Episode #142 - Functional Zones – Simplify Your Home, Simplify Your Life

Welcome to Organizing with Ease, where we simplify and organize our lives for the better. I'm Diana Moll, your host, ready to lead you on a journey towards a more organized and enriching life. Together, let's explore practical strategies, inspiring stories, and expert advice to simplify every aspect of our lives. Let's declutter our spaces, free our minds, and cultivate genuine happiness. Are you ready to embark on this journey with ease?

Let's get started. Hello, friends, and welcome back to Organizing with Ease. I'm your host, Diana Moll, and I'm thrilled to bring you functional zones, simplify your home, simplify your life. If this is the first time tuning in, welcome. You've joined us at a transformative time in our January series.

Fresh beginnings start strong in 2025. For my seasoned listeners, it's wonderful to have you back for another week of actionable strategies to create spaces that simplify your life. So, so far this month, we've tackled physical clutter, digital detoxes, daily habits to set the tone for our intentional year. And this week, we're going to be diving into functional zones, those dedicated areas in your home that make routines more efficient and reduce stress. Functional zones aren't just about organizing your stuff.

They're about creating spaces that actively support your goals and lifestyle. Today, we'll explore fresh examples of functional zones, step by step guidance using the fresh start method, and practical tips for maintaining these spaces for long term. Plus, I'll share a personal story about redefining zones that I did in my bedroom, which made my mornings much more smoother and more intentional. So are you ready? So let's dive right in.

If you're probably wondering and you're asking yourself, what are functional zones and why do they matter? Well, let me explain to you what that means. Functional zones are areas in your home dedicated to a specific purpose. It's designed to make tasks easier and more efficient. By creating these zones, you streamline your routines, you reduce decision fatigue, which does exist, and increases productivity.

So think of your morning routine. If everything you need is in one organized area, let's say in the bathroom, your toiletries, your makeup, or maybe even your work essentials in your office, it becomes less about scrambling to find things but more about starting the day with intention. Outer order contributes to inner calm by Gretchen Rubin. A study from the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2024 found that eighty seven percent of participants experience less stress and greater focus after organizing their spaces with defined zones. So this shows how impactful this small change can be.

So here's some fresh examples for you to consider of functional zones. Let's explore these zones. These are ones that you might not have considered before and how they can transform your daily life. One example is the morning prep zone in your bathroom. Why does that matter?

Well, I don't know about you, but a clutter free bathroom helps me and you start the day with ease and in focus. Right? So if you have your bathroom vanity in your morning as a prep zone, that means what? You use clear bins to separate the skin care, the hair tools, and your makeup. Now everything you need is accessible and easy to put away.

In your drawers, the same thing, like, for the toothpaste. Right? If you have for the men, if you share if you share the bathroom, the same thing applies. The his and the hers separate much, much easier. Both might have also separate skin care products.

Definitely don't want to commingle any of that. Right? So use also if you do have drawers, use no. Use dividers to keep the items from shifting and to ensure each product has its own spot. So for my husband and I, we do have a long vanity.

And so therefore, we both have our own mirror. We have our own sink and underneath we have our own space. In the middle, we have our drawers and we actually have separated those. So we have the his and hers and it actually makes things quite easy and makes my morning a lot easier and productive, especially if I need to be running out the door at a certain time. And some of those busy moms knows exactly what I'm talking about.

We shower, we change, we get ready, we get the hair done, put on the makeup, do our morning routines, especially I know I do. I have my facial, routines as well, so we have to make sure that all works. But if it's not in its place, that means I'm spending time trying to find it. And that is where we want to make sure that each of the products has its own spot and we put it back. It's a beautiful thing.

Beautiful concept. So now you might wanna also consider maybe a relaxation zone in the bedroom. And you're like, what? What do you mean? So your bedroom should be your sanctuary.

It's not a source of stress. It's like a relaxation zone where you need it helps you unwind and improves your sleep quality. So now as you know, I still have chaos because of my kitchen. So a lot of my items that I had in my other areas of my home wound up in my bedroom. But I do have to tell you, within that whole chaos of my bedroom, I still allocated I still had one corner of my bedroom that I actually still made sure that it was somewhat of a quote unquote a relaxation nook.

So I had it I have a chair and I have a little bit of a side table and that is where I would you would find me where I'd be in hand my journal and I'd of course have a little bit of my coffee, especially if it was in the morning times. That was like my go to spot for my quiet moments because at the time for all these months and the construction, I needed a place. I needed a go to spot. And since I found it, it was a dream come true because it was also my go to spot for my quiet moments before bedtimes. So you definitely wanna keep this area free from any distractions, like any electronics and clutter, to maintain its calming effect.

Even on a side note, even with the clutter within my chaos of my bedroom, I still made that little nook still having some type of a calming effect. Family communication hub in the dining room. Wow. How about that? Why does that matter?

Well, a shared space for schedules, reminders, and important documents keeps everyone in the loop. Now it doesn't necessarily have to be in the dining room. It can actually be in your kitchen, which could be part of your what? Command center. Absolutely.

So you can definitely do this because the fact that you have so many other options on how to keep a calendar for the family. You can use a magnetic whiteboard calendar. You can use a corkboard for notes. You can actually even do color coded slots for each of the family members. It's so important to make sure that everybody is on board with the family calendar.

Starting with the new month, new year, twenty twenty five is always inspiring. I don't know about you, but I just so love getting a new calendar for the year. I get inspired by that, which is why it's really important that you have family communication a hub. So again, my client actually chose the dining room to actually transform this section of her room. She actually used a wall and, again, she used a whiteboard to make that command center, which typically is also in the kitchen and or in your office.

But, again, it depends on your household and how you are living with your children, what area best suits for you. My clients decided that the dining room was the best one for them. You can also incorporate decorative elements like you can actually frame the board or you can actually have matching bins to keep that hub area zone functional. And what do we want? We want to make it look good, make it stylish.

So let's do some meal prep station in the pantry. Now, what does that mean? Well, that means that a meal prep station actually just streamlines your cooking and makes grocery shopping more efficient. So a client and I, we were working together and we actually use baskets for the dry goods. We labeled the jars for grains and indicated space for reusable meal prep containers.

This made planning the week meals for the week very simple. And the best part, stress free because and organize if you organize it by category, like your snacks, your spices, your dry goods, we're talking about the pantry, And use uniform containers for a neat and cohesive look makes all the difference in the world. Now let's say that you don't want to buy any product and you still wanna have an organized pantry. That still can happen. You just need to make sure that you actually, you know, separate them, then buy the type as well, do the same thing.

And then also just maybe you might wanna label then maybe the shelf so that when you place it back, you know exactly where it goes on that specific shelf. But that does make a big difference. So you have that for the pantry as an example. You know, we also wanna maybe do a hobby or a craft zone and a spare closet. So we actually have a designated space for our hobbies that we like to do.

Like, we keep the supplies contained, and it inspires us for the creativity. So, again, we did this in our closet in a little in the hallway, and that is where we have our bins labeled for all the materials. And we also have, like, a little side table for a fold out table for those projects so that it's all there together and we don't need to worry about anything. We did do vertical storage so that it makes the supplies easy to find. We do have pullouts, for the drawers so that we have all of those, I guess, those glitters and the glue, sparkle glue.

Let's see what we have. Paints. We have our paintbrushes. We have our paper. We have our everything else that one can possibly imagine in that specific closet area that makes it that craft zone.

So maybe you might wanna use a guestroom closet for that craft zone. Right? It's the same thing. So someplace in your home, especially if you have children, maybe it could be in your playroom as well, but that would be considered the craft zone. What about we think about now trying to create these functional zones using the fresh start method?

So why don't we just break it down to how creative and how we can sustain these functional zones? Well, one thing we wanna start off with, we wanna identify everything in the area you want to organize, and you want to group similar items together. Back to the bathrooms again. We wanna do a prep zone. We wanna sort the toiletries into categories like the skin care, the hair tools, and your dental care.

The question that you need to ask is what belongs here and what doesn't? Those are pretty two pretty good questions. Those are actually key questions that you want that you want to ask yourself. We want to reduce and evaluate. We want to let go of items that don't serve the purpose of the zone, or are there duplicates?

So we're back to now the bedroom, the bedroom for the relaxation zone. We wanna remove items like unfolded laundry or any electronics that might distract us from the space's calming purpose. Question did you wanna ask yourself is, does this item support the function of the zone? This is a really good question to remember for any other zone that you are creating. We wanna then wanna use storage solutions to create order and make the zone visually appealing, And that is under the systemize and harmonize.

So, for example, the craft zone, we want to add labeled bins. Maybe we want to if you have the space, add pegboards to keep the supplies organized and accessible. We want to prioritize frequently used items by keeping them, what, within easy reach. So this would apply to also the pantry and also to your bathroom and any of the zones that you have created. We want to sustain and tidy by what?

By maintaining the zone with our daily or our weekly resets to keep it functional. In, for example, in the meal prep station, we wanna check for the expired items and we wanna tidy up those containers weekly, especially if we do our weekly meal planning. This is really important to do. You might wanna set a reminder to review each zone monthly to ensure that it's still serving your needs. This week's task for the 31 January decluttering challenge, we have focused on creating and enhancing functional zones.

Consider creating a bathroom morning prep zone for that stress free start of the morning of your morning. Set up a relaxation zone in your bedroom to unwind and recharge. Organize a family communication hub to keep schedules and reminders in one place. Again, this one place does not necessarily have to be the command center in the kitchen. It can be in the home office.

It can be actually in your mudroom or laundry room. But my clients chose the dining room. So there's other areas of your home that actually can make this family communication hub work for you. Build a meal prep station in your pantry to help you simplify your cooking. And then dedicate a hobby or a craft space with clearly labeled supplies.

This is super helpful for those younger children, especially that they know where they have it, where they can find it, and they won't be rummaging as they have in my past in my home office. Just saying I know exactly because I've been there too. That's why I created the zone for the crafts. So you want to maybe pick one or two to start with and just remember, it's about progress, not perfection. This week's recommended book, Atomic Habits by James Clear.

One of its key principles is designing your environment to make good habits easier and bad habits harder. Functional zones perfectly align with this idea as they create systems that support your routines. Here's a quote from the book. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

By organizing your environment with functional zones, you're building systems that set you up for success every day. I love to see how you're simplifying your home, whether it's the morning prep zone, relaxation corner, or a family hub. I'd love to hear from you so that we can celebrate these transformations together. Remember, functional zones are not just about organizing. They're about creating spaces that support your life and bring ease to your routines.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode. Next week, we'll wrap up January's series by celebrating your progress and setting the tone for February. Until then, little by little, step by step, let's continue creating 2025 filled with clarity, calm, and transformation. Wishing you a week of simplicity and success. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe to Organizer with Ease podcast on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review.

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