Living away from home for the first time can be chaotic. Moving your things out of your parents’ house and into a college dorm room? Even more stressful. Add the fact that you’ll probably have a roommate, and you’ve got a recipe for organizational disaster, and once classes get going and homework and events begin taking up all of your spare time, you won’t get too many free moments to try to fix the mayhem after it’s settled into your living and sleeping space. Here are three ways to keep chaos away from the very beginning.
Minimize Your Stuff
If you don’t love it, or if you can live without it, don’t bring it to your dorm room in the first place. This means books, clothes, furniture, electronics, instruments, sports gear, and knick-knacks. You’re going to be collecting new things you love as you meet new people and do new things. Don’t spoil your new space before you even get started by bringing things in that aren’t useful, or you don’t have a lifelong, obsessive passion for. Have a friend help you if you can’t figure out what to leave behind. Be critical. Be severe. Too much stuff is way more of a problem than too little.
Maximize Your Available Space
Tight spaces mean using vertical areas. This will usually translate into building lofts or using closet organizers. If you can find anyone who has lived in the dorms the past few years, they will generally have some tips and tricks for you to maximize the space you have. This doesn’t mean smashing things down or crumpling things up and wedging them in corners. It means putting useful things where you can get to them, and storing things you use less often in places that are out of the way. It is a fine line, and there is theoretical and strategic balance involved, so put on your thinking caps for this one.
Make Good Habits Easy and Bad Habits Difficult
This is a trick to adjust your mindset before you get started with any problems in your dorm room cleanliness habits. Make good habits easy. Make bad habits difficult. Make it easy to wash dishes. Make it hard to leave dirty dishes out. Make it easy to put dirty clothes in hampers. Make it difficult to have hampers overflow. How you do these things is situational and workflow-based, but the better you establish these practices early on, the more they will be ingrained in daily life. Routines will save the day and prevent frustration later when small bad habits get out of control, simply because they went unnoticed while your focus was somewhere else. Make it your mantra – good habits are easy, bad habits are difficult. That one statement can make worlds of difference in the long run.
