An Expert Helped Me Organize My Bedroom, and It Improved My Morning Routine

In general, I am a pretty organized person. I maintain systems, and everything I own has a designated spot — especially in my bedroom. As a single mom, it’s my sanctuary. Even if nowhere else in the home is tidy, I always ensure that my bedroom is. I moved into my current house around seven months ago, and I’m just now entering what I consider phase two of making it a home, which includes optimizing organization.

Although I hadn’t been able to identify exactly why or how, I’d been thinking that the systems in my bedroom needed a tune-up. It’s not unusual for systems set up in a new place to no longer feel effective once I’ve actually lived there for a while, but typically I can figure out how to fix them pretty quickly. 

When I woke up every morning, I didn’t necessarily feel overwhelmed while getting ready for the day, but I also didn’t feel completely satisfied or productive. To help identify the gaps, I reached out to Kenzie Harkey, the founder of Simply Dare, a professional organizing firm in Charlotte and Atlanta. She sent me a thoughtful to-do list of strategies to implement — this is how they worked out for me.

Confession: I hate shoe racks. Do I think they’re functional? Yes. Do I think they’re (almost always) ugly? Also yes. Because keeping my shoes at the top of my closet was already working well (or so I thought), I was skeptical about the impact of Harkey’s suggestion to move the shoes down. What I found, however, was that not having to reach up made me much more likely to put my shoes away. In the morning, this meant all my shoes were actually in one place. I didn’t have to hunt any down, and I also wasn’t just wearing the pairs already by the door.

Living in Texas, the weather is usually considered “hot” or “not as hot.” Because of this, I don’t have a ton of off-season clothes aside from my comically impractical collection of sweaters. Still, I was immediately able to put some denim and all of my long-sleeve blouses into these bins.

Once those were taken care of, I realized there was no reason to keep my sweaters in my “overflow” dresser. Since relocating my shoes, I suddenly had an entire closet-wide shelf free. I was able to move some miscellaneous items from the bottom drawers into my actual dresser, which freed up space for my lighter sweaters I still use in the summer, as well as my shorts and swimsuits.

As Harkey predicted, this gave my closet some much-needed breathing room — not just by narrowing down my hanging items, but also by getting rid of the plastic dressers altogether. When I get dressed in the morning, I’m now solely focused on my actual options instead of having to mentally narrow them down.

This was the one suggestion of Harkey’s I thought might be unnecessary, and I think for me, it still is. Labeling bins makes sense in my mind: Things can very much become out of sight, out of mind. Plus, you usually have more bins in your home than dresser drawers. Where I store what in my dresser (aside from what I’ve recently moved over to it) is second nature at this point, and I’m usually opening them at least a couple of times a day.

My drawers are already pretty tidy, but in a way, having physical dividers is like bowling with bumpers on. When in a rush, sometimes I’d end up shoving clean clothes into my drawers to deal with later, and now I don’t have that flexibility. They have to go in neatly, or they don’t go in at all. That accountability makes it incredibly easy to see everything and pick pieces out in the morning.

I knew the suggestion was coming, and I knew it was warranted. Just as Harkey said, it forced my body to wake up earlier — which was easier to do since I wasn’t scrolling in bed anymore. Gaining extra sleep both at night and in the morning helped me get a jump on my day, making me more productive overall. Plus, I’ve found I don’t even miss having my phone by me at night. Win-win.

I made a conscious decision not to implement this idea, but hear me out: I used to organize my closet by color before realizing this wasn’t specific enough. Now I organize by category, then by length, and then by color, which is exactly how my brain thinks when getting dressed in the morning. In this case, I’m already operating at my most efficient. 

This was Harkey’s advice if I wanted to take my closet to the next level, which I did — and I loved it. Not only does it feel more organized, but it also looks more organized. Closet rod dividers are such a little, semi-frivolous detail, and that’s exactly why they bring me joy when I open my closet in the morning. 

The one recommendation I couldn’t afford to implement was switching my nightstands, but it makes sense — so much so, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the benefits. Not only would I have everything I need in the morning (medicine, glasses, etc.) at the ready, but I also wouldn’t deal with things piling up. I don’t like cluttered surfaces, so I try to avoid them — and it’d be so much easier to do if I had a drawer to keep things easily accessible.