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

by Dana K. White

Every time I considered getting rid of something, my brain calculated how much money I might get if I sold it.

I already struggled to get things out of my house, and now I analyzed and planned how to milk every last possible penny out of every ...

Changing what I valued also changed the speed at which I could get things out of my home.

GETTING REALISTIC ABOUT MY DEBILITATING FRUGALITY

This is so great! How much am i really saving vs spending to store stuff i think i will need soeday??

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

If the living room has clutter on every surface and the dining room table is covered with mail, no one automatically thinks, Wow. Dana has been getting things done today.

So I created the Visibility Rule:

when I declutter, I start with the most visib...

This ensures the results of my efforts will be visible, which will inspire me to keep going, and my decluttering energy will increase instead of being sucked away by a proj...

UNDERSTANDING THE LAYERS OF A CLEAN HOUSE

LAYER ONE: DAILY STUFF

LAYER TWO: CLUTTER

LAYER THREE: CLEANING

Cleaning and decluttering are not the same thing.

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 ove...

SPEEDY DECLUTTERING

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

When I donate, I’m (almost) done the moment I place an item in a Donate Box. There is no work left to do other than take a trip to a local charity or make a phone call to schedule a pickup.

Selling on eBay required a holding area where things could stay until I had the time (and the season was right) to sell them.

Having a garage sale meant a garage piled high with junk while I collected enough stuff to make the effort worth my while

Even idealistic giving away was a problem for me. Giving things to the perfect person who would perfectly appreciate my thoughtfully unloaded clutter involved a detailed, complicated system of sorting.

When I began decluttering like my sanity depended on it, I simply did not have time to use my complicated systems. I just donated.

CONSIDER THE HASSLE FACTOR

Because of the Internet, there are a million ways to get rid of things, for free or for sale.

But there was hassle involved.

Even though I was giving things away, I was giving them away one item at a time. Each item required a description and photo to be posted online. That post had to be monitored for responses. I had to coordinate pickups, and this often meant multiple e-mails back and forth with a second or third person after the first or second person decided they didn’t want it.

For years I brought things into my home without considering the harm it was doing to my home, my family, and our well-being.

The best way for me to get stuff out of my house quickly, and without emotional hassle, is to donate.

But as I decluttered, the term came to my mind often. I liked the idea and realized that with my Clutter Threshold, I needed to aim for minimalism. I function better with less stuff in my home.

Bringing useful things into the house is fun, and using them is satisfying. Bringing random things into the house is also fun, but when there’s no use for them they’re not fun. They’re in the way, and they make living in the house unfun. Having to get rid of things, especially bulky, heavy things, is the complete opposite of fun.

how do you embrace this concept when you’re so far away from a minimal home?

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 so...

Start erring on the side of getting rid of things. Be willing to risk not having something that you tru...

Maybes ar...

What-ifs become let’s-assume-probably-nots. And wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-haves turn into I’m-su...

My house full of stuff was a huge project. A bajillion different little decisions that I needed to make. Getting started was hard because of the sheer volume of work that would be required. So starting from nothing seemed like the best idea.

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.

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.

USEFULNESS AND USING STUFF

There’s a difference between something being useful and actua...

USE IT OR LOSE IT

I suffer from TPAD (Time Passage Awareness Disorder). It is a disorder I made up, but it’s totally real. It means I rarely have a realistic understanding of how much time a certain activity will take. I assume it will take more time than I have, or I assume it will go faster than it ends up going.

HOW TO DECLUTTER IN WHATEVER CHUNK OF TIME YOU HAVE

Here’s how it works. The only supplies you need to start decluttering are a black trash bag (black, so people living in your house won’t be able to see what’s inside and suddenly remember why they totally need it), a donatable Donate Box (the box itself has to leave the house along with the stuff inside), and your feet (in most cases, attached to the ends of your legs).

Each and every item will go in the trash, in the Donate Box, or in its home.