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

by Dana K. White

The goal here is to get stuff out of the house. And that’s it. And that is enough.

Do what you want to do. There’s no wrong way to declutter. As long as stuff you don’t need leaves your home, you’re doing awesome.

Decluttering is stuff you don’t need leaving your house. And that’s really all it is. If five things leave or five hundred things leave, you’ve succeeded.

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 my kids can easily get dressed for school because the only things in their drawers and closets are clothes that fit. Not clothes they outgrew two years ago or clothes they’ll grow into someday. Living now means open floor space so my sons can wrestle. It means I can walk to my bathroom in the middle of the night without stubbing a toe. It means my daughter has space to dance around in her room. I know these things are obvious, and I would have said they were obvious to me too. But I wasn’t living like they were obvious.

You can totally do this.

If a closet needs to hold all your clothing, the size of that closet determines how many clothes you can have. It’s a limit. And if you have more clothing than will fit in the closet, you have clothing outside that closet. Clothing with no home because its home is already full. And that’s how the Out-of-Control Home Thing happens.

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

Once I realized my bookshelves were containers for books, I filled them with my favorite books first, and then, once they were full, I got rid of the books that didn’t fit. That worked so much better than what I’d done before: lamenting the lack of bookshelf space and buying another bookshelf, and then lamenting the lack of space in the room for bookshelves, and then lamenting the lack of money available to buy a new home with more space for bookshelves.

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

Open space makes me like my home more. Boxes and piles of stuff don’t.

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

As a long-term strategy, following the Visibility Rule means starting again in the most visible places with each decluttering session. Re-clutterers like me resist this. How will I ever get to the rest of the house if every decluttering session starts with those same visible spaces? When a space I’ve decluttered becomes re-cluttered before I get to the next space, or as I’m working on the next space, it feels like no progress will ever be made and I’ll never get to the spaces where we live our daily lives.

In real life, the Visibility Rule plays out like this: When you’re ready to declutter, go to the front door (or whatever door your guests enter). See what your guests see, and start there. Starting in that visible space every time will maintain your overall progress and will (really, I promise) eventually lead to your whole house being decluttered. At the same time.

Clear spaces make me happy every time I walk past them, and that is the biggest reason I have to follow the Visibility Rule. Following the Visibility Rule means my fleeting decluttering energy won’t flee quite so quickly. It will renew itself. Perpetuate.

Using my energy on a space I’ll see every single day creates visible progress. Visible progress makes energy sustainable. Which makes decluttering sustainable. Which, over time, affects my entire home.

Following the Visibility Rule is important, but if you don’t, there’s no wrong way to declutter. If you’re getting stuff out of your house, you’re succeeding. If your home functions better, go you! Any decluttering at all is a win for sure. But if you’re constantly frustrated because you can’t make sustainable progress, repeat to yourself, Visibility, visibility, visibility.

Dealing with daily stuff every day means that when it’s time to clean, you get to skip this layer. That makes cleaning so much easier and so much more likely to happen.

Layer three is cleaning. It’s counter-wiping and floor-mopping and surface-dusting and carpet-sweeping. And while it will never be fun, I still find myself shocked by how much easier it is when I don’t have to catch up on daily stuff and decluttering (or, honestly, Stuff Shifting) first.

Cleaning and decluttering are not the same thing. And daily stuff isn’t cleaning either. But rather than let yourself get depressed over this fact of life, here’s some hope. This book is all about layer two: decluttering. The beauty of focusing intensely on layer two is that it’s the only layer that lasts. Daily stuff has to be done every day for the rest of your life, and the effects of cleaning don’t last. Dust falls, toilets get used, and toothpaste splatters on the bathroom mirror. It never ends. But once something leaves your house, it’s gone. And the more things leave, the more that layer becomes a non-issue and makes the other layers so much less overwhelming and quicker to tackle.

Shouldn’t I use my decluttering energy on real decluttering instead of on these tedious daily things? Yes, except this daily stuff is clutter because you haven’t been dealing with it daily. If you dive into the tough decluttering stuff and ignore the procrasticlutter, you’ll feel like your efforts were wasted even though you worked all day. The room will still look messy. But if you do the easy stuff first and deal with the procrasticlutter, at the end of the day you’ll see progress. The room will look better. Seeing progress is so much better than telling yourself you made progress even though you can’t see it.

Once I made the decision to donate everything, I felt incredible freedom, and I was able to move through my clutter so much more quickly.

When I declutter, I feel happy as things leave my home. The literal weight of that stuff is gone, and I’m thrilled to have open space. But I also find joy in the things I keep. I keep the things we need and love, guilt free, because I’ve accepted the size of the container that is my house and acknowledged that these treasured things deserve space in that container more than other things that I didn’t love. And something beautiful happens: the things I love have room to breathe, and this lets me breathe as well. The things I love are now visible, and the things I need are now findable, not crowded out by a mass of stuff I don’t even care about. 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.

Don’t get overwhelmed and stop reading. These instructions work whether you’re planning to declutter twelve hours a day for seven days straight, or you only have five minutes today and seven minutes tomorrow and who knows what will happen after that.

No matter when you stop, you’ve made progress. In a perfect world, with a guaranteed three days available to devote to decluttering, what makes sense is to pull everything out of a space and then only put back what has a home. But no one I know lives in a perfect world. As long as the take-it-there-now principle is followed, the mess gets smaller and doesn’t become a bigger mess outside the space that once held the clutter. This also allows measurable progress to be achieved, even if you get interrupted.

To declutter at the speed of life, you have to accept that life happens. By making a final decision about the fate of each item as you pick it up and then acting on that decision (trashing it, donating it, or taking it where it goes immediately), at any point when you get distracted, you’ve made progress. There are no Keep Piles or Keep Boxes to deal with later.

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.

But what about the intense desire to go bookshelf shopping so you can keep all the books? This is a living area, right? It’s for living. There needs to be room for living. For sitting. For reading. For talking, for plopping down on the couch, for resting together as a family. This means the goal of this room isn’t to fit as many books as possible. It’s not a storage room or even a library. If another bookshelf would make living more difficult, don’t do it.

Identify the essentials needed to help this room serve its purpose. For us, that’s super comfortable seating for five and decently comfortable seating for eight. And a TV we can all see from any of those seats. Anything else has to prove itself worthy of being in this room.

The goal here, as always, is to reduce the overall volume of stuff. Reducing the volume of stuff reduces the visible scariness of the task and helps you gain momentum in this room.

My point is that you need to either eat the garbanzo beans or get rid of them. And no, I have no idea how long garbanzo beans are nonpoisonous after their expiration date. You’ll have to search the Internet for that too. Or you can throw them away.

If you believe expired food is good enough to eat, then eat it. If you hesitate to eat it, throw it out.

But remember your goal: a house that’s easier to manage because it doesn’t hold stuff you are never going to use. And you aren’t going to use food you’re not willing to eat.

I suppose it’s possible there is no trash in that pile. But prove it. Do not assume you know what’s in the pile. Look. Always look.

A bedroom is for sleeping. It needs to hold a bed, and the bed needs to be easily accessible. Stacks of books creating a maze that leads to the bed aren’t okay. This is a bedroom. But a bedroom is also referred to as so-and-so’s room. My husband’s and my room is our room. My sons’ room is the boys’ room, and my daughter has a room. Other areas of the home are communal, but bedrooms are where individuals keep personal treasures.

We had favorites, and identifying our favorites made decluttering simple because we could easily identify which things weren’t our favorites. We saw the dividing line between the things we liked wearing and the things we only wore if we had nothing else to wear.

We’ve established that the size of your house is the size of your house. If it’s important to you that bedrooms function as bedrooms, the kitchen functions as a kitchen, and the living areas function as living areas, then this space you have available is the limit to the amount of hobby-related paraphernalia you can keep.

Which hobby are you actually doing? That’s the one that deserves shelf space.

If things are being stored for a purpose, this space needs to be usable as a storage space. The most important feature of a functional storage space is get-it-out-ability. If there’s a reason to store something, it also needs to be accessible.

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.

Look. Always look. Remember? I have to make myself look, no matter how sure I am that I know how I’ll feel when I open that box. Because one thing I know for sure after fifteen years of mothering is that I don’t have the razor-sharp memory I still seem to think I do. Looking is the only way to know if the stuff inside the box (or at the bottom of the pile) is as emotionally volatile as I’m confident it is.

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

People matter more than stuff.

willing to change, they first need to feel accepted as they already are. As someone who desperately needed to change her ways, I can tell you this is true. I needed to feel accepted by the person who was trying to help me. Feeling judged made me want to defend myself, and this meant defending the way I’d been doing things, even when that way was so clearly disastrous.

But soon, because of a lack of consistent pickup times, costumes covered the floor, teeny-tiny parts were strewn across the entire room, and the books were falling off the bookshelves. It was scary, so I avoided going in there. The longer I avoided going in there, the more horrifying the space became. The more horrific the space became, the less my kids went in there. No one was playing in the playroom because the playroom was a disaster. It, therefore, was not a playroom. It was a toy-storage room in total disarray. As I worked on my own deslobification process, I worked in that room. I decluttered. I saw that the less there was in that room, the more my kids played in there. It’s a phenomenon most parents have experienced. Kids are restless with nothing to do as they sit on the floor surrounded by toys. Put those toys away, and the imaginative play begins.

What’s the real purpose of a playroom? That’s the question. Is it a place for storing toys or is it a place for playing? Because without clear direction one way or the other, chaos happens. When our playroom was a wreck, my kids didn’t want to play in it. When they didn’t want to play in it, they brought their toys into other parts of the house. Then, when we cleaned up the house, I told them to take their toys to the playroom, but because the playroom was a disaster, that meant literally throwing them on top of the pile.

My kids were happier with fewer toys.

I looked into a room jumbled with piles of random toys and costumes and games, and the sheer chaos made the thought of cleaning overwhelming. My kids looked into a room jumbled with piles of random toys and costumes and games, and the sheer chaos made the thought of finding something to play with overwhelming.

You’ve likely collected many containers over the years in your attempts to get this room under control. Use them, but also acknowledge that the room itself is a container, and you may have too many containers to fit in the room.

As you purge containers, consider: What kinds of containers work and which ones don’t? How many containers can the room easily hold, and how much can fit easily in each one? Easily is the key word here. Getting stuff out is fun. Putting things back isn’t. Putting things back needs to be as uncomplicated as possible. Simple storage solutions are better than complicated ones.