Disorganized? Suggestions from home management expert may help

Do you live by the motto: A place for everything and everything in its place?

Or, is your life more on the lines of: Everything's got a place — if only I can remember where that place is or why I didn't put the object back the last time I used it or where I might have put it because the original place is full or why I put it there in the first place because it's too hard to get to all the time because I have all this other stuff in the way that I might need someday, too.

If that sounds familiar, Deniece Schofield has some advice for you: Get organized!

The author of "Confessions of an Organized Homemaker" (Better Way Books, $11.99) and "Confessions of a Happily Organized Family" (Better Way Books, $12.99), Schofield is a home management expert, consultant and lecturer based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She recently presented home management seminars in Salt Lake City, where she talked about organizing both your home and your life.

HOME

When it comes to organization at home, she says, the problem most people have is not that they don't have enough space. "We have more space than 90 percent of the world's population. The problem is we have too much stuff."

That leads to clutter, and clutter means that everything takes longer.

In business, she says, there is something called the 80/20 Rule. "It means that 80 percent of the results generally come from 20 percent of the efforts. That's true at home — 80 percent of the recipes you use come from 20 percent of your cookbooks. You reach for 20 percent of your gadgets 80 percent of the time."

So, she says, if you can eliminate some of the clutter in your life, you can become much more efficient. "How you organize and store things directly affects how you spend your time. What you need to do is translate time management into thing management."

Several basic principles can help:

1. Think before you act. Are there ways to make things more efficient? For example, putting all your cleaning supplies into a totable basket that you can take from room to room will cut down on time spent walking back and forth. A kit under the front seat of the car can hold such things as zip-lock bags, a mending kit, bandages, hand lotion, a screwdriver, an emergency pair of pantyhose.

Filling the sink with sudsy water before you start baking will mean you can wash dishes as you go. Having a bag filled with little chores you can do while you wait will cut down on frustrations.