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February 14 - February 18, 2024
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. And that’s really all it is. If five things leave or five hundred things leave, you’ve succeeded.
Decluttering isn’t Stuff Shifting. It isn’t rearranging or buying a new shelving unit or sorting into slots or drawers or baskets.
Decluttering isn’t organizing. When I realized decluttering and organizing were two different things and that it was okay to just declut...
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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.
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.
Accept the limitations of the space you have, and declutter enough that your stuff fits comfortably in that space.
I didn’t decide anything. I didn’t figure out anything. I just accepted that limits were limits. And accepting limits was strangely freeing.
The question wasn’t whether something had worth; it was whether it fit in my container. And that let me let go of things I once thought I never could.
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 something you don’t use.
Start erring on the side of getting rid of things. Be willing to risk not having something that you truly might wish you had one day. Maybes are nos. What-ifs become let’s-assume-probably-nots. And wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-haves turn into I’m-sure-I-could-get-replacements.
Mind-set. That’s what this is. A change in my perspective. A difference in my ultimate goal for my home. A desire to have...
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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.
Decluttering Question #1: If I needed this item, where would I look for it first? Take it there right now. The key word is would, which is a question of instinct. No pondering or thinking or analyzing needed. The second part of question #1 is ridiculously important. Take it, right now, to the place where you’d look first.
Decluttering Question #2: If I needed this item, would it ever occur to me that I already had one? This needn’t be asked if question #1 has an answer. If there is no answer to question #1, it’s likely because I wouldn’t look for it because I didn’t even know I had it. If the answer to this question is no, I stick it in the Donate Box.
Envisioning perfection inhibits more than it inspires.
My advice is to go through the steps, focusing first on all visible clutter in the room, working on floors and surfaces and open shelves. Purge visible trash, easy stuff, and Duhs from the room as a whole, and then work through individual piles or corners of stuff that are out in the open.
Keep Boxes don’t work. They let me put off making a final decision. I can temporarily place a particularly difficult item inside, confident that the future version of me will know what to do with it. Future Me doesn’t deserve that much credit, and honestly, she doesn’t appreciate the pressure.
The decluttering questions work because they deal with reality only. Not possibilities, potential, or emotion.
