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"  It&amp;#039;s standard in a professional organizer&amp;#039;s arsenal of approaches, but you may not have heard of it... having a staging area during a project makes everything easier to see and manage! Here&amp;#039;s how to use this idea in your home projects. Want to know an organizing pro&amp;#039;s secret for fast sorting? Staging areas! Visibility is truly the goal of any organizing project, whether you&amp;#039;re filing papers or organizing a closet or pantry. During the project itself you need to get visibility to be able to make decisions and sort out piles. A staging area is a larger, open area that allows you to spread your belongings out and arrange them more easily. Here are seven staging areas that are feasible in many homes: Dining tables and dining rooms:  Often unused except for formal occasions, a dining room is frequently open and available. The table is a perfect expansive surface for staging and sorting, especially for smaller items, and its height makes it easy to reach things without stooping over. The dining room also has the added benefit of not being needed as urgently, allowing you to stage projects over several days without interrupting the flow of daily living. Beds: Make up the bed, then centralize everything in the room that needs sorting. Your incentive to finish your organizing project is that you&amp;#039;ll want to sleep in that bed when the sun goes down! Garages: Move a car out of the garage and use the open bay for sorting items from other areas. Driveways:  Best for garage projects, driveways are ideal for staging, but do check the weather report for rain chances first. Make sure that you have time to finish your project before the end of the day if you don&amp;#039;t want to leave things outside. Have some plastic tarps handy in case you get surprised by rain or you need to camouflage a few piles overnight. Hallways: Pulling things out of a room and into a hallway allows you to rearrange furniture within the room and create sorted donation piles that are already on their way down the hall and out of the house! Floors: Sometimes it&amp;#039;s best to just sit down on the floor and sort things around you, such as when you are organizing large stacks of paper. Floor space can be cleared in any room for staging purposes. Don&amp;#039;t rule out moving furniture temporarily to create more open space. Basements:  Depending upon how inconvenient the stairs are and how accessible it is, a basement can serve as a large open area for staging. The best staging basements are ones that have a door opening to the outside to allow for moving loads out. Having signs is also helpful for staging purposes to identify your piles, especially if you are working with others on a big organizing project. Use some scratch paper and large markers to make quick signs saying, &amp;quot;Keep,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Donate,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Give to (family/friend),&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Trash.&amp;quot; You might also need piles to collect items for distributing to other rooms in the house. Paper sacks are another wonderful sorting tool - - see my video on &amp;quot;Four Ways to Use Paper Sacks to Organize&amp;quot; on YouTube. Are you inspired to tackle a large project this weekend? Share your inspiration in the comments! Lorie Marrero is the best-selling author of The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life, the spokesperson for Goodwill Industries International, and the creator of ClutterDiet.com, an innovative online membership program that&amp;#039;s provided affordable professional organizing advice to thousands of people in eighteen countries. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/decorating-ideas/a24466/set-the-stage-for-organizing/>