Rooms Are Dead, Long Live Activity Zones.
This is part one of a series about how I organize, using examples from my own life and home.
I know, what could I mean by “stop thinking about rooms?” It sounds counterintuitive! Agreed! It certainly feels wrong to drop the room framework when thinking about organization. Frankly, it’s programmed into us from every angle of the household consumer market. The real estate industry defines homes by types of rooms and quantity. Furniture is sold in categories belonging to room types - bedroom sets, home office furniture, garage shelving, etc. People fantasize about how much better their lives would be with more rooms, bigger rooms, and specialty rooms. Haven’t we all felt like a laundry room, pantry or mudroom is necessary at one time or another, or dreamed about even more niche spaces like a game room or sewing room?
The reality is that more rooms, bigger rooms, and/or more types of rooms can’t solve organizational issues. Just like more bandaids, bigger bandaids and more types of bandaids won’t heal a broken bone.
Even if you moved to a new house to resolve some room-based problems, the underlying organizational issues will follow you. Just like goldfish, organization problems grow to match the size of their containers.
Not until you start asking yourself, “What activities do I do in my house and where do I need to do them?” can you really start figuring out why it’s so hard to find your keys in the morning, or why your partner leaves the cereal on the counter, and what to do about it.
Let’s do an activity:
Grab whatever medium you like to write in most (mine is paper and pencil, believe it or not), set a timer for 60 seconds, and write down every activity you, and anyone else who lives with you, does in the house or uses your house to store equipment for.
60 seconds starts now…
Great! I’m assuming you have a pretty silly list, if not on paper then in your imagination.
Here is my list:
Get dressed, cook, wash dishes, make the bed, laundry, pet care, homework, bathroom “business,” reading, blogging, video production, accounting, video games, lesson planning, board games, painting, embroidery, coloring, lego, dolls, dressup, rock tumbling…
Honestly, the list could go on forever.
Your Home Has Many Jobs!
So, now that you have a sense of how many activities your home is expected to support, the first step towards successful and lasting organization is having each of these activities take place within a designated area. I call these designated areas Activity Zones and plan them for the comfort and convenience of both the person doing the activity, but also everyone else who has to live there too.
Let's further define Activity Zones.
What Are Activity Zones?
Activity zones are not rooms, they are sections of the house that are used for a specific purpose.
Children’s bedrooms have to support many activities. Finley and their parents are probably struggling with how to keep all of Finley’s activities inside their room.
My children’s room is not one activity zone, because there are so many activities that take place there. They sleep, get dressed, read, play dressup, and play with lovies. Each of those activities has a zone where each item needed for the activity has a designated place. When we take a look at the kids’ Getting Dressed Zone we see it consists of two dressers and a laundry basket.
Activity zones should be confined to as small an area as comfortable and functional.
Imagine if cooking dinner meant you had to go to the garage to get a pan, the bedroom to get some spaghetti, the living room to get the sauce, the attic to get the parmesan… forget about it!
This activity zone is just a little too big to be convenient.
The famous kitchen work triangle only is functional if the stove, sink, and fridge are not on opposite sides of the house. It’s at its best when calibrated so that the amount of space between each appliance allows for food prep, but a cook could reach across to turn on the water or shut the fridge door without having to take more than one step away from the stove.
The same principle applies to any activity zone. Currently, the Dressup Zone in my kids’ room is not completely functional, at the moment the outfits box and the dressup accessories drawer are on different ends of the room. This was an unintended side-effect of reworking a different activity zone, one that has resulted in my kids not taking the accessories out as much because they don’t want to go all the way across the room.
I’m not sure I mind - the wings, wands, and masks feature heavily in my children’s top ten most catastrophic messes. However, the organizer in me has already thought of a way to utilize the dressup box more efficiently so they can find everything there.
If an activity zone is in two rooms it’s likely because you actually have two separate zones.
In my own home, the shoes are not part of the kids’ Getting Dressed Zone - they are part of the Kid Departures/Arrivals Zone in our entryway. I would prefer the shoes to be kept in the bedroom, but I know I am more likely to avoid the “I can’t find my shoes!” drama if they stay in the entryway. This is because it’s more convenient for me to see if their shoes are put away than they would be in their room. If they are not where they should be, I have the child in question find them ASAP. The shoes share the Kid Departures/Arrivals Zone with backpacks, seasonal jackets, and hats stored where the kids can easily get and put them away.
Activity zones can overlap.
A great example of this is in our living room, our Kids Book Zone (two bookshelves and a bean bag chair) shares space with the Toy Zone, specifically the bottom of one of the bookshelves. The zones can be complimentary, or totally unrelated as long as they serve the needs of the people in that space. However…
Overlapping activity zones should never interfere with each other.
Here is a little early aughts media throwback for you - Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and The City didn’t have everything put together, but she knew what she needed from her home. The evidence was in the oven - designer shoes! If she’s as savvy as I predict, her Getting Dressed Zone was just in her closet, whereas her oven was part of her home’s deep storage system (storage for things you need but don’t use very often, blog post coming soon!)
There is nothing morally wrong with storing anything anywhere in your space. There are just places that are more or less comfortable and convenient.
Now imagine her only cohabitating love interest, Aiden, had a baking hobby. Aiden would have to remember to remove her Manolos before he started a pre-heat, and put them back after the oven had completely cooled. It would have only been a matter of time before disaster struck.
You do you…
Perhaps a more relatable example is my Bathroom Business Zone vs. my husband’s - which naturally, completely overlap in the confines of our tiny 1970s bathroom.
I had managed the overlap by starting my routine earlier than his, but it couldn't last forever. My routine was progressively taking over his time slot, and because there are some bathroom privacy boundaries we both hold dear, there are certain things we weren’t going to share the bathroom for. This led to my husband having to wait outside the door frame as I did my finishing steps at breakneck speed.
The Moral:
Activity zones that overlap either will or won’t cause problems, depending on:
what the items in the zones are used for.
or
when the zones are used.
If the items are compatible and/or timing is not an issue, then you’re good to go!
A minor inconvenience, that occurs regularly, can add to the unconscious buzz of stress we experience in our homes.
It’s worth fixing! Eventually, I took my little kit of makeup out of my Bathroom Business Zone and put it together with my jewelry box and floor length-mirror, thus completing a Getting Fancy Zone. My husband then had 10 more minutes to himself in the bathroom before work. It was more than worth the effort involved to change the routine.
What Next?
That wraps up defining an activity zone. I hope that perceiving your house as a series of zones instead of rooms will give you some insight into some of the organizational issues you be experiencing.
If you’ve made it this far, you may have noticed there are many unanswered questions. I promise I’m not holding out on you, I just can’t write an article a mile long. In my next post, I will be writing about how to tell where an activity zone needs to go and elaborating on why everyone’s convenience and comfort matter.
