Do you need to learn how to declutter your home? Don’t worry, I had to learn too. It’s not as difficult as it seems. Let me tell you a quick story.
Around 3 months into the pandemic, I was starting to feel overwhelmed. I’d already been working from home since 2019 but now I was stuck at home.
I had all this stuff around me and I came to a realization: a major source of my anxiety was clutter. Thus began my decluttering journey.
Let’s be honest here, trying to figure out how to declutter is a daunting task. It seems like a never ending chore. There is some truth to that. That is why it’s so important to remember this mantra:
“Decluttering is not a task, it’s a journey.”
I tell myself this a lot when I start to get overwhelmed with the clutter. Unless you live alone, never have anyone over at your house, and have complete 100% control of anything that comes in and out of your house.
Clutter is going to creep up on you. Even when you live alone, it can still start to take over. All it takes is a few days of being overwhelmed at work and not having time to clean up. You tried making something new and now you’ve got extra supplies in your cupboard that you may never use. Suddenly you’ve got clutter.
Don’t despair. Clutter happens and once you’ve gotten it to a manageable state, it’s easier to get back into that manageable state. If clutter starts to take over again, just remember, it’s a journey.
How to Declutter in just 4 Steps!
The overall process of decluttering can be broken down into the following major 4 steps:
- Identify where you want to start?
- Break it down into manageable tasks
- Start decluttering
- Identify projects that come from the decluttering, but don’t complete them.
Now step 4 may sound counterintuitive. For example, what if I find that I have 50 pens that I’m not sure if they work or not? Wouldn’t I want to go through them all to declutter them?
Yes, but that is a time consuming project that takes away from what you are trying to do. It’s better to put them all in a single home and tackle that later.
How to Declutter Steps 5-8
Wait! I thought there were only 4 steps! So why do I have steps 5-8 here? These aren’t all directly decluttering steps. If you really want to know how to declutter, you will want to do these steps afterwards.
- Organize.
- Execute your projects you identified.
- Reorganize based on the completion of projects
- Declutter as maintenance.
Now Step 5: Organize may seem like it’s out of order. It’s not. Some of these projects may take you days or months to complete. Do you really want to put the declutter on hold while you wait to complete those?
Step 1: Identify where you want to start
Now that we have covered that there are 8 steps total in our ‘how to declutter journey’, let’s go back to Step 1. Where do we begin with this? Depending on the size of your house, this could be a very tough question.
I’m blessed or cursed depending on how you look at it to live in a fairly large house. Blessed because it gives plenty of room for my kids to run around, that I have my own space, and things aren’t cramped. The downside of it is that there is a lot more room for ‘stuff’. And boy does it pile up quickly.
As a general rule, when you are choosing where to declutter you want to choose a place that is visible to you. Sure I could start with the closet under the stairs and get that all organized. But do you know how often I open that closet?
Roughly once a week. I could spend all afternoon decluttering it and cleaning it out and at the end of the day I will pretty much never see the work I did in there.
A bit part of learning how to declutter is mental. So you don’t want to start in an area where it will seem like you didn’t do anything at all.
So, choose a spot that you see every day. That way when you look at it, you see the work you put into it and are more motivated to keep going instead of decluttering being an endless drag that never seems to accomplish anything.
Why do you want to declutter?
When you are trying to figure this out, take a look around you and try and figure out what do you see everyday that is causing you to want to declutter. Perhaps it’s an endless collection of shoes and coats that pile up by the door. Maybe it’s the dining room table that just always seems to be covered in papers and never actually usable for dinner.
Narrowing It Down
You may have to take a step back to figure it out. I knew that I had anxiety from the clutter, but I was having problems figuring out what it was that was causing that anxiety that made me want to declutter in the first place.
Was it that my office was a mess? That it was always difficult to find what I was looking for in the kitchen and now suddenly we had ants? Was it the fact that we’d been living in this house for almost 3 years and we still had boxes that had never been unpacked from when we first moved here in the ‘storage room’ or as I called it, the junk room.
As I thought about it, the two logical answers were the kitchen and my office. The kitchen was an obvious choice because the ants were getting out of control and I really really hate ants.
My office was the alternative answer because it was where I spent most of my time during the day and it was where I would likely see the most visible impact of my decluttering process.
What Can I Act On?
With that narrowed down, I asked myself a new question: What is within my ability to act on? Just looking around the house, I realized there was a lot of things that belonged to my wife.
Especially in the kitchen since when we moved in together she already had a complete kitchen full of pretty nice things, so I got rid of most of my kitchen stuff years ago. If you want to know how to declutter, you have to know the golden rule:
“Don’t get rid of someone else’s stuff unless you have permission.”
Now that’s not saying you can’t move their stuff, it’s just saying don’t get rid of it.
So I decided to start in my home office. This room is mostly my domain with just a small corner that my wife’s desk is in. Also being that I work from home, this was the area of the house that I spend the most time in, so this looked like an ideal candidate to start. So now that I had the room figured out, it was time to begin Step 2.
Step 2: Break It Down
The second part of learning how to declutter is learning how to break down things into more manageable tasks. Depending on what and where you are decluttering, these tasks could be as large as “this quadrant of my garage” to “this shelf in my bathroom”.
My office had three major areas that were cluttered. My desk, my bookshelf, and the closet. Looking at my desk, yes it was cluttered but it didn’t affect my ability to work every day.
I could tell it wasn’t the source of my anxiety in the room. Looking at the closet, it just seemed far too overwhelming to start with. So I decided on the bookshelf.
Just a simple bookshelf with 5 shelves on it. It was kind of a mess. The books weren’t really organized on it, there was random stuff on the shelves. It was visually unappealing.
Especially since this is what people would see if I turned on my camera for work because it was directly behind me. This was an embarrassment and it needed to be fixed.
Rules of Decluttering
Before I began working on this, I made a a few rules for myself.
Rule #1: It’s OK to keep things.
Especially if you are just starting to figure out how to declutter, the whole process can be very overwhelming. Just remember, this is a journey. Personally, I tend to do a major declutter about once every 6-8 months.
Just because I kept it this time doesn’t mean I will keep it next time. When I was learning how to declutter, I found that often times it was just too difficult emotionally or mentally to figure out if something was worth keeping.
That is perfectly fine. Decluttering is a highly emotional process. Keep that book, that cable, whatever it is. This isn’t the last time you will be decluttering, so it’s OK to keep it.
Rule #2: Get Rid of Anything Broken
Sometimes things are just not worth fixing. If that is the case, just get rid of it. A big part of learning how to declutter is knowing when to let go. This was difficult for me because I grew up in a household where we saved absolutely everything.
I knew I had items in the house that would cost more to repair than replace them. For example, I have some battery powered lights that are part of holiday decorations. A new battery was going to cost $5 for them. Not bad right? Until I realized I could replace the entire light for $1.
Sometimes there are items that actually wouldn’t cost too much to repair. In those cases, you have to be brutally honest with yourself. Are you really going to fix it? The vacuum that I spent $500 on, yeah I probably would. That kids toy that needs the wiring fixed on it, probably not.
When you are learning how to declutter your home, it’s important to learn the mantra of Elsa. “Let it go!”
Rule #3: Everything Needs A Proper Home
When you are learning the rules of how to declutter, this is the absolute most important rule. Everything needs a proper home. And not just tossing it in a pile somewhere. It needs a legitimate home.
This means that it should go in a place where it makes sense to find that object. If it is just tossed into a junk drawer, that isn’t a proper home. That is procrastinating and forcing you to deal with it later.
Maybe that home is a storage tub, maybe it’s properly displaying something on a shelf or a wall, or putting it in a drawer with similar items. Those are all acceptable.
I’m going to use twist ties for an example because people love twist ties. If you are putting twist ties in a box with other organizational tools then that is acceptable and it counts as a home. If you are just throwing them into a random drawer to get them out of the way, that does not count as a home.
Step 3: Start Decluttering
This is where the action takes place. This is also where most people get overwhelmed. As you learn how to declutter, it’s important to know that there are two major paths that you can take to decluttering a space.
Path 1: Take Everything Out
Your first option is to take everything out of the spot and put it in spot where you can sort through each item one by one and get rid of things you don’t need.
The major benefit of this method is that you see absolutely everything that you have in that single space. The downside is that if you don’t have time to finish decluttering, you are going to be left with a mess until you finish.
Depending on your lifestyle, this may or may not work for you. I am a parent of young children. This means anything left out is subject to be grabbed and walked off with by little fingers. This method works only in spots of the house that are off limits to my kids, which there aren’t very many of.
For that reason alone, I very rarely use this method. Also, in general I find this method more helpful when organizing than decluttering.
Path 2: Leave Everything In Place
Your second option is to leave everything in the space that it’s in, then sort through the items. In this method, you are going to leave the bulk of the items in place and declutter one by one.
I know a lot of people struggle with this method when they are trying to figure out how to declutter a space, because this method makes it harder to see everything that you have in a particular space.
This is especially true when you are working in spaces like pantries or closets. However, the upside of this is that if you have limited time to declutter, you aren’t left with a mess afterwards that causes more stress.
As a parent of young children, I often have to use this method to tackle spaces. Sometimes my decluttering time is limited to 15-30 minutes and taking everything out of a space to declutter it just isn’t feasible. The kids will wake up and then I’ll have to deal with a mess and kids who think everything from a cardboard box to that expensive vase is a toy.
In the end, choose the method that works best for you. Part of learning how to declutter is learning about yourself and how you function. There is no right or wrong way to declutter as long as it gets done.
Step 4: Identify Projects from decluttering
Sometimes when you are decluttering you’ll find other projects that need to be completed. Now it’s very tempting to start in on those right away. Don’t do it! Part of learning how to declutter is learning restraint.
You don’t want to be stuck with a bunch of half finished projects. Then you will be in a cluttered and probably messier spot than you started with. Instead, write down the project so that you don’t forget to tackle it later.
Let’s take pens for example. I have a pen jar with probably 50 pens in it. Going through and making sure each one works is a tedious task. Some of them were good for sure, some of them were specialty use.
But the pens were all contained and I actually had room for more. Going through the task of sorting through all the pens, while it was a necessary task, it didn’t need to be accomplished right at that moment.
Sorting through them would be counterproductive to the decluttering processes. So rather than sorting through them, I added them to my decluttering project list and kept decluttering the spot I had designated to work on. This kept in on my radar but didn’t stop me from completing my task.
Now keep in mind, you’ll be performing Steps 3 and 4 at the same time. Keep working on getting rid of things. Once you’ve gone through all the items in that area, congratulations you are done! You’ve got a decluttered area!
Yes, it’s that easy, but it can still be daunting. Fortunately, if you still need help with learning how to declutter, I am here to help with Part 2!
Part 2 of this series will cover Steps 5-8 that I listed above.