How a $15 Sink Organizer Drastically Improved My Life
A simple solution to a complicated problem.
My partner and I are both neurodivergent. I have bipolar disorder, and she has her own set of struggles that affect her life. The problem is, that negatively affects how we do things around the house. Dishes and laundry pile up sometimes, and sometimes our bedroom is a mess.
There are numerous ways to address these problems, but many of them don’t work well for people like us, or just a lot of people in general. Not everyone is a type-A clean freak who automatically cleans and organizes everything. A lot of us have to get creative.
My partner, who follows a lot of neurodivergent folks on TikTok, heard a suggestion from one of them about how to address a messy room or a dirty sink. For a lot of people (not just neurodivergent folks), cleaning is a chore and requires a lot of mental energy. So, you can break it down into chunks.
Some people advocate cleaning a particular part of a mess first and doing it in sections — doing one part of the room makes you feel like you accomplished something. For my partner and me, that doesn’t always work, though.
No, the way that chunking it works for us is to take all of the mess and clutter and put it in one place. It doesn’t matter if it takes up a quarter of the room, three-quarters of the room is much cleaner now, and it feels a lot better. Then, when you have the energy, you can tackle the pile of clutter and knock it out a bit at a time, or all at once if you want.
This leads us to the sink organizer I mentioned in the title. We have had an issue with dishes piling up in the sink lately, largely for stress reasons. So, my partner combined the above method with another suggestion from neurodivergent TikTok: getting a rack just for dirty dishes.
That seems weird to some: why get a place to keep dirty dishes? Why bother with that when you can just clean them or load them into the dishwasher?
Well, the short answer is that sometimes, a task seems so insurmountable that you don’t feel that you can ever do it, and sometimes that task is the dishes. So, the best way to get it done is to do it in stages. If that means loading a rack full of dirty dishes in a way that will make it easier to clean them later, then cool.
The problem my partner and I were facing was that we would often wind up with a sink full of dishes, stacked in that precarious way that looks like it’s about to fall over. It would often stay that way for several days, teetering on the brink of destruction while more dishes were added to the pile.
My partner got tired of it one day and applied the methods described above: she didn’t clean the dishes or put them in the dishwasher, but simply re-stacked them in such a way that it would be easy to do so later. And, sure enough, when I had the energy to do the dishes later, they all went into the dishwasher really quickly and easily because they were organized.
This resulted in a few things. First, we make an effort to keep dishes organized — like bowls to like, plates on the bottom, all utensils in one place. No more leaning towers of dishes. Second, we discovered that one of the primary problems we were having was that utensils would get everywhere and we would sometimes find them in weird, random places. So, we got the sink organizer.
It’s a simple wire thing, about four inches wide, that goes on the side of the sink and expands to fit. Most of it is just a wire rack that can store things like mugs or sponges while they drain, but there is also a fairly large plastic bucket that is meant to hold — you guessed it — utensils.
From now on, all the utensils go into that bucket. We lose a small amount of sink space to this rack, but our sink is deep enough that things fit under it and the bucket makes up for all of it.
It strikes me as interesting how a simple workaround has helped us with doing our dishes more effectively. A simple sink organizer is such an obvious solution, but it had never occurred to me until I randomly started looking things up as my partner was organizing the dishes. I found something that looked like it would work, used a gift card on it, and away we went.
We are trying to implement that method in other areas of our lives. At one point a few months ago, I had to clean out my car, and my partner helped me by throwing everything — trash, shopping bags, useful stuff, everything — into my trunk. It was about what we could manage at the time, and when we were ready to finish the job, it was all in one place.
As with anything, your mileage may vary, but it’s a way my partner and I use to keep ourselves organized and accountable. I hope that this does help you, but if it doesn’t, I encourage you to look into other ways to help keep things clean and organized around your living space. I recommend Catieosaurus on TikTok and elsewhere for ways to help improve your neurodivergent life.
Good luck, and be well!
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