A Minimalist & An Organizer Take on a Toddler’s Drawer

Unfortunately, more often than not, the images created for us (and by us) about home management are not realistic. These images don’t work in our real lives for a sustained period of time.

Contrary to many social media posts and conversations I’ve had about home organizing and minimizing, shame is not part of managing our homes. It’s not a tool that will help us find that extra contact lens solution we’re looking for in an early morning rush. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Shame actually dulls all the other home management tools we have.

I developed M.O.M. to support real families who go through seasons of near perfection, near chaos, and everything in between. Below you will see:

Two drawers.

Two moms.

Two organizational systems.

Let’s take a closer look at these two drawers and these two systems.

First let’s look at the file folding system. File folding came on the organizing scene in a big way with Marie Kondo. For those that don’t know, file folding is basically a system of folding clothes so that you can quickly find them, like you can quickly find a file in a cabinet. Wen, the Minimalist in M.O.M., is a big file folder. As you can see in this image, when she opens her son’s drawer, she can quickly find what she is looking for.

The file folding system is probably used more by minimalists. When you open your drawers everything is easily laid out. If you wanted to you could organize your clothes by color or style or even match up outfits as needed. Those who use it swear by it. It’s also great if you don’t have a lot of clothes.

Now, let’s look at the box sorting system. The basic idea behind this system is to take a box, and put it in the drawer. Then put like items in that box. In this system, you spend a lot less time putting things away. I literally take the clothes from the laundry basket, and quickly place them in the appropriate box. It takes me less than 5 minutes to put my sons’ clothes away.

Box sorting is more of an organizers’ tool than a minimalists tool. In part this is because organizers tend to have more clothes than minimalists. With so many clothes, it becomes much more time consuming to fold the clothes.

I can hear the minimalist in my head say, so get rid of some clothes. And the organizer in my head, is responding — yes but grandpa gave him that shirt.

Wen and I had a long phone conversation about how we manage our son’s drawers. I chose to use the box sorting system over the file folding system, in part, because my son likes to go into his room and take out some —- if not all — of his clothes. I asked her how she handles this. She explained that her younger son’s dresser is taller than he is, so all his clothes are in the top drawer where he cannot reach them. And her older son is out of that phase.

And when we talked about the time it takes to fold the clothes, Wen said she loved being able to get their outfits out quickly after the folding. She also expressed some joy in the process of folding them. Additionally, she minimized down to as few clothes as possible to be able to do this. I, on the other hand, don’t want to spend (what feels like) hours putting away clothes. I don’t even have a dresser for my own clothes — because I generally hate folding clothes.

But this isn’t really about folding clothes. This is really about maximizing our time with our families and friends. Wen and I have both developed systems that allow us to care for our families in our own ways. We are better than perfect moms — we are real moms — doing what works for us and celebrating it.

We invite you to celebrate whatever systems you use to run your home.

We hope to see you back here for more tips, tricks and tools you can use to improve upon the systems you already have in place.