Declutter Your Home!

Why should you declutter your home?

Space can give you peace of mind and lift your spirits. And it can also help streamline the cleaning process.

Most of us need a fair amount of space to feel comfortable so taking clutter seriously can have a great impact on your everyday life. Decluttering can give us a sense of accomplishment as it proves that there are things we can control.

The following are some fundamental decluttering tips to help you create neat living quarters.

Identify what personality traits are contributing to the clutter in your home

By identifying your personality and the life you live, you can identify the root causes of the clutter in your home.

Are you too absorbed in your work and personal life?
Do you have a serious compulsion to save everything you have?
Has your life become too chaotic?

By asking yourself these questions you can pinpoint what you need to change to declutter your home. The solution might be to keep track of your inventory, let go of physical possessions, make time, or a combination.

Planning is a crucial step to declutter successfully

Decluttering your home can be a bit overwhelming if you start without creating a specific strategy to figure out what you plan on doing with all your extra and unneeded stuff. The following questions can help!

• Will you throw it away?
• Give it away?
• Sell it online?
• Sell it in a garage sale?

Figure what stuff you need and what stuff you can get rid of

Settle on a system that will let you know what things you use and then heed the results. Here are two systems that you can help you with that:

Cardboard Box in the Kitchen

Place all your kitchen utensils and appliances in a cardboard box. When you must use something from the box, take it out, use it, and then place it in a drawer or cabinet. After a month, you will find out what you don’t use often.

Reverse Closet Hangers

Hang your clothes so that the hanger is facing the wrong way. When you wear something, put it back into your closet and hang it normally. After a few months, you will be able to see what you’re not wearing on a regular basis.

The 80/20 Rule of How to Declutter Your Home

Also known as the Pareto principle, it states that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. In other words, 20 percent of your kitchen utensils and appliances will account for 80 percent of the activity in your kitchen.

This kind of distribution crops up in many settings including nature and economic activity. Identifying that 20 percent will show you what your priorities need to be in terms of organizing and placing objects.

It can also let you know early on what things you should be looking to get rid of. If you’re a hoarder or someone who’s sentimentally attached to everything, this can be the time to start entertaining the idea of letting go. The 20 percent is what matters.

Declutter the Hot Spots

Keep a close eye on clutter hot spots as they form. Do your best to figure something out today, not tomorrow, and then begin attacking that area to keep it clean and tidy.

• What rooms or places attract clutter?
• What is always being left out?
• Is a thing’s storage place unclear?

Flesh out ideas on what do to about these situations. If putting something back is difficult, people won’t want to put it back. If figuring out where something belongs is difficult, people won’t even try. Come up with solutions and test them out.

• Make room for more important things.
• Use colorful tape to mark where something belongs.
• Keep your family on the same page.
• Let others come up with solutions.

Set a time to declutter your home and stick to it!

Decluttering your home is most likely not going to be a one and done kind of thing. If you’ve owned your home for years then the clutter that you’ve built up will not go away easily.

If you’re the kind of person that likes to do everything at once, it’ll be good for you to set a day or a date where you can devote your time and energy to decluttering.

And if you’re the kind of person who enjoys chipping away at something every day then you can dedicate a few minutes to it as a part of your daily routine.

Let your own decluttering process evolve and then maintain it

You might not be able to get your optimal decluttering process down immediately. That’s totally normal when starting out. It could take weeks or even months to have a process in place that allows you to identify clutter, its source, and what needs to be done about it. The most important thing is that you keep at it.