A partner in organizing can help you stay motivated, find new ideas, and hold you accountable.

A great strategy for maintaining your systems over time is to have an organizing buddy or partner who can be there for you during the process. If you work out, you know how helpful it is to have a partner who can get you motivated when you may not feel like exercising. Likewise, having an organizing buddy can help get you through the rough patches when you don’t feel like maintaining your systems. This could be someone who you call once in a while to check in with how their different systems are doing compared to yours, or maybe the two of you meet at each other’s locations so that they can help you with the actual physical organizing work and vice versa. Whatever you do, whether it is in person or over the phone, having some accountability outside of yourself can be a very powerful motivator to continue to make progress and be successful with your productivity in your organizing systems.

Think about who might make good organizing buddies for you and what you’d ask them to help you with—as well as what you could offer them in return.