Decluttering and organizing your home can quickly feel
overwhelming and frustrating. If you're afraid to get started because it seems
like so much work, try doing fewer tasks at a time. When you take small steps to
declutter and organize your home, you can conquer the task much more easily.
Divide Things Up
Tackle only one room at a time. This will make your task appear
much less daunting. Avoid moving on to the next room until you've completed the
last one.
Try these tips for
organizing and decluttering your home in small steps:
- Choose your starting point. Select
a room that you can tackle in a day, rather than the most challenging one
in the house. Once you've chosen your room, start early, so you have as
many daylight hours as possible to work on your cleaning and decluttering.
- Basic sort. Go through everything
in your starting room and sort out items you no longer want. Everything
that you touch in the room should go into one of four categories: Things
you want to throw away, things you want to donate or sell, things that
should remain where they are, and things that you want to keep but that
are in the wrong room.
·
Use this sorting principle for every item in
the room. When you're finished, you should have four distinctive piles or
areas in the room. Each item in the room will be in one of the four piles.
- Remove trash. Simply taking all
the "throwaway" stuff out of the room will make a huge dent.
Keep in mind that personal paperwork should be shredded rather than simply
put into the garbage.
- Remove donation items. Anything
that you intend to sell, give away, or donate should come out next. Store
these items somewhere else in the house for now. Continue to add to this
section from each room in your home until you're ready to make one single
donation or yard sale.
- Sort the "belongs elsewhere"
section. Do not merely move these items into another room; otherwise,
you'll need to sort them again. Create a box or container for each room
for which you have items. Make sure that you definitely want to keep them
so that you can transfer them into the right room without having to sort
them again later.
- Organize what's left. Now that
you've removed large chunks of "stuff" from your room, you can
organize everything that remains. When you're only working with the things
that are supposed to be in the room, decluttering and organizing becomes much
simpler.
- Repeat this process. Continue steps
1-6 in each room until you've finished the whole house. When you handle one
room at a time, the process is much simpler and less stressful.
It's also important to take a couple of 10-minute breaks.
Walk out of the room, preferably outside if you are able, and the weather is
permitting. Don't go "do" something else. These breaks are for you to
take some breathes and possibly grab some water and use the restroom. You
really shouldn't take more than 10 minutes, though, unless you're eating lunch,
then give yourself 30 minutes.
Once you've finished organizing your house, take a few
minutes each day to ensure everything you've used during the day is back in
place so you can continue to enjoy your "new" clutter-free home.
Big tasks can seem overwhelming. Break your decluttering
challenge into smaller increments, and before you know it, your house will be
clean and organized!
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As always, stay blessed and live your life Enthusiastically!!
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