If your life is anything like mine, getting organized has been an on-going adventure. There are so many variables and as the paths of my life have changed so have my organizational needs, tastes, and desires. What worked for me during one season seemed to become a total flop during another. As our family dynamic has also changed, so have the various methods of keeping things in order. When all my children were young and at home, free time was scarce. I found it difficult to keep up with things. I am inherently a clutter bug and my children pretty much followed suit. I don’t know about you, but we tended to forget the “If you take it out, put it back” rule more often than not, especially when we really did not know where to put it. As they have grown things have changed dramatically. Free time is still scarce, but Mom is not the only one trying to keep things in order. The kids are now trained to put things on a list when they use the last of it. They have become accustomed to the way I like the pantry organized and put the groceries away accordingly. And most times they don’t leave their things hanging around just willy-nilly. But it has been a long road with many twists and turns as we figured out what works for us and not try to imitate every great organizational idea out there that often is more work than benefit.

I again find myself at a different stage of life. My oldest is married and making a life outside our home with his wife. My middle son will be graduating this year and is rarely home between work and social activities. My daughter has only three years left of home learning and lucky for me, likes keeping things neat. Now I find that I am able to tackle those organizing things that I have had in the back of my mind. I’ve created a sort of organizational bucket list for this year. My list probably won’t look anything like yours but these are the things that I really want to tackle over the next year (and more than likely than not they will take more than a year to accomplish). Here it is in no particular order.

1. Re-do home manager binder; create individual binders instead of having everything in one big binder
2. Go through books, albums, CDs, VHS, DVDs; sort through, create an index
3. Clean out and re-organize file cabinets (I have 8 drawers in the office and 4 drawers in the classroom)
4. Put together a meal planning system where menus are rotated throughout the year and create master grocery lists for those menus.
5. Get a handle on couponing, spending, and finances.
6. Clean, de-clutter, and efficiently organize the rooms of my home.
7. Figure out a good way to track inventory in freezer, fridge, and pantry.
8. Get photos onto CDs; perhaps create digital scrapbooks; put printed photos in albums and perhaps make various scrapbooks.
9. Clean out the attic and garage and figure out some sort of sensible system for storing stuff.
10. Clean up all the files on my computer drives and make my computer a more efficient tool.

I am sure that I could add more to this list, and each item on the list will have its own to do list, but I think there’s enough here to focus on for the year.

So, what’s on your organization bucket list?