Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

by Dana K. White

I’ve collected the supplies needed to live my ideal life and then pried those supplies from my own tight grip as I adjusted to the reality of the life I’m actually living.

I’ve consciously decided to view my home as a place to live instead of a place to store all my great ideas and their attached stuff.

Decluttering isn’t organizing.

I define clutter as anything I can’t keep under control. If a space in my home consistently gets out of control, I have too much stuff in that space. I have clutter.

Living for now became my new goal: living in the house we have, in the city where we are, and in the moment when we’re alive.

Living now means giving now preferential treatment over the future or even the past.

Accept the limitations of the space you have, and declutter enough that your stuff fits comfortably in that space.

I didn’t decide anything. I didn’t figure out anything. I just accepted that limits were limits. And accepting limits was strangely freeing.

And that is the One-In-One-Out Rule. If a container is full, and I need to put something in it, I have to remove something from the container to make room for the thing I’m putting in.

As I got rid of obviously worthless stuff, I started realizing I loved something else. I loved space.

An amazing bargain that ultimately makes my life more difficult isn’t an amazing bargain at all.

It’s a mind-set. And the mind-set is that life is better and easier with less. And it’s better to live without something you might use than to have something you don’t use. Start erring on the side of getting rid of things. Be willing to risk not having something that you truly might wish you had one day. Maybes are nos. What-ifs become let’s-assume-probably-nots. And wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-haves turn into I’m-sure-I-could-get-replacements.

So the point of decluttering isn’t to get rid of things you want to keep; it’s to identify those things and then to make space to enjoy those things.

There’s a difference between something being useful and actually using something.

Decluttering Question #1: If I needed this item, where would I look for it first? Take it there right now. The key word is would, which is a question of instinct. No pondering or thinking or analyzing needed. The second part of question #1 is ridiculously important. Take it, right now, to the place where you’d look first. Decluttering Question #2: If I needed this item, would it ever occur to me that I already had one?

Accepting the value of less allowed me to start, knowing I’d succeed even if less was all I had to show for my effort.

Give yourself permission to just declutter. Don’t worry about getting organized, and focus on getting the things you don’t need out of your home.

Surface by surface, shelf by shelf, you’re accepting limits of each container and, ultimately, the room.

In the kitchen, question #2 isn’t always a matter of whether I would go out and buy the item; it’s a matter of whether my natural inclination would be to make do with another kitchen tool that has lots of different uses and works perfectly fine for this job too.

I Stuff Shifted for years, even though I called it decluttering. I moved things from one area to another, assuming the problem was that I hadn’t found the right way to store it, not that I had too much.

And that is the only thing that truly is not an option at all: to keep stuff you know you don’t want because you’re so stressed out over the best way to get rid of it.

We’re reducing the mess. Less mess means success.

The purpose of a storage room is not to hold so much stuff I have to use my full body weight to close the door. (Which is something I’ve totally done.) The purpose is to keep things I’m going to need so I’ll be able to use them when I need them, and this means I have to be able to get to them.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. As long as the space is better when I leave, we’ve succeeded.

Would I pay to move this? Even if you’re not hiring movers, you’re paying with your own muscle and your own sweat. You’re paying for a bigger truck than you need, and you’re paying with extra gas costs and time if you have to make an extra trip for stuff you don’t actually want.