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

by Dana K. White

Decluttering Mind-Set

WHAT DECLUTTERING IS AND ISN’T

Decluttering is stuff you don’t need leaving your house.

Decluttering isn’t Stuff Shifting.

Decluttering isn’t organizing.

decluttering and organizing were two different things and that it was okay to just declutter,

As things left, life was easier, and my home functioned better than it had after any of my attempts at organizing, just because there was less.

decluttering actually is: achieving less.

Decluttering is achieving less

deslobification. It’s what I call the process through which I improved my own home from a constant state of oh-my-word-what-is-wrong-with-me to I-can-totally-do-this-even-though-it’s-never-going-to-be-perfect.

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 what I can consistently manage If it’s out of control it exceeds your clutter threshold

Once I defined clutter this way, I finally understood why my friend and I can buy the same décor, and her house looks like a magazine but mine looks like a thrift store.

Decluttering Paralysis, a real phenomenon that makes me unable to move when facing an overwhelming mess. I cured it by moving. By starting with the easy stuff. And strangely, every time I did something easy, the space looked better, and I was less overwhelmed.

better is better/success/enough vs house perfect or minimalism or konmai

Decluttering Regret (the realization that I need something after I declutter it) isn’t fun, I’ve survived every time. And the peace I feel over a home that’s easier to manage outweighs the frustration I feel over having to write “medium-sized cutting board”

Decluttering Momentum.

Start somewhere make it any better - especially in most visible spaces - and it inspires decluttering momentum and lessens overwhelm

visible, measurable improvement

Any better is still better

I had to dig my way out, and it was the most unnatural thing I’d ever done. If I’m left to my natural tendencies, clutter builds, and clutter stays.

We were ready for the future and all the possibilities it could possibly bring.

Stuff for the life you live today and space for you and your family to live today

totally-useful-in-the-future stuff.

With the you-never-know-what-you’ll-find excitement of garage sales and the might-as-well-keep-it-if-there’s-any-chance-I-might-use-it-one-day mentality I already had, our already cluttered home grew more and more cluttered.

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 for now

stop assuming I knew what I’d love to already have in the future.

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

There’s a constant rotation of dishes and newspapers and school projects going onto and off of our table, but that table can’t be the permanent resting place of anything that doesn’t directly contribute to eating dinner as a family.

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.

I’ve experienced the joy of an after photo and the agony of another disaster reappearing in that same space. And I’ve decluttered again. You can totally do this. I did.

YOUR HOUSE IS A CONTAINER

Container Concept. The basic idea is this: the purpose of a container is to contain. According to Dictionary.com, contain has multiple definitions. These are the ones that speak to my clutter-collecting soul: to keep under proper control; to prevent or limit the expansion, influence, success, or advance of; to succeed in preventing the spread of1

kept buying containers, filling them up, and buying more. And my house was worse off every time I did. I was using those containers incorrectly because I didn’t understand their purpose. Used properly, containers are limits. They keep clutter from spreading. They keep stuff under proper control by preventing and limiting the expansion of that stuff.

I assumed there was a solution lurking just beyond my current organizing abilities. Someday, when I reached that elusive State of Organization, my stuff would all work together perfectly, and I’d be glad to have whatever I already had. But as long as I was using containers incorrectly, I was never going to reach that State of Organization.

what I’d have done before I understood the Container Concept: bought more wall-hanging-organizing thingies and more scarf hangers until the floor was clear but there was no more wall space because it was covered in wall-hanging-organizing thingies and no more room for my clothes because the closet rods were full of scarf hangers.

Scarf example of difference btwn organization and decluttering

I might have tried to do some math. Multiply the number of days in a month with scarf-appropriate weather by some other number that entered my unnecessarily analytical brain. I might have researched scarf trends and color palettes and tried to determine which scarves were on their way out of style. I’d hold each scarf up, maybe try it on, and analyze it for its inherent worthiness. I might even research which colors look best with my skin tone. I might close my eyes, take a deep breath, and try to recall how I felt the last time I wore each one. And all that time, all that thinking, all that analysis would let me get rid of eight to ten scarves—not even enough to make a visible dent in the piles.

once I understood the purpose of containers, I was freed from my overthinking. Once I understood that the purpose of a container is to contain, I saw that though the container held the scarves, its most important purpose was to limit the number of scarves I kept. Once the scarf container was full, I knew how many scarves I could keep.

Scarf example of container concept

Anything can be a container: a wall-hanging thingy, a scarf hanger, a few nails in the wall, a drawer in your dresser, a basket, a shelf, whatever. Any defined space

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

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.

Closet as a containet

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. No angst. No emotion. No analysis. I just picked out my favorites, put them in the container, and knew that when the container was full, anything left wasn’t as loved as the ones in the container.

it really had never occurred to me that there was a limit to how much stuff I could have in my house.

I didn’t know I was living above my Clutter Threshold. I didn’t know I was exceeding both the limits of what I could handle and the space available in my home, because I didn’t know there were limits. I didn’t know my house was a container.

decisions exhausted me. When I tried to declutter, I examined each item, attempting to assess its value to my current life, my family’s current life, and our future life as a whole. I analyzed the importance of each and every item, trying to predict how much I’d use it if I kept it or how much regret I’d feel if I purged it. Even after all that fretting, I might not have made a difference in my home. Or a difference in how we functioned. Understanding the Container Concept fixed this completely.

The decision became, “Do I like this more than that?” Favorite things got first dibs at container space. Things I liked (but weren’t favorites) could totally stay, guilt-free, as long as there was space. Things that didn’t have a current purpose or need didn’t get to stay, and I didn’t even feel bad about that. There simply wasn’t space.

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.

excess stuff was ruining my ability to enjoy and function in my home.

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. Many people are born knowing this. People like me are not.

One in one out if it doesn’t fit the container then do I like or need this more than that

FAMILY NEEDS SPACE IN THE CONTAINER TOO

As I changed my focus from deciding to fitting, I had another moment of life-changing understanding: if my entire house is a container, my family...

The kitchen isn’t only a holding space for pots and pans and forks; it’s ...

appreciate the purposes of the rooms in my home.

Once I decluttered, my house was bigger. With each nonpiled space I cleared, I gained usable square footage. I got the bigger house I wanted, but not by taking out a bigger mortgage. I got that house by accepting the limitations of the house I already had.

VALUING SPACE OVER STUFF