How to clear clutter - step-by-step guide

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

So, we talk a lot about needing to declutter, but part of what holds us back from just diving in and making some progress in decluttering is that even though we say that we are doing this project we don’t really understand how to do it. We don’t understand what the project really is, what it entails, what we set out to accomplish. It remains this, kind of, vague, nebulous project that we can’t define. And that means we can’t see progress made. And when we don’t know what we’re going to do next, we end up not doing anything at all. So, in order to declutter our homes, we need to understand the process of decluttering and it’s really very simple. It’s a little bit scary, but what you need to remember is to start with an amount of space that you can actually tackle in the amount of time that you have. What I like to do is choose a spot that I can actually declutter in 10 minutes or less, because even when I think I have half an hour I often don’t. But 10 minutes I can probably manage that, or at least, if some interruption comes a 10 minute declutter session is easier to come back to and finish up, whereas longer projects not so much. 

The first step of decluttering is actually removing everything from the space—that’s scary, that’s a big deal, I know, but it’s really the most effective, efficient way to declutter. But that’s why it’s so important to start with a very small space. So, a single drawer (or even a section of a drawer), a single shelf in a closet (and not the whole closet), one container at a time decluttering; not entire rooms or even entire closets—a small space. Empty it out entirely onto a table, or some other space—just move it out. 

Then the next thing I like to do is to just throw away the garbage that came out in that process. Ideally, it doesn’t even make it onto the table (or whatever other space I’m emptying things out on), but as I’m pulling it out it just goes into the trash. And still, if there is some junk on the counter (or wherever this pile has ended up), I go through and throw away the trash because that’s the fastest, easiest, most obvious step to take first. And the more visible progress you can make quickly the more momentum that you get. You’re seeing that success and you’re seeing progress right away and that helps you keep the momentum and the energy moving forward to get the job done. 

So, we don’t start with the hardest part (although emptying the entire space might have been hard, mentally or emotionally) but then we do something easy—we just throw away the garbage. And, it’s amazing sometimes how much difference that makes right there. 

Next, we’re looking at all this stuff that’s out to see. Now, none of it’s where it belongs because none of it belongs on the bed or the counter or the table or wherever we’ve put it, and we see things that belong somewhere else. So they have homes, we know what they are, we know where they belong and it’s not here and it’s not in that drawer that we just emptied. So, we go put those things away. This is where distraction is tempting. This is where we might get an idea, see something else that needs to be done, get interrupted by a child, or something, so we have to be very careful and try to do this very quickly. 

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com