I kept one meaningful souvenir, a Christmas ornament with our photo on it, and let the rest go without regret. The value was in the experience, not in holding onto every object connected to it. If you can ask yourself whether you got the experience, whether you learned the skill, enjoyed the process, or made something from it, even briefly, you can let the leftover stuff go without it cheapening what you got out of it. The experience already happened. Letting go of the props doesn’t undo that.

Even the most precise planners need room to evolve

A dear friend of mine, a total monkey brain in the best way, had her kitchen completely custom-built two years ago. She knows her inventory precisely and had every drawer and cabinet custom designed around exactly how she’d use each item. I pushed her, repeatedly, to leave a drawer or two unplanned, to let her actual daily use in the finished space guide a few final decisions rather than locking everything in based on paper plans or 3D renderings. She resisted at first. Two years later she texted me a photo of one of those very drawers, now set up completely differently from her original plan, thanking me for insisting she leave room to adjust. She’d also planned her whole kitchen in neutrals so anything would match forever, and once she was living in it, she realized she craved color and started adding it back in. Even someone who plans everything perfectly still discovers things about how she actually lives only after she’s living it.

What this looks like in practice

You don’t have to get a space right on the first try. Organize your closet with old shoe boxes before deciding whether to invest in nicer bins. Try clothes sorted by type, then by rainbow order, then by outfit groupings on single hangers, and see what actually sticks. You might rearrange the same space over a dozen times as your life and preferences shift. That doesn’t mean you got it wrong the first time. It means it was right until it wasn’t, and then you were free to evolve it.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick one space you’ve been avoiding because you can’t find the “perfect” solution, and set it up imperfectly on purpose, using whatever you already have on hand. Give yourself permission to change it again later once you know how you actually use it.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.