The Secret to Tackling Clutter Once and For All
Let me tell you a story.
Girl comes home from work, walks in her house, looks around at all the clutter, feels dejected, overwhelmed, and a little appalled. Girl walks through house, keeping eyes above clutter and pretends it’s not there so she doesn’t have to deal with it. Girl does the usual things, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, leaves for work and does it all over again. Each day preceding the next though, somehow the clutter expands. When any work is done to the clutter, it seems to come back immediately, and sometimes with a vengeance.
This was me. I had clutter everywhere.
Full disclosure, this is still me—sometimes. No matter how many times I go through my clutter and donate the junk, throw away the garbage, so on and so forth, it always manages to come back. Yes the cleanliness is there and lasts for a while, but it’s never permanent. So what I’ve discovered through countless organizational purges, reading books and books on minimalism and living with the essentials, that realistically and honestly, it will always come back.
The cold hard truth that nobody tells you is this—clutter will always return.
I’m about to blow your mind with this concept. Clutter is like a weed that has to be pulled, it’s like trees that need pruning, and it’s like hair that needs a good hair cut every once in a while. It’s inevitable and it needs to be maintained.
Your home is a living entity that goes through changes and evolutions and this includes stages of clutter.
Right? Did your whole outlook on clutter just shift? Knowing it’s going to happen and accepting that fact is the first step to combating it.
SO WHAT CAN WE DO?
Here are three of the most important habits—I have found—that you can develop to help prune your clutter when it appears.
Throw away your garbage when it’s ready to be thrown away. Half the time, clutter is just garbage we haven’t dealt with yet. It’s the mail we opened but didn’t file away or shred. It’s the packaging for that thing we bought on Amazon. It’s the empty box of ritz crackers we finished but left on the counter because we didn’t have the heart to throw it away but we also don’t have the energy to go outside to put it in the recycle bin.
Put the thing back where it belongs when you’re done using it. If it doesn’t have a spot—a place it lives when it’s not being used—then it’s time to find a spot and start keeping it in that spot always. These are things we use but think we might need them again really soon so we leave them within grasp instead of walk across the room to put it in the drawer/on the shelf/in the cabinet.
Stop buying things. Another cold hard truth is this—you don’t need more things, so just stop buying things. There’s a reason impulse buys are called impulse buys. Because they are purchased from a place of impulsivity and not intentional thought. It’s the cute mugs you saw in the seasonal aisle, even though you already have nowhere to put the hundreds of mugs you already own. It’s the small toy you thought your son would love, even though you intuitively knew he’d play with it for about 2 minutes and move on. It’s the little knickknacks you get from the dollar section and justify buying because it’s cheap and you could totally use it but really it won’t get used more than once and usually ends up just taking space.
SO THERE IT IS.
Was it as much of a wake up call to you as it was to me? Are there rooms in your home that seem to clutter up quicker than others? Do you have any mythical rooms that don’t clutter up at all, EVER? Tell us your tips below on decluttering!
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