5 Day Decluttering Challenge
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Welcome to my five day decluttering challenge! Below I’ve listed a series of five tasks, to be tackled over five days, to get you thinking about the benefits of decluttering and to hopefully start clearing a little extra space in your life.
Day 1
Clutter.
For many of us clutter is a constant intruder into our homes, cars, and even our heads.
The first things you need to do is decide that you don’t want to live an overwhelmed, chaotic, cluttered life for a moment longer. You have to be resolute that from this day forward, you won’t tolerate it in the way that you have been until now.
You CAN change things. It might not always be easy, but I have done it, and so can you.
What’s wrong with clutter?
Clutter:
- Reduces your ability to focus
- Makes you feel overwhelmed, and is even associated with depression, obesity and poor self care
- Wastes your time and energy
- Stops you knowing who you really are
- Stops you achieving your goals
It has a huge impact on your whole life, and it is really worth the time to:
a) declutter your home
b) learn the skills to keep it that way
Where do I begin?
Right where you are. You are exactly where you need to be. Your actions got you here and your actions can get you where you want to go. You can’t change your home environment overnight, but you can keep chipping away at it, day after day. Gradually you will see a transformation taking place.
Task: Take some photos
Photos of how you live now will be amazing to look back on. Take pictures of your worst areas and know that you’ve recorded your ‘before’.
Task: Pick one small project and FINISH it
For your first task I suggest something really small. Your purse, or maybe your bag. Or maybe the kitchen junk drawer if you’re feeling ambitious. Whatever it is, it should be small enough that you are confident you can FINISH the project in a day or two at most. Completing things gives you the confidence and the skill to take on bigger projects successfully (more on this in Day 5).
Half-finished things create clutter, mental overwhelm, and reduce your confidence in your ability to get things done. For each space you clear out, you can follow a set of simple instructions:
1. Take everything out.
2. Decide what does and doesn’t live in that space.
3. Recycle/donate/sell what you no longer need (being mindful of the waste we create is very important).
4. Throw away the things that have no usable life left in them.
5. Take all the things that DON’T belong in that space and find homes for them: As far as possible, always keep like with like (more on this in Day 2).
Task: Begin to educate yourself on over-consumption and advertising
Motivation is key to keeping going and changing your perspective on your stuff. I recommend the following two books as a great starting point (tip: get them from your local library):
Affluenza
Enough: Breaking Free from the World of Excess
Day 2
I mentioned this above, but when you are decluttering your house it will really help if you ALWAYS keep like with like.
By this I mean that all clothes should live together (for each person). All books should live together. All cables should live together. All paperclips should live together.
You get the picture?
Why do this?
Keeping like with like helps you understand what you own. It makes it easier to determine what you do and don’t use and it makes it easier to find things.
It also helps you appreciate the storage space that each of your groups of things requires. And it can help you realise that it might not be more storage you need – but less stuff.
Lost and found
Designate a drawer, shelf or cabinet as a “lost and found” area while you are working though your house.
Expect to spend weeks, if not months (it was years in my case) really getting to grips with what you own.
During that time you will find things that you thought you’d lost (adapters, puzzle and game pieces, socks, etc). Having a dedicated area for where these things go makes it more likely that at the end of the day all the right things will end up in all the right places.
Task: mentally allocate a lost and found area
Declutter the easy stuff
This next item is an easy win. Take a trip around the whole house, and gather up all the stuff that you know can go:
- Glass jars
- Broken flower pots
- The plastic bag collection
- Broken umbrellas, mugs with chips or cracks, chipped or broken ornaments, scratched CDs and DVDs, novelty gifts you are never going to use
- Used envelopes, directories, catalogues, magazines, junk mail, old manuals and newspapers
- Broken cables, old mobile phones and chargers, old memory sticks and broken appliances
- Threadbare/irreparably stained/outsized socks and clothes
- Books you know you are never going to read or re-read
This alone can amount to a huge collection of stuff. Don’t spend time debating over anything – if you have to think about it, move on for now. The things you are looking for are the things that you’ve been meaning to get rid of.
Don’t procrastinate
Sometimes we don’t get rid of the easy stuff because we’re waiting for the day that we’re going to sit down and sort things out properly. However, this is a backwards approach because:
a) you are making the job bigger than it needs to be
b) you are not “practicing” the act of decluttering and keeping things simple and tidy (the more you do it, the easier it gets)
c) in the meantime your home is suffocating under things you don’t even want to keep
Task: gather up and dispose of (remember to finish the job) all the easy wins around your house and garage
Getting stuff gathered together and OUT of the house can cause as much procrastination as dealing with more difficult things like sentimental items.
Useful articles on the website:
- Keeping Like With Like
- Get Rid Of The Easy Stuff First
- Minimalism and Finding Yourself
- Decluttering Is A Habit Not A Goal
- Why Minimalism Matters (It’s Life and Death)
- How Clutter Affects Your Health
- 10 Reasons Why We Can’t Declutter (And What To Do About Them)
That’s enough for today (you mean that wasn’t enough?).
Tomorrow I’ll have a big challenge for you.
Day 3
Today’s step is a great thing to do because it doesn’t involve lots of clearing out, but visually it makes a huge difference. The motivation to keep going comes from seeing the results of your hard work, so give yourself something to be pleased with.
Task: completely clear off your kitchen counters
Empty counters are lovely (even if the drawers and cupboards are crammed with stuff), and they give you more space to prepare, cook and serve food.
Don’t let anything be an excuse here. I have a small kitchen that was fitted out in 1980. It’s been somewhat abused (even before I moved in 10 years ago). It’s badly designed and the colours are awful. My apologies if you love yellow. It definitely wouldn’t win any pretty-kitchen awards.
However, I always keep the counters completely clear because it makes the best of a less-than-ideal environment.
Come on in!
Want to see an example of how much difference clear counters can make?
I invite you to take a look at my kitchen back in 2013:
It was a constant battle to do ANYTHING in there.
This is how I like to keep it now:
Quite a difference, huh?
How to clear your counters
Here’s a step-by-step guide to what you need to do:
- Get all things that don’t live in the kitchen, out of the kitchen.
- Paperwork tends to pile up in the kitchen. Gather it all up now and set it aside for tomorrow.
- Get everything washed up, dried up and put away.
- Examine what’s left on the counters. How often do you use it? Could it be stored in a drawer or cupboard?
- Put away counter-top appliances that you don’t use every day.
- Give every counter a good wipe down.
- Long term/advanced step: think about the appliances you have in your kitchen. I got rid of the toaster and the microwave years ago and I have never missed them.
Did you do all of that? Doesn’t it feel GREAT? Do you keep popping into the kitchen to have a look at how nice it is?
That’s the feeling I want you to have for your whole house, and eventually your whole life.
Step by step, we can all get to a place of clarity and simplicity. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Day 4
Unless you have made a concerted effort to go paperless (and even if you have), there is no way to avoid the steady stream of paper that comes into our lives and our houses.
Today we’re going to make some changes to the way you deal with it all.
There are two things that you need to do to keep paperwork under control:
- Recycle immediately the things that you don’t need.
- Have a simple system for processing the rest.
Easy eh?
Set up a system
1. THE IN-TRAY
The first thing you need to do to stem the tidal wave of paper is establish a base.
I started with an actual office in-tray for this, but a large empty space on a shelf, the corner of a cabinet, a cardboard box, or any other area can also work as long as you consistently use it.
This is about habit.
Once you designate your base, you have to put all your paperwork there.
Repeatedly.
Until it becomes second nature.
Even if you do nothing else this will help you when you next need to find something, because all un-processed paperwork will be in the same place.
So the first thing to do is set a location – do that now.
It should be accessible, in a frequently used area of the house, and spacious enough to accommodate a sizeable pile of papers.
Note: if you work for yourself, I strongly suggest having separate areas for business and non-business papers. It just keeps things simpler when you can clearly see home versus work. You can follow this project for business and home – it works for both.
2. HUNT AND GATHER
Now set off around the house and gather up every rogue piece of paper you can find (hint: now is a good time to filter out obvious recycling).
Don’t forget the pile you removed from the kitchen yesterday.
Check all the places papers normally end up – drawers, bedside tables, desks, even your car glove box and your bag. ALL paper should be piled up together.
3. BREATHE
You may now have a terrifying stack of things to deal with that makes you feel like giving up and going shopping.
Don’t do that!
Have a cup of tea.
Then press on with…
4. SCHEDULE
This email course is a gentle introduction. I’m not trying to reform you overnight, I’m simply trying to help you put systems in place to simplify the necessities of life. So although you might have expected step 4 to be something along the lines of process-every-piece-of-paper-until-you-get-to-the-bottom-of-the-pile, it isn’t anywhere near so awful 😉
You didn’t create a massive life-admin backlog in one day, and you can’t fix it in one day either.
What I want you to do instead is to designate one evening, each week, to processing your paperwork.
That’s it.
If you’re feeling really proactive, start right now.
Process what you can, then walk away. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to the bottom of it. You will if you come back every week and sift through what’s there.
Again, this is about habit more than anything else. And once that habit is in place, dealing with all the papers suddenly gets a whole lot easier.
If you know you’re always going to spend an hour or two on a Tuesday night catching up on admin, you won’t be phased by the endless bills and letters and reminders coming through the door, or the piles of school newsletters that your children bring home.
You’ll know that when say, Tuesday, comes around, you’ll grab that tray and get to work. Nothing will get missed. Nothing will get forgotten. And if you’re waiting on something, you can leave it in the tray until the following week. It acts as an instant reminder. It’s a simple, but very effective way of dealing with paperwork.
5. DON’T USE YOUR IN-TRAY FOR FILING
When something has been processed, put it away.
File it away in a cabinet. Put it in a box under the bed. Scan it and trash the original (make sure you back up your computer).
Don’t mix filing with active paperwork.
It helps with retrieval if you have some kind of filing system. When I first left home, I filed everything in two lever-arch files. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve needed a larger home for paperwork, so now I have a four drawer cabinet that contains everything for all of us, but essentially, the way I file things hasn’t really changed (alphabetical order).
Day 5
The fifth and final day!
I’m going to leave you with a project.
How many unfinished projects do you have?
When we start things and don’t finish them, it can lead to physical and mental clutter.
Every broken item you want to repair, every scrapbook you’ve started, and every piece of art and craft that you’ve begun, every single project in your life that you have started and not yet finished is taking up space. Not just in your home, but also in your head. Each time you see the box/pile/corner that has your unfinished project in it, your brain remembers “I need to finish that”.
Multiple this by the number of unfinished projects in your house and you can imagine the mental noise that this creates. Our homes are meant to be a place of relaxation and rest. They are not supposed to be chore-masters constantly reminding us of all the things we haven’t done, and all the things we’ve failed to finish.
It’s also not good for our confidence to be surrounded by things we haven’t completed. The sense of achievement we get from finishing something feeds into our sense of self-worth and our ability to successfully take things on in the future.
If you are a serial un-finisher, it’s time to think about how completing all the outstanding things could improve your home and even your life.
Broken stuff has the same effect
This also applies to getting things fixed around the house, such as squeaky hinges, broken handles, broken doorbells, missing curtain hooks, dripping taps, broken drawers, dead light bulbs, loose door handles, mouldy shower curtains, dead batteries, cracked windows and unfinished DIY. These are just a handful of the things that we can find ourselves living with for years.
Irritation builds over time. For example: after 18 months of living with a broken light bulb in the cupboard under the stairs (because the fixing is in a really awkward place, and there’s so much stuff in there you can’t easily reach it), there will come a day when you need something you can’t find in the dark, and it will be SUPER STRESSFUL because you hate the fact that you just can’t see anything in the cupboard!
You know what I mean?
Leaving projects undone contributes to that horrible feeling of overwhelm.
Overwhelm causes paralysis because no action is easier than any of the actions that are required.
And the vicious circle continues.
Become a finisher
Make it point to start knocking those projects off your todo list. Get things fixed. Get things finished.
Learn the value of completion and don’t take on more things in the meantime.
Focusing on one project at a time (all the way to the end) is more efficient and more enjoyable than having 15 things lying around that you haven’t completed.
Or decide not to finish at all
Sometimes we take on things that don’t work out as we thought. We start things and realise we don’t really enjoy them. We leave things unfinished for so long, they are no longer relevant.
You don’t have to finish everything you started in your old, cluttered life. Maybe you’ve got a cross-stitch project in a drawer that you began in 2012 and didn’t get around to completing. Do some soul-searching and decide if you really do need and want to finish that project. Maybe cross-stitch isn’t something you’re that bothered about any more. It’s okay to decide that it’s not as enjoyable as it was. It’s okay to pass it on to someone else or recycle the materials. Accept that it’s okay to move on. Life changes, we change, our circumstances change.
However, if you love cross-stitch and wish you had more time for it, then keep it. You will get your time back when you have cleared all the overwhelm from your life.
The End?
It doesn’t have to be.
These steps are to help get you started without leaving you in a bigger mess from trying to decide what to throw away. They are a little bit of help in the areas that we all experience clutter and overwhelm in.
Where you go from here is up to you. I hope that you will stay with me and continue your journey into living with less. If you want to make a deep dive into decluttering and really get to grips with living a more minimalist lifestyle, try my 37-part video course.
Decluttering has changed my life, and it can change yours too.