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

by Dana K. White

I’ve learned how to get rid of things even though I wanted to keep them all.

I will address (some of) your unique delusions. Certain things I say might make you mad. I know this because I despised facing my own reality at one time. Letting go of my own excuses was harder than getting up and decluttering. Just thought you should know.

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

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. Eventually, I understood that is what decluttering actually is: achieving less.

I definitely didn’t make up the word clutter, but I did make up a definition for it that helped me get it out of my house. 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.

I have a Clutter Threshold, and it’s unique to me. My Clutter Threshold is the point at which stuff becomes clutter in my home. When I’m living above my Clutter Threshold, there’s more stuff in my home than I can handle, and my house is consistently out of control.

Living under my Clutter Threshold helps my home stay more naturally under control. I found mine (and you’ll find yours) through decluttering.

But I’ve accepted that while 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” on my shopping list.

I accepted that people with homes that are consistently under control prefer living with regret over living with clutter. I want to be one of those people.

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.

And that was when I made a conscious choice to live in the phase of life I was in. Right then. I decided to stop assuming I knew what I’d love to already have in the future.

Revolutionary for me!!

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.

This doesn’t mean forgetting the future exists. Living now means giving now preferential treatment ove...

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.

I’m telling you my story because I know how hard it is to completely change your thinking about stuff.

ACCEPTING THAT YOUR HOUSE IS A CONTAINER

Container Concept.

to keep under proper control; to prevent or limit the expansion, influence, success, or advance of; to succeed in preventing the spread of1

Those definitions describe what I was desperate to make happen in my home. Keep things under proper control? Mm-hmm. Prevent or limit the expansion or advance of my stuff? Yeah, baby. Succeed in preventing the spread of clutter? Yes, please!

But 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.

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.

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 did not see my closets or drawers or cabinets as limits, ...

I complained that I had no room for all my stuff, but I was trying to keep more stuff than could ...

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.

This sounds crazy, I know, but it really had never occurred to me that there was a limit to how much stuff I could have in my house. I have a make-it-work personality, and I’m quick to readjust in many situations where this trait serves me well. But I also, unfortunately, readjust in situations where I shouldn’t.

Since limits weren’t a thing, I kept bringing more stuff into my home and kept feeling more and more overwhelmed, but I didn’t understand why. I believed I needed to get organized, to find a way to fit all the stuff neatly and in a totally maintainable way.

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 hom...

The stuff I put inside my house has to fit within its limits. When I live within those limits, the house stays under control so much more easily.

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.

Understanding the Container Concept fixed this completely.

When I understood that the key to successful decluttering was to purge enough stuff that I had only what fit comfortably inside the existing containers in my home (shelves, closets, and so on), no emotional decisions were necessary.

The question wasn’t whether something had worth; it was whether it fit in my container. And that let me let go of thi...

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 ...

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.

That’s how my brain worked before, but I had to stop the clutter. My excess stuff was ruining my ability to...

Letting my bookshelves make the decisions for me was i...

Because that’s reality. It’s not personal.

And I survived. Surviving freed me to bring home a new book without the sinking, guilty feeling that it might be the thing that makes my house implode with mess. I just had to decide which book(s) to remove so there was space for my new one.

YOU DON’T NEED A BIGGER HOUSE

When I stopped using living space to store things that didn’t fit in the rooms where they were supposed to go, I was finally satisfied with the home I had. And I accepted that as long as I didn’t live within my container, I’d overfill any house, no matter the size.

VALUING SPACE OVER STUFF

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

The same thing happened when I collected stuff to satisfy the what-ifs that plague my soul.

As a super-duper planner of all future possibilities, I grabbed things because I saw their potential to solve a future problem.

But even though I believed the items entering my home were valuable, the fact that they lived in a jumbled mess inside my home meant my view of the jumbled mess was skewed.

Later in this book I’ll share exactly how I broke through this feeling and got started,

And these things (plus everything that was already in my home) now had invisible dollar signs attached to them.