Recently Decluttered: The Lego Instructions

(if you don’t have legos, think of any papers you want to sort: cards, manuals, games instructions, recipes)

We have a lot of lego (too much lego?), and much of it was Conor’s when he was a kid.

By some proactive maternal wisdom, my Mother in Law saved his lego AND the instruction sheets. So now my kids look through the old instructions and rebuild sets that he once built as a kid. It is a gift, there is always something to be built!

Years back I had all the instructions in a binder, but over time the binder broke and papers never were returned. They were all ending up thrown into a white plastic bag like the pile of chaos we let it become.

So I scrounged some working binders, reorganized the papers and put them in the binders.

My takeaways:

The system DOES work . . . when we maintain it

In the past, I would have said this system DIDN’T WORK.

It is a myth we often believe about home organization – we think the systems don’t work because we are forgetting about the maintenance the system requires to keep it working.

I needed to

• Replace the broken binder
• Match papers back together (get rid of the garbage that made its way in there)
• Train my kids to take them out and return them (a skill I know they have now but maybe not when I started)

👉🏽 Sometimes it is a good idea to go back to square one and start over again with What We Know Now.

How long do you think it took me?

Something I also like to do is ⏰ look at the timestamp of my photos to see how long this task takes. (We all need better data around how long things actually take us to do)

This task of cleaning out and putting back the papers took me less than 25 minutes. And I did it while drinking tea in my PJs half-watching tv with the kids.

 

Recently Decluttered is a feature periodically shared in the Simple Saturdays email.  You can find the Recently Decluttered Archives here