45: Putting Aesthetics Over Function Can Hinder your Progress
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Welcome to episode 45 of Permission to be Messy. I'm your host, JoAnn Krall. And today I'm talking about why putting aesthetics over function can hinder your progress. Remember, I'm not using the word productivity anymore. I have swapped it out with progress because it's about us getting things done without having to worry about that hustle, mentality of productivity and doing all of the stuff. As long as we're making progress, we're doing well.
So you may have heard me talk about how it's important for us to put function before beauty, when it comes to getting organized. I'm going to talk a little bit differently about this in the sense that yes, I believe that we need to have function in place. Because we need to make sure that something's working before we make it look nice. But then when we go to the next step of making it look nice, we have to make sure it's practical.
So I'm going to talk about why making things too aesthetic can be a hindrance to your progress.
And I'm going to do this through examples of systems that you may have seen on TV, or you've read in books that, create these aesthetically pleasing, everything looks nice, but is it practical for you or your space? So the first example would be having some beautifully arranged bins on high shelves. Now it may look pleasing, but they could be impractical for daily use. So you have to make sure that if you're doing something like this, that these are items that you wouldn't be using on a daily basis.
Another example is that famous rainbow technique of grouping items based on color. Now I know this makes a lot of people happy and that's wonderful if it does. But if you're somebody who say is arranging books by color, and you need to reference those books, if you don't remember what the color is, it may hinder you on a daily basis. If it doesn't, it's fine. If it looks nice and it makes you feel good, then great.
Sometimes when we're trying to make things aesthetically pleasing, we're looking for uniformity, like in the size of, bins that we're using or the shapes, and this doesn't allow for diversity in storage because, like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It's the same with our stuff.
If we're getting all these uniform bins, but then we go to try and put stuff in. We're really not creating a system that may work for our daily flow. Sure. We're hiding things away, but if you're needing to access things and if you're limiting yourself to this one, shape or size and things just don't fit well it's going to affect your daily habits.
So when you allow for some diversity and not making sure that everything is symmetrical, that can really help. And this all comes after once you're organized and you know what you have and you know, where you want to place things. Things don't have to be so uniform. They can look nice. And you're fitting exactly what you need into the space that you need it, but you really need to know where things are going before you can get all those containers.
So I always say, never buy the containers first and it's even true once you think you have an organization system, you want to make sure that things are working for you. And that's where I always say the function comes before beauty. I work with a system before you put everything into place, you're going to save yourself a lot of time and money.
The next thing if you're storing everything behind closed cabinet doors, because you need the space to look neat but you're not organizing those, like if you say you bought a piece of furniture because you thought, this is going to be great for storage, but if you're putting the stuff in there for just to get it out of sight, if it's not organized in there properly, that's going to cause you problems.
Along with buying containers and bins and things like that. The actual furniture pieces that you're investing in, you want to make sure that they're flexible enough. And I often tell people. Try to make sure that when you purchase something for a specific organizing thing. And I use children as an example for this.
If we're getting a piece of furniture to organize the kids toys. Think about how that piece of furniture could be used in the future in another manner. so right now it's holding toys, but maybe, fast forward to when they're teenagers, it could hold, electronics, or it could even hold clothes or something, or, depending on if it's a book case, it can hold books.
If If it's when they're young and it's a bookcase and you have things in bins, just try to think ahead of what thing could be used for, of course, if you're older in your organizing for your space and your space is your space, then this is less of a concern.
Another example. is a meticulously organized system. With many categories. Now, this is something that you will see on shows like the home edit, where they do a pantry and they have everything organized. And there's so many different categories and there's bins for everything in containers and it looks wonderful. But you really have to think about the reality of how to maintain that.
There's a couple things that can go wrong. You organize it all for the state that you're in. And then six months later, your diet changes and you're buying all different products and your products that you had fit nicely into your pantry don't fit anymore. You also want to be aware of if you're containerizing things.
So if you're taking safe cereal out of boxes and put them in containers,Think about, are you going to be frustrated? That you have to wash that bin out when you replace it with either a new cereal or just a new box, because we don't want to be mixing the old stuff with the new stuff, at least, every so often.
you don't have to do it every time, but there are going to be times when you're going to need to wash these containers out. And that's just going to add more time to your day now, if that's fine with you, that's great. But I often tell people to be aware of that because people don't think about it, especially with spice containers. All of these different things that you would need to wash out to replace.
And plus you're also going to have to be replenishing things. So think about whether you even want to be doing that.
The key point I want to make today is make sure. That you are not just looking at a space and thinking, oh, I have these shelves, these bins will work.
I'm going to just make everything look nice and then try to fit all your stuff into them. If you have to use boxes or shoe boxes or whatever it is say, you're doing your linen closet and you want to do all new containers in there, but you're not quite sure where things will fit, lay it out.
It's almost like mapping out a room with paper for, furniture for a paper, sometimes people will cut out or they'll map out with tape. It's basically space planning for your closets, your cabinets, your shelves, whatever it is. And really think about things that that can be repurposed if what you're organizing is going to essentially be a temporary situation. Yes, children will have toys for years and years. But also, if you think about it, when your kids are really young, you're organizing, those big Duplo blocks and then they graduate into Lego, which are not going to fit into those big boxes. It's often not practical to throw small little things into what was once holding larger items.
And always allow room for change.
I was prompted to do this episode because my daughter will be releasing some virtual interior design products.
And it's a perfect fit to what I do because I help people with the function. And now she can help people with the aesthetics.
I'll be sharing links with that soon and I want to mention, the link to my planning program is in the show notes along with being able to contact me if you want to schedule a organizing jumpstart free call. Those links will be in the show notes.
And as always, I'm wishing you much progress, peace, purpose, and the permission to be messy. Thanks for listening.
