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When you start to go through your belongings, put everything in one of three piles: keep, donate, toss. Keep the things you want, donate what you don’t like or use but is still in good condition, and then toss everything that’s in bad condition.
For decluttering your closet, do this little trick. Put all your hangers backwards in your closet. When you wear something, put it back on the hanger facing the normal way. After a while, you’ll know what you don’t wear by which clothes are still on backwards hangers. Donate those clothes to declutter!
When you start decluttering, ask yourself if you love the item, or if it makes you happy. Most people don’t have space for unliked items, so don’t keep them around. You’ll be surprised at how liberating this is!
Also ask yourself when the last time was that you wore or used a certain item. For most items, if it’s been more than a few months, then you should probably get rid of it. No use in keeping items around that you don’t ever actually use.
If you have things that are broken or not working, then just get rid of them. If you haven’t fixed them by now, then you probably won’t get around to it. This is especially true for kitchen utensils. For some reason, we seem to love keeping broken utensils around.
Ask yourself why you’re keeping something around your home. If it’s because someone gave it to you and you feel obligated to keep it, then you can probably get rid of it. It’s been long enough, and there’s no need to keep things around your home that you don’t actually like.
Round up all the duplicate items you have and get rid of the extras. While it can be good to have extra paper towels, you probably don’t need four microwaves. Donate or sell the extra items to clear up space.
Make sure you keep decluttering an ongoing process. It isn’t something you just do once every year or so, unless you want it to take a long time. You should declutter about once a month or so to keep your home neat and organized.
One of the biggest causes of clutter around the home is paper clutter. Solve this with the three S’s: scan, save, and shred. Scan items that don’t need to be physical copies, save them onto a computer or hard drive, and then shred the physical copy. Just make sure you keep the items around like birth certificates and tax returns that need to be physical copies.
This may sound counterproductive, but I think it’s a good idea to only have ONE junk drawer. Junk drawers allow you to have a space where random items can go. Just keep it organized. Just because it’s a junk drawer doesn’t mean it needs to be messy.
All great tips and reminders except the paper clutter. I had a hard drive go on a new computer, a $6,000 computer. In spite of backing it up, I lost everything. 4 places tried to recoup my stuff – but no go. After that, no computer, no scanner, no printer for me. Shred you say, I went through 4 expensive paper shredders after my parents passed. Luckily my community has a free shred service twice a year, I use that otherwise I would have to spend an hour a day performing this task. Nope, not going to do that. Mind you this is my experience only. I have been hacked 6 times in the last 6 months and I do not use ATM or credit cards. The documents that are necessary are kept neatly, and properly labeled in a file drawer with duplicates held off site. This makes MY life as simple as can be. I know it is not for everyone. And think about it. First we had floopy disks, then cd’s, now zip drives, when that becomes outdated you will need to transfer again. No thank you, I have better uses for my precious little free time.
Excellent tips but as a very busy person I will just make a call to declutter my home and the results are satisfying.