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

by Dana K. White

My favorite made-up word is 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. Going from a worse-than-bad home to a livable one is how I learned these strategies and principles,

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.

I suffered from 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.

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.

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. As my home changed, I changed. And decluttering got easier and easier. I’m so excited for you to experience that too.

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. This doesn’t mean forgetting the future exists. Living now means giving now preferential treatment over the future or even the past.

I’m telling you my story because I know how hard it is to completely change your thinking about stuff. I also know how hard it is to take advice from someone who doesn’t understand. I have stood in my own home, completely overwhelmed, crying tears of frustration and hopelessness over my inability to deal with the sheer volume of clutter. I have trialed and I have errored and I have succeeded. I’ve used every imaginable way to get stuff out of my house, and I know what works and what doesn’t. 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.

But I 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. But how? I thought the purpose of containers was to hold stuff. That’s why I kept buying more when the ones I had were full and I still had stuff that needed to be held. 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.

the Container Concept applies to everything: forks, shoes, cans of black beans, or books. (Yes, I just said books.)

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. The kind of container isn’t the issue. 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 that holds scarves is the scarf container. How does it work? • Fill the container with your favorite scarves first. • Once the container is full, you know how many scarves you can keep. • Donate the rest of the scarves. 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.

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 made decluttering easy, or at least doable.

realized that baskets and plastic shoeboxes weren’t the only containers in my home. Each shelf was a container. The size of an individual shelf determined how many baskets I could keep. The size of the cabinet determined how many shelves there were. The size of the room determined how many cabinets there were, and the size of my house determined how many rooms we had.

But those 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. 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 things I once thought I never could. 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.

Letting my bookshelves make the decisions for me was incredibly freeing.

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. And that is the 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.

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 needs to fit in that container as well. The kitchen isn’t only a holding space for pots and pans and forks; it’s a space for us to live.

Frugality is a condition I’ve suffered from since birth. Some days I brag about it; others I suffer its effects. After decluttering huge amounts of amazing bargains from my home, I’ve had to admit my frugality contributes to my clutter issues.

Even though my frugal side still tries to argue with the side of me that understands my reality, I’ve decided the internal dialogues are well worth my time. An amazing bargain that ultimately makes my life more difficult isn’t an amazing bargain at all.

I created the Visibility Rule: when I declutter, I start with the most visible spaces first. 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 project that gave me nothing to show for my effort.

Declutter that most visible area first, every time. The Visibility Rule serves as both a short-term strategy and a long-term strategy. As a short-term strategy, it helps me focus and prioritize. I have a place to start when I’m overwhelmed by the overall mess. Visibility! Visibility! Visibility! is a chant I can say in my head to stay on track. As a long-term strategy, following the Visibility Rule means starting again in the most visible places with each decluttering session. Re-clutterers like me resist this.

When you’re ready to declutter, go to the front door (or whatever door your guests enter). See what your guests see, and start there. Starting in that visible space every time will maintain your overall progress and will (really, I promise) eventually lead to your whole house being decluttered. At the same time.

I can successfully not see a mess, even a fairly horrific one, until the doorbell rings. But, strangely, I do see clear spaces. Clear spaces make me happy every time I walk past them, and that is the biggest reason I have to follow the Visibility Rule. Following the Visibility Rule means my fleeting decluttering energy won’t flee quite so quickly. It will renew itself. Perpetuate.

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.

Once I made the decision to donate everything, I felt incredible freedom, and I was able to move through my clutter so much more quickly. I made the decision about whether something needed to stay in my house or not, and that was the end of it.

Through my friends’ example I understand how minimalism works in real life, but 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 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 less stress by having less stuff. But decluttering with this mind-set is actually about keeping stuff. Huh? The definition of decluttering is getting rid of things I don’t need. But the point of decluttering is to keep stuff. The goal is a home free of clutter, right? A home where everyday living is easy and enjoyable, and my family can do the things we need to do without tripping over random junk.

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. I keep the things we need and love, guilt free, because I’ve accepted the size of the container that is my house and acknowledged that these treasured things deserve space in that container more than other things that I didn’t love. 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.

There’s a difference between something being useful and actually using something. It’s kind of a big difference. One of my favorite and most effective decluttering strategies has been to justify keeping things by using them.

Like less, the word better was a game changer for me. Ideas flow from my brain like water from a firehose that has lost its regulating valve thingy. My big ideas are sometimes so far from my reality, though, that I’m stuck doing nothing for a long time. When I gave up on waiting until I had time to make things perfect, I was shocked at the value of better.

Give yourself permission to just declutter. Don’t worry about getting organized, and focus on getting the things you don’t need out of your home.

Every home is different, and every space has its own challenges. But the same steps work no matter the clutter and no matter the depth of that clutter. There’s no need to reinvent the process every time you start. Just follow the steps.

Books are the most emotional of all clutter for so many people like me who’d prefer to live in a fantasy world over the real one.

Now let’s go back to books. I understand emotions over books, and I get attachment and sentimentality too. But, y’all, I had to eliminate emotions from my decluttering process. If I let emotions guide me, either good emotions or bad ones, I spiraled down a winding path of crazy. And I didn’t get much decluttering done. I let the container make the tough decisions. I don’t have to evaluate the worthiness of each book and somehow worry about offending these inanimate objects. I just have to let the shelf determine how many I can keep.

If you are overrun with paper, you’re overwhelmed. Just like any pile of clutter, a pile of paper seems to be a pile of decisions to be made, and paper decisions are the most overwhelming. But the same strategies that work with any kind of clutter work with paper clutter too. Get into the mind-set that your goals are “less” and “better”—that anything you can do to reduce the overall mass of paper clutter in your home will be worth the effort. Giving yourself permission to do something without the pressure of solving this never-ending problem once and for all is giving yourself permission to get started. Just Declutter

Always look. When a paper pile overwhelms me and I find myself pretending it doesn’t exist, I give myself permission to simply look. To feel absolutely no obligation to make any decisions at all. Just to look at each piece of paper in the pile and only get rid of the ones that are easy. Every single time I do this, I reduce the pile by more than half.

Decluttering Question #1: If I Needed This Item, Where Would I Look for It First?

Decluttering Question #2: If I Needed This Item, Would It Ever Occur to Me That I Already Had One?

Keep consolidating. Don’t worry, we’re not getting organized. This is still decluttering. Organizing would be pot racks and shelf dividers and such, and we’re not going there. But consolidating is part of decluttering. Consolidating is a reality check.

I have absolutely no idea how many pots or pans I have unless I’m looking in my pots-and-pans cabinet. And if I can’t see one pan because it’s hidden behind another pot, it simply doesn’t exist in my universe. Consolidating breaks through that mental block for me. To consolidate, I have to actively move things. Consciously look at things. What was a “decent number of skillets” becomes five skillets. The number five (a concrete number as opposed to my totally ambiguous concept of how many I might have) registers in my brain as more than I need. And as that realization hits me, my eyes are opened, and the three I rarely use (and don’t actually like) reveal themselves to me.

Step 1: Trash

Step 2: Easy Stuff

Step 3: Duh Clutter

Step 4: Ask the Decluttering Questions

Step 5: Make It Fit

Step 5.1: Consolidate

Step 5.2: Purge Down to the Limits of the Container

Container Concept. The size of the pantry space you have is the size of the pantry space you have.