5 Tips to Help You Start Decluttering Your Home

Clutter is by far one of the most common problems people struggle with. Regardless if you own a house or rent an apartment, it’s very easy to start feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things you own. Being exposed to clutter can raise your stress and anxiety levels, make it harder for you to concentrate, and even make it harder to sleep well at night.

As important as it is to cut the clutter in your home, there’s no denying that it can be a daunting project. With so many different places that need to be organized, a lot of people just end up feeling discouraged not long after they get started. These tips will help you stay on track toward a more organized home.

Start Small
When your entire home is disorganized and cluttered, you might be tempted to set aside an entire day, or maybe even a whole weekend, to dedicate to getting things in order. But no matter how ambitious you are, it’s really hard to spend that much time doing just one thing. As the day wears on, you’ll inevitably start to lose energy and focus. And if your expectations are too high, you might end up being frustrated by the amount of progress you’ve made -- even if you’ve actually accomplished a lot.

No matter how big your project is, start small. At most, spend 2-3 hours a day focusing on one area of your home. But if you don’t have to spend that much time each day to start making progress. Just setting 15 minutes aside each day to focus on organizing an area of the home will add up quickly without making you feel burned out.

Should it Stay or Should it Go?
Trying to figure out what to keep and what to get rid of is one of the most difficult things about any organization project. After all, if it was easy to figure out what needs to be thrown out, we wouldn’t ever have to worry about finding ways to get rid of clutter.

If you can’t decide whether or not to keep something, The Shelving Store recommends asking yourself five questions: Have I used this in the last year? Would I buy this now if I saw it on the shelf? Is this taking storage space away from something else? Am I going to be using it anytime soon?

See Your Projects Through to the End
When you have several areas in your home that need to be organized, you might feel like you should have several projects going at the same time. Maybe spend one day focusing on your linen closet, then work on the kitchen pantry the next. But unless you can actually finish organizing those spaces in one day, it’s best to stick to do one project at a time and see it through to completion before moving on to the next. If you start leaving projects half-finished, it’s very easy to put off going back to finish them.

If you have boxes of things you need to donate, throw away, or put in a storage unit, don’t wait to actually do those things. Otherwise, they’ll just stay in your house as clutter.

Prioritize
If you’re planning to organize your entire home, it can be hard to know where to begin. In every home, some rooms naturally tend to get more disorganized than others. Before you start organizing, make a list of all the rooms in your home, putting the rooms that need the most attention at the top of the list. As you go from room to room, start by organizing highly visible flat surfaces like tabletops, shelves, and counter tops since they’re all places that tend to attract a lot of clutter. And since they’re areas that you always see, it’s easy to feel encouraged by your progress.

Don’t Buy Storage Solutions Before You Organize
It’s easy to look at pictures of perfectly organized homes online and feel like you need to go out and buy a multitude of organization tools like storage bins and boxes. But as Apartment Therapy points out, none of those things will be of any use at all if they won’t fit in the space you want them to go in. Once you’ve gotten rid of your clutter, you’ll have a much better idea of what storage tools you’ll need and how much you’ll need to buy.