Decluttering at the Speed of Life Quotes

“Accept the limitations of the space you have, and declutter enough that your stuff fits comfortably in that space.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“Touch things. I’ve said it again and again. Look. Always, always look. Assuming what is in a box or at the back of a shelf does no good whatsoever. But assuming is the hardest thing for me to fight in my war against clutter. I see a mass of stuff and assume it’s full of emotions. I assume every last item in the pile, box, or closet will rip my heart right out of my chest. Every single item will represent a part of life I’m not ready to accept is over.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“Decluttering Question #1: If I needed this item, where would I look for it first? Take it there now. Decluttering Question #2: If I needed this item, would it ever occur to me that I already had one?”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“a common trait among people who struggle with clutter: they’re interesting, and they like interesting stuff.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“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.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“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.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“I didn’t decide anything. I didn’t figure out anything. I just accepted that limits were limits. And accepting limits was strangely freeing.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“An amazing bargain that ultimately makes my life more difficult isn’t an amazing bargain at all.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“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.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“As I got rid of obviously worthless stuff, I started realizing I loved something else.
I loved space. Open space. I had no idea how much I would love open space because I'd always filled every space that was mine.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“As long as you’re living, there will be new stuff coming in and old stuff that needs to leave. And that’s fine. Accepting this universal truth took me far in my own decluttering journey.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“Remember your goals are “better” and “less,” so progress is everything.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“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.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with 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.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“If I feel like my head is going to explode over a decision that isn’t life changing, but feels totally life changing, I choose to declutter the item. Because no item is worth my head exploding.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“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 overwhelming and quicker to tackle.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“As long as you actually sell them. I have an entire chapter about how deciding to donate instead of selling significantly accelerated my decluttering progress.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“In real life, distractions happen. Resist the urge to be super-duper efficient and throw everything into a box so you can deliver items to their “where would I look first?” homes on one big trip through the house at the end of the project. 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.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“Envisioning perfection inhibits more than it inspires.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“Are you keeping these things because you love them, or because you feel guilty about not keeping them? Can you use them?”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“Two things happen when a room isn’t defined: it becomes a storage room (and storage rooms aren’t good places to hang out or to sleep), or it becomes a dumping ground for temporary things that become less temporary and eventually turn into storage.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“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.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“Grieving is the process of emotionally navigating a loss. Navigating the loss of a dream is where grief can come as a surprise. It’s possible to grieve something you never had. This is what so many people grieving the loss of a loved one are experiencing. The loss of a loved one’s presence is devastating, but grief returns in waves as time brings reminders of things that should have happened for that one who is gone. A parent who loses a child also loses the opportunity to visit colleges with that child. A wife who loses her husband loses the partner who was supposed to be there to help make daunting decisions. And that’s what is important to understand about grief: There are stages, and walking through those stages isn’t only important, it’s necessary. And unfortunately, unavoidable. Prince Harry of England was interviewed in 2017 on Bryony Gordon’s Mad World podcast. He shared that at the age of twenty-eight he finally faced his grief over his mother’s death, sixteen years after she’d been gone. For years he thought he could avoid grief, but he couldn’t. He had to walk through it. There isn’t any way to get around grief. There’s only walking through, and even then it’s not about coming out on the other side unscathed. It’s about coming out a changed person. The stages of grief are real. Knowing what the phases are doesn’t prevent hurt, and getting through them doesn’t mean you forget. But understanding that the phases are legitimate and identifying your own stage in the process can help you feel a little less crazy. A lot of my own clutter is directly linked to denial. I have to fight against living in denial. If something is unpleasant or stressful, I’ll purposely deny it. Ignore it. If I think an e-mail is going to say something I don’t want to hear, I put off opening it. But”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“Big dreams that require decluttering usually also require grief. Require it. Grief is a thing. It happens whether you’re planning for it or not. Some people manage to go their entire lives without bringing home a minivan full of things they don’t actually need, but no one avoids the pain of life not going exactly as he or she planned. But sometimes you don’t realize that what you’re going through is grief.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“I’m all about living with intention, but living out that intention doesn’t mean the details look exactly like I thought they might.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“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.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“Decluttering is about identifying the stuff you really want to keep, in a way that”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“awesome.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“I used to have a dream (an actual, when-you're-asleep dream). Maybe you've had it too. In this dream I find rooms in my home that I hadn't known existed. I'm so, so excited they're there, and I'm relieved to learn my house is bigger than I thought it was.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff

“By making a final decision about the fate of each item as you pick it up and then acting on that decision (trashing it, donating it, or taking it where it goes immediately), at any point when you get distracted, you’ve made progress. There are no Keep Piles or Keep Boxes to deal with later.”
― Dana K. White, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff