Cleaning Tips

DE-CLUTTER IN FIVE MINUTES A DAY

The unending stream of stuff that enters our homes can easily get out of hand. It’s stressful to live with chaos and disorder, so how can we dig ourselves out?

Even if you’re home is already brimming with stuff you no longer want or need, solutions are at hand, and it doesn’t necessarily take a professional organizer to get you in line. Use these tips whether you’re just trying to recover order after a holiday or want to reclaim your space from years of clutter.

1. Five minutes a day really does make a difference. Part of our resistance to purging clutter is that it simply becomes too daunting of a prospect. We become overwhelmed with the largeness of the task looming before us and then immobilized. It might seem counterintuitive, but the situation calls for setting smaller goals. Instead of telling yourself you have to clean out the basement or “once and for all get this house organized,” think in tiny, doable bites.
   
   
2. While the pasta is boiling on the stove, take one pile of mail and go through it, or throw out a handful of items collecting dust in that classic repository, “the junk drawer.” When you get dressed on Saturday morning, take three items of clothing nobody wears from a closet and drop it into a bag that you will gradually fill and donate. After you brush your teeth, pick an item or two from your medicine chest that are dried up, expired or no longer used and discard them. Do a sweep through the house in search of old newspapers and magazines and put them in the recycle bin. You can go through piles of kids’ old schoolwork while you’re watching television, discarding what is no longer needed. Small, daily efforts really do add up. Take it a few inches at a time, and soon you will begin to see results, which will motivate you to keep going.
   
   
3. Keep a sturdy bag in your closet and make a habit of eliminating an item of clothing to give away on a regular basis. If you buy three new shirts, you should probably get rid of three to make room for them. If you don’t absolutely love an article of clothing, or you haven’t worn it in a year, it’s probably safe to let it go.
   
   
4. Likewise, keep a box or bin in your basement and periodically drop things in it for donation. When it’s full, drop it off and start a new one.
   
   
5. If your house is exploding with toys, put half of them away for a month. The next month, bring them back out and store the other half. Everything will feel brand new again to your children, and your home will stay neater.
   
   
6. Here’s the magic of setting five-minute goals for home organization. Once you get past the resistance of starting, something clicks. Five minutes of de-cluttering quite often results in enough visible progress to inspire five minutes more, and five more after that. Before you know it, you’re an hour into it and purging like mad, maybe even enjoying the process. But don’t go back to thinking big, or everything will begin to seem like too much again. Five minutes a day really will add up to significant progress. Odds are all these small efforts will also begin to change your daily living habits, so once an area is really organized, it might just stay that way.