Best Organizing Books

Hello! Although I still have a few more Christmas posts to share, I thought I’d post about my favorite organizing books today. At the end of the year I always seem to start thinking about getting organized for the year to come…and these are some of the best tools I’ve found over the past year or so. They also make great Christmas gifts if you are looking for something for the book-lovers on your list.

My favorite all-time book for getting organized isn’t what some would think of as

a typical “how-to” in the organizational book genre. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less  is probably one of my favorite non-fiction books ever. I read it for the first time a little over a year ago, and it was seriously life-changing. It really made me think about what I want to do with my life and gave me simple tools to  not only discover what I want most but also to schedule my time better. I’ve read a lot of time management books and this one is the best.

Another amazing book to help with your organizational goals is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.  Now Marie’s method isn’t for everyone…her decluttering ideas and techniques are pretty extreme. But I really enjoyed reading her ideas and learning a bit about the Japanese culture while doing so. While I don’t follow all of her ideas, I did gain a new perspective on our possessions and how they affect our lives.

I feel like being able to keep my home (mostly) clean and clutter free translates to more time for me in the sewing room. The Organically Clean Home: 150 Everyday Organic Cleaning Products You Can Make Yourself–The Natural, Chemical-Free Way.  I love the cleaning product formulas made with ingredients that are easy to find, but what I also love about this book are the charts and lists in the back of the book that can help you keep up with your cleaning tasks. They can be easily copied to use over and over again.

And the two best books for how-to, step-by-step decluttering and getting organized are Decluttering Your Home: Tips, Techniques and Trade Secrets and The Complete Book of Home Organization.  These books give tips, techniques, product ideas, storage ideas and  plans for attacking clutter one step at a time. I organized my kitchen this summer using the method in Decluttering Your Home, and I can’t wait to use her ideas for some other parts of our home on the winter break.

Finally, for my system to work, I finally realized I needed a book to keep lists that I want to hang on to  on a more permanent basis. This Leuchtturm Medium Notebook, Dots, 5.75 x 8.25 Inch (LBL14) is perfect. It has numbered pages and a spot at the front for listing what is included on each page. So I have a page for decorating ideas, a page for books I want to get, quilt project idea pages, and even organization ideas. I love the fact that this has a lot of pages but yet is small enough to take along in my purse if I’m going shopping.

Finally…two more books with tons of great ideas are Never Too Busy to Cure Clutter: Simplify Your Life One Minute at a Time and The Joy of Less: A Minimalist Guide to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify (Updated and Revised).  Never too Busy to Cure Clutter has ideas listed by category. It’s a quick read, and yet there are a lot of valuable ideas.  The Joy of Less is also a helpful book…written in an easy to read conversational style, the author walks you through her minimalist perspective.

I hope some of these books will inspire you as they did me…thanks so much for stopping by!