Book Review: Organize Your Way By Katie and Kelly McMenamin

ORGANIZE YOUR WAY
Simple Strategies for Every Personality Type

By: Katie McMenamin and Kelly McMenamin

Published: March 14, 2017

Publisher: Sterling

For many, September is the start of a new year. With getting the kids back to school and back into a routine, it is also natural to get our homes reorganized and systems in place to know where everything is.

Everyone has their own system of organizing and you can tell that by the hundreds of organizing and decluttering books available. The McMenamin sisters have taken organizing another step by linking your styles of organizing to your specific personality type. By offering tips based on your specific personality (or PixieType as they call it in the book) then you can learn how to better create systems in your home that you can maintain and understand.

The book begins with an explanation of the different PixieTypes and gives you an opportunity to take a quiz to see which type you belong to. This is my only real negative of the book and I will offer a caveat that I had an eBook which didn’t make it as easy to read rather than if I would have had a physical copy. But, in taking the quiz, I found that I fit nearly every category of PixieTypes. The quiz results didn’t give me any definitive group to identify with. My notes showed Fun, Classic, Organic, Smart Freedom, Organic Freedom, Organic Structure, Fun Freedom, and Classic Freedom depending on situations. So, I just decided to move on from the personality types and just read the organizing tips.

Much like any other book, you have to offer numerous solutions and this book does that well. Since the authors/professional organizers are trying to give tips to numerous PixieTypes, they offer lots of different ideas for organizing. The chapters are broken down into areas of the home including the entryway, the home office, the master bedroom, the kitchen, the dining room, the family/living room, the bathroom, the kids’/rooms/playroom, and the garage/attic/storage spaces. By reading each section and working with their tips, you can certainly get your rooms in order. One thing I appreciated in each chapter were the illustrations (not photographs of perfect rooms but illustrations) of the main areas of a room first cluttered and then rearranged based on the tips shared in the chapter. Every chapter ends with a checklist of things you should do to put your room back in order. My favorites were the home office and master bedroom chapters. Those are areas that seem to get cluttered the most for me and I took away some tips that I’m hoping will help me keep the chaos contained. I loved that the authors gave me permission to throw out my white t-shirts. They never look the same after a year of wearing, yet I hate to throw them out but I should. White t-shirts are cheap! YES! The same goes with underwear and socks. Why do we hold on to socks that barely have any material left or underwear that no longer fits or is comfortable???? Adding a small dish for my daily jewelry was also a life changer. I typically wear the same earrings and necklace, once in awhile changing them out. Rather than having to put them away every day, leaving them in a small dish on my counter keeps them close since they are in my rotation frequently.

So, I came away with some helpful tips on keeping our home organized, but the personality type part just didn’t work for me. If you need an organizational book that breaks down the rooms and steps for each room, then this book is for you. It doesn’t get much simpler and offers you motivation to get it done and keep things looking nice.

Check out the book trailer:

Katie McMenamin and Kelly McMenamin – source

Katie McMenamin and Kelly McMenamin are sisters, professional organizers, personality-type experts, and founders of PixiesDidIt!®. Their business is the product of buttoned-up hedge fund analyst Kelly spending years trying to get her messy older sister Katie, a writer, to be more organized. Countless fights ensued until they had an idea: What if there is more than one way to organize? Today, they spend the bulk of their time consulting with clients, writing for their website — www.pixiesdidit.com — and giving talks on how to organize according to your personality type. Kelly lives in NYC with her husband and three sons and Katie lives in their hometown, Cleveland, OH, with her husband and three daughters. For more information, check out their website, HERE. 

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