“What I know for sure is that when you declutter – whether it’s your home, head, or your heart – it is astounding what will flow into that space that will enrich you, your life, and your family.”
Peter Walsh
But surely decluttering isn’t quite as significant as this seems to imply, right? We’re simply tidying up!
Wrong.
In part one of this blog series on decluttering, we explored the effects on one’s mental health when you surround yourself in too much clutter over an extended period of time. When we say ‘clutter’, it’s not just about physical objects in your home or office, it can also be clutter online – from an overcrowded inbox or a crammed desktop folder, too many old apps on your phone, or even general disorganisation in everyday life, like having a handbag full of things you no longer use, an old diary with the wrong dates, a to-do list that lives haphazardly in your head instead of a notepad, and so on.
Clutter has become synonymous with all sorts of ‘mess’ in your life. But today we’re focusing on the physical clutter that lives in your home, and how you can tackle this using easy, tried and tested methods.
That’s the kind of clutter we’re good at getting rid of!
A word of warning before we dive in – don’t try to declutter your entire home straight away. Rome wasn’t built in a day! If you try the all-or-nothing approach, you’ll end up with nothing, having given up too soon and reverting to old habits. This is especially true if decluttering is new to you.
Now, let’s take a look at 5 ways in which you can become clutter free!
Before you go through piles of paperwork and sift through odd bits and bobs all over the house, you’ll need some tools for the task ahead, namely boxes and labels.
Get hold of five medium or large sized boxes (depending on how much clutter you have) and get ready to adopt ‘the five-box method’.
The first box should be labelled something like put away/find a home. You’ll find that you have plenty of items that just don’t live anywhere. Think about your pots and pans in the kitchen – they have a home. Nobody picks up a pot and thinks ‘where shall I put this?’,and then discards it somewhere, turning it into clutter. It should be like that with all of the items in your home. If you keep finding pens around the house, get yourself a pen jar. Batteries, lighters, keys, post-it notes, notepads, bills, envelopes etc – do they have a set place? If not, and you want to keep them, make it your mission to find homes for everything.
A second box should be labelled sell, and you’d be surprised at just how easy it is to make a little bit of money online from your unwanted items. Facebook groups are a great way of advertising locally, and most of the time, people will come and collect. If you’d rather donate, then that’s what the third box is for. Just make sure you actually get around to taking those items to the local charity shop because if you don’t, and it just sits there for weeks on end, then you really haven’t decluttered that box at all!
The fourth box is for things that can be recycled, and the fifth is for the bin. You’ll be amazed at how easy (and fun!) the whole process becomes when you use the five-box method. Just make sure everything doesn’t end up in the ‘put away’ box, otherwise all you’ve done is tidy up!
Armed with your boxes, it’s time to decide where to start your decluttering project. It’s a good idea to start small, so a bedroom is perfect. You don’t even have to tackle the whole room in one go. Start with a section of the room, for example the wardrobe. Once you’ve completed that area, tick it off from a written list, as you’ll enjoy the sense of achievement as you move through different areas. It’ll also keep you more focused. You can choose to do one section per day, or two or three sections at one time during a weekend, or whatever method you like best.
There have been a lot of studies in recent years about time blocking and how it helps you organise your day. It’s all about choosing to focus on one thing and disregarding other duties for a specific amount of time. For example, when you starting a workday, some people choose to focus on reading and responding to emails for the first 30 minutes or one hour – depending on how many emails usually come in. The more you do this, the better you’ll get at judging how much time you need for each task.
The challenge is not to use that time to do anything else, like checking your phone or social media, walking the dog, making breakfast etc. Then, once that time is up, purposefully move on to the next activity. This works extremely well when it comes to highly productive tasks like decluttering. Start small(ish), for example one hour, and set your timer. For those 60 minutes, try to fill your five boxes as much as you can. Then, do it again the following day or the following weekend. Schedule the time in and make it a habit. And if you like how this method works, why not adopt it for your hobbies, your chores and your work? Before you know it, you’ll be the more organised person you know!
Put some music on, have a cup of tea or coffee, light some candles if that’s your thing, and focus only on the task at hand. Don’t let your mind wander to what you could be watching on Netflix, or that last biscuit in the kitchen, or whether that email you’ve been waiting on has come in. Turn your phone off, or on airplane mode, and just get the job done. Not only will it make you more productive, but avoiding multi-tasking is actually hugely beneficial to your mental health. As Time Magazine said, ‘we are wired to be mono-taskers’. If you don’t make an effort to enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll quit before you’ve finished the first room.
This is easier than it sounds, thanks to modern technology and its wonders. Microsoft Lens is a free app that works with iPhone and Android and allows you to scan receipts, notes, and most other types of documents easily from your phone. With one snap, you can store the image as a PDF file or a Word document and then save it to your Microsoft OneDrive or to OneNote. There is a similar app for Google Drive users, so whatever your preference, there’s a way to digitise your paperwork and store and organise it properly.
So, there you have it: five simple ways to get started in your decluttering journey.
And if you’d rather get a head start by hiring an expert to come in and do it all for you, or get you started off right, simply give us a call on 0141 374 0373 or contact us at www.allaboutthemove.co.uk 😊