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

by Dana K. White

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 is stuff you don’t need leaving your house.

My favorite made-up word is deslobification.

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.

Clutter Threshold is the point at which stuff becomes clutter in my home.

I suffered

from Decluttering Paralysis, a real phenomenon that makes me unable to move when facing an overwhelming mess.

Decluttering Momentum. It’s a real phenomenon. By starting with easy stuff and working through the steps

I’m sharing in this book, I saw visible, measurable improvement in my home.

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.

I finally understood what I now call the Container Concept.

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

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.

Every time I felt the relief of not needing to determine the value (monetary, emotional, whatever) of something and instead asked myself whether it fit into the container I had for it, I started looking for more ways to put this drama-free strategy to work.

And that is the One-In-One-Out Rule.

Comfort clutter is also a thing. Unfortunately, though, like comfort food, it’s not usually good for me.

So I created the Visibility Rule: when I declutter, I start with the most visible spaces first.

The short answer? Guests. Even if you rarely have guests in your home.

But I said something else in that 2009 post that reveals the need to follow the Visibility Rule: “When it’s clean, I love this room. It makes me happy to walk by it.”

But when I start again in that visible space after only a week (or a month) as opposed to months (or a year), I’m re-decluttering. Re-decluttering is shockingly easier than decluttering. I made the hard decisions last time. This time, it’s mostly a matter of putting things away. It’s mostly easy stuff.

The culprit is most likely procrasticlutter.

Procrasticlutter is stuff that’s technically

not cl...

It’s the stuff that will be done one day because it will have...

Procrasticlutter, by definition, is made up of things that require no decisions.

The most frequent examples of procrasticlutter are clean laundry piled on the couch and clean dishes in the dish drainer or the dishwasher.

But what do you do about them? Well, um, stop procrastinating. The best way to prevent procrasticlutter is to avoid it in the first place.

Dealing with procrasticlutter will come up again and again in every room we work through in this book.

The biggest advantage of donating is the speed at which I get stuff out of my house.

Donating is always acceptable.

Freecycle.org is a group that was around before Facebook groups were a thing.

minimalism.