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Mickey’s Ten Commandments by Marty Sklar

1. Know your audience.
2. Wear your guests’ shoes.
3. Organize the flow of people and ideas.
4. Create a wienie (visual magnet).
5. Communicate with visual literacy.
6. Avoid overload–create turn-ons.
7. Tell one story at a time.
8. Avoid contradictions–maintain identity.
9. For every ounce of treatment, provide a ton of treat.
10. Keep it up (maintain it)!

Marty Sklar

To share the key lessons from the success of Walt Disney Imagineering with the world, Marty Sklar started sharing the set of principles called Mickey’s Ten Commandments in 1983. After decades of designers copying out the list and pinning it to their boards for reference, Sklar then wrote and Disney Editions published One Little Spark! Mickey’s Ten Commandments and the Road to Imagineering in 2015. These principles still have relevance to the field of themed entertainment design in the 2020s. My graduate school classes in the subject discussed them frequently and referred to them constantly.

After graduation, with these principles still well in mind, I started contemplating how they applied to my household organizing work, and I decided to make the relationships between them more explicit, resulting in the following list of principles modified for household use:

Commandments of Household Organization

1. Know yourself and your household.
2. Wear your guests’ shoes when required, but mostly your own.
3. Organize the flow of your life and your things.
4. Create a place for everything.
5. Communicate.
6. Avoid overload–clear space.
7. Reflect your story in your home.
8. Make it easy to put everything in its place.
9. For every ounce of cleaning, provide a ton of treat.
10. Keep it up (with a plan for when life gets in the way!)

1. Know yourself and your household.

Your home is yours, and it needs to work for and bring joy to you and your household. Anyone else matters far less. If you feel that something will work for you and your space, that is what you should try first, regardless of if it is customary. As an example, since I prioritize avoiding waste in my kitchen, I arrange my fridge largely by expiration date. It works for me, and I have no reason to compare my home fridge to those of others.

Other members of your household do matter too, though. Since my fiancé also cooks using that fridge, I did check about that setup working for him. Under a similar consideration, I store filtered water and pumpkin at the front of the fridge top shelf, so my cat-sitter can find them easily to give them to Alcibiades. (Filtering my water makes it taste better, and the pumpkin helps with some digestive issues he has.)

You will, by the way, hone your tastes and your organization preferences as you go through the process of organizing, by the way. You do not need to know everything about yourself and the other members of your household to get started. Just make sure to keep yourself at the center of your work.

Erin’s Aside: For what it’s worth, I prefer the phrasing “Know thyself” for the philosophy reference, and only changed it here after pressure from some early readers.

2. Wear your guests’ shoes when required, but mostly your own.

Metaphorically, of course. I do not wear shoes inside my house and certainly do not intend to start anytime soon, just as I do not intend to steal my guests’ shoes when they visit. Wearing your guests’ shoes means anticipating what will make their experience of visiting the best. Wearing mostly your own shoes means modifying things so they work the best for you and your lifestyle in practice.

When I expect company, I make sure to check that the spaces and things guests will likely want are ready and convenient for them. Please note that I said convenient, not necessarily impressive. Although choosing the best hand soap can certainly be fun, this has more to do with toilet paper and soap being available at all than it does to do with perfection.

You will need to rearrange things and modify systems so they work for you. Not everything will go into just the right place on the first try. You will instead discover as you go through the process that systems that sound good in your mind don’t always work when put into practice. It takes some time living with different systems to see if they actually work for you; recognizing that makes tweaking things as you go an experience of learning rather than of merely regret.

3. Organize the flow of your life and your things.

I suspect some of you have a mistaken idea of flow planning in organization. It does not simply refer to things being easy to reach near where they are used, although that can certainly be a part of it. Rather, it should involve the organization of a space supporting the people who live and the activities performed there.

As an example, if I arranged my bedroom based on making things the easiest to reach, I would put my television remote on the bedside table. And then my cat Alcibiades would knock it over every night as he takes his nightly watch at my window, and then I would have to find where it fell the next time I wanted to watch something, which sounds (and from experience, is) particularly inconvenient. As it so happens, I have never felt the desire to turn on the television without any delay. My remote remains on the makeshift television stand, placed next to the Switch, where I can find it and put it away easily.

As another short example of organizing activity and item flow, my apartment lacks a space for unsorted mail. With my current schedule, I immediately sort it over the recycling bin so it doesn’t pile up. If I lived in an area with curbside recycling pickup, I would not even bring junk mail into my space, I would sort it directly into the outside bin.

Erin’s Aside: Having my television in my bedroom would not be my first choice, but it makes the most sense in my apartment right now.

4. Create a place for everything.

It is difficult, often nigh impossible, to put something away at home if it doesn’t have a designated place. Let’s use An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler as an example. I immediately see the possibilities to put that under the category of cookbooks, food writing, or homemaking. Books of food writing often have a few recipes in them, so I could also start a new sub-category specifically for that and divide up the category based on if they contained any recipes. At this point, if I was just trying to put the book away quickly, I would likely shove the book wherever it fit on a vaguely appropriate shelf.

In another circumstance more like my own, I have designated a place for that book. It belongs in this case next to the author’s other released books, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook and Something Old, Something New, both of which I personally classify as decidedly cookbooks. So when I am done reading, I get up from my desk, walk over to the shelf with my cookbooks on it, and slide it right back in where it belongs with no more effort than finding some random nook for it. Of course, if I owned more cookbooks, my categories would need to be more specific.

5. Communicate.

Your household will need to figure out what works best for it for different topics and different circumstances. As an example, my fiancé’s weekly class schedule is written on the fridge so I don’t have to ask him about it. My meal plan for the week is also written on the fridge so he doesn’t have to ask me about it. More important and emotional conversations, though, are done face to face.

In the process of organizing I do recommend an emphasis on face to face communication rather than, say, texting, for two main reasons, emotional connection and practicality. The process of organizing a home brings up a lot of different emotions, and face to face communication generally does a better job of addressing those. The process of organizing a home also brings up a lot of different physical things, which are easier to interact with when people are together. This decreases the chance you will have to sort a pile twice.

6. Avoid overload–clear space.

No, I am not telling you to take paintings down from your walls and put your painted miniature collection in an opaque cabinet. If you actively like having something out on display, it should probably remain out on display in your home. But when it comes to things you don’t actively like to have out, consider clearing the space and putting them inside something. Visually, this helps draw people’s eyes to the things you actively want displayed, so you and your guests can spend more time thinking about your art or your Warhammer army or fun things like that.

Practically, this also makes your home more useful to you. I can almost guarantee you that more counter space will make more of a positive difference to your enjoyment of home cooking than having to open a drawer to reach your paprika will make a negative one. If I’m making cardamom buns right now, the paprika would just be in my way. Beyond the increased workspace, clearing off space also makes cleaning easier. To continue the example, it is far easier and more pleasant to clean a mostly bare countertop than it is to clean around and under several jars of spices.

7. Reflect your story in your home.

Where you’ve come from, who you are, where you’re going–all these can be reflected in the belongings you choose to keep and how you organize them. They can also be reflected in matters of strict decoration, as well, but that falls outside of this article’s scope. I know my living room particularly reflects the story of my education, both in my books and some of my memorabilia, and I personally emphasize that as one of my values.

I will say as a brief note that very few physical things truly have to be kept, and you can always change aspects of how you present your story to the world.

8. Make it easy to put everything in its place.

There are very few things in a domestic environment where ease of access is more important than ease of putting away. So far I can only think of fire extinguishers and first aid kits. Please consider taking this opportunity to check that your fire extinguisher(s) and first aid supplies exist, can be easily accessed in an emergency, and are in generally good working order.

For basically everything else, prioritize ease of putting away. This ties into flow, mentioned above, and into avoiding overload. If it is not easy to put something back, you’re more likely to use that as an excuse to start a never-ending put-back basket. Those put-back baskets can be very effective tools, but as a short-term carriage solution rather than a medium- to long-term storage solution.

9. For every ounce of cleaning, provide a ton of treat.

As several other commandments have alluded to, keeping spaces easy to clean makes life easier and more pleasant. Minimizing the number of things in the spaces that need to be cleaned as frequently helps a great deal with this, especially in the kitchen. I keep my stove-side countertops bare of everything except my toaster oven and Dutch oven, and that greatly simplifies my kitchen cleaning.

Another way this commandment applies is in displaying things that make us happy to look at them. I enjoy looking at a red, enameled Dutch oven in a way I do not enjoy looking at a large assortment of mismatched spices. This is the reason other than practicality that one of them stays on the counter and one of them goes up in a cabinet.

10. Keep it up (with a plan for when life gets in the way)!

I hope it comes through clearly that I do not want you to have to spend too much of your free time and energy cleaning and putting things away. One of the reasons for organizing a home is to be able to spend less time and energy doing that and more time doing activities you enjoy more. I personally find it works best for me and my schedule right now to do smaller cleaning tasks daily rather than larger tasks weekly, but you and your schedule might dictate an entirely different approach. Maintenance needs to work for you and your household and your home, not me and mine.

Please remember, finally, that life happens. No matter your habits and cleaning schedule, things get off track sometimes, and that is okay. Make a plan to deal with it when it happens, but realize there are more important things in life than always having the tidiest home imaginable.