Welcome! Today is Day Three of the Decluttering Club! If you’ve been playing along, how did your house feel when you got up this morning? Did you notice the visible difference? I did. I walked into my living room and breathed a sigh of relief because the lack of stuff all over the floor made me happy.
If you’re new, go check out Day One and Day Two. Or start here. Or do whatever you want to do. It’s your house!
The goal of these Non-Overwhelming Decluttering Tasks is to help you see progress every single day in your home. VISIBLE progress that will improve your life even if you never get back to decluttering the rest of the week.
Today’s Task:
Make it fit!
If you’re new here, let me clarify that I am NOT telling you to use your entire body-weight to shut the drawer.
Starting with what is visible, make things fit.
Huh? A game-changer for me in my own deslobification process was grasping what I now call The Container Concept. It’s what Normal People don’t even know they know, but people like me don’t even know we don’t know.
Confused enough?
A container is supposed to contain things. It’s a natural limit that determines how much of something I can keep. So, if something doesn’t fit in the container, it has to go. I used to assume I just needed more containers.
And there are natural containers all through my house. Every shelf, every drawer, every closet, every room is a container. If there’s an overstuffed bookshelf in my living room, the answer isn’t to buy a new bookshelf, it’s to get rid of the books/knick-knacks/random-things that don’t fit on that bookshelf.
A bookshelf can only hold so many things. A room can only hold so many bookshelves.
I used to firmly believe all my problems would be solved by more shelves, more storage. I was so wrong. And that belief was a big part of my Slob Problem.
The Goal:
See visible progress in your home and be inspired to keep decluttering!
Start in your home’s most visible space. In the video chat we had on Saturday, most of you named your living room, entryway (or mudroom), or dining room as the most visible area in your home.
If you’ve ever spent all day cleaning, only to have the doorbell ring unexpectedly and your heart ache because the first thing your guest sees is still a disaster, you know what your most visible area is. Start there. People like me like to tackle a linen closet first, but that won’t produce visible results that will keep us going.
If you keep important papers in a drawer in the china hutch in your dining room and that drawer won’t close, see if there are any unimportant papers that have been shoved in there that can be removed so the drawer can shut.
That right there is a totally hypothetical example, people. Really.
But here’s where things can derail for people like me. I get totally lost in the purging-of-the-drawer and spend all the time I have available on that drawer. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Progress is progress. But my goal for today is to make as much visible progress as possible in as much of my home as possible.
So if I can stay focused on the fact that I am Making It Fit today, I let myself pull out the seventeen empty-and-totally-unnecessary envelopes and close the drawer. And then I start a list on a piece of paper (maybe on one of those envelopes I was about to stick in the trash can or recycle bin), or take a picture with my phone, or write “Important Papers Drawer in Dining Room” on the whiteboard in the kitchen so I’ll have a list to work with tomorrow when I’m starting to tackle more in-depth decluttering.
And then I move on to the next most visible space in my home and focus on making things fit in the natural containers in that room.
And add more things to my list.
And no matter when I get distracted (not if I get distracted, it’s guaranteed in my world), I’ve made visible progress and will wake up tomorrow to a house that looks better than it did when I woke up today.
If my Decluttering Energy remains tomorrow, I’ll know exactly where to start, but if it’s gone I’ll still enjoy a more livable home.
A few posts (and podcasts) to help you grasp these concepts:
How to Prioritize Decluttering Projects
Containers and Limits and How They’ll Change Your Life
Ooooohhhhh, “Contain”er. Now I Get It
Establishing Boundaries, Confining the Clutter, Whatever You Want to Call It
Replace, Don’t Add. A Clutter-Busting Concept
Keepable Resolution: Live in Your House (<– specifically talks about seeing your home as a container, a game-changing concept)
My Two (and only two) Decluttering Questions
How to Not Get Distracted from Decluttering Projects (by other decluttering projects)
Need company while you declutter? There are hours and hours (and hours) of my podcasts you can listen to here.
Want to talk about this live?
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Need more inspiration?
See my decluttering tips, tricks and stories (with totally real before and after pics) here.
If you’re desperate to declutter, For detailed guides, check out my books: How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind and Decluttering at the Speed of Life. You might also want to get the 5 Day Clutter Shakedown video course.
--Nony
I still struggle with this. Things are so much better then they were but some days I look around and see the overflowing stuff, the stuff that doesn’t fit.
I want it to fit, but some things I’m not quite ready to say farewell to yet. The ‘I’ve got plans for that’ things.
This year I’m going to be tackling the overflow more and trying to figure out what is what. What I love and what I don’t. I keep thinking it should be easy like it is when I’m just finding the trash, that it should be black and white, and I should be able to have my hallway overflowing with donations the way it was so often over the last year.
But I have to remember that one of the reasons I don’t have the hallway full of donation boxes in a blink of an eye now is because you’ve helped me create a lifestyle of decluttering. That when I buy a new top (like I did today) that I found a top to let go of. There isn’t 50 tops to say goodbye to and fill a huge bag with and get that ‘decluttering satisfaction’ from that a huge bag of clothes for goodwill creates. I have to remember that I am finding it easier to say farewell to the ‘harder’ items, but that they will be farewelled at a more sedate pace then the frantic need to reduce the stuff in my house that I started decluttering with.
Making things fit means something different to me now then it did a year ago. Making things fit now means eliminating the need for extra storage (because we don’t have any) and I haven’t got that figured out yet. I want to get to a point where I don’t need to have the winter things stored somewhere else, I want them to live in our drawers all year round. My house is a container and I have to find a way to make things fit. It’s hard, I still struggle with the making it fit concept but it seems like it should be possible now. A year ago it certainly did not feel possible.
You’ve done so well this year, Stella! Celebrate! Just keep chugging along, and don’t get discouraged!! Look back at last Dec. You’ve come a long way baby!!
Here’s to us, becoming much less slobby this year!!
Melinda
Melinda, your continued encouragement is heartening :o) thank you!
You just saved my life! We are moving house in a few days with 3 little kids (5, 3 and 1 year old) and we have to paint our current apartment… So we emptied out a couple of rooms into the living room. Mostly packed up but random odds and ends and half packed boxes. I thought I’ll lose my sanity and knew I had to wrap up the living room tonight so we can function “normally” and keep on packing more rooms. I knew I can’t pull out more stuff on top of this mess, so I just played a bunch of your podcast and they were just the right motivation to keep me going. Now I sit in a VISIBLY much better place than just 2 hours ago.
I’m suddenly seeing a bunch of your posts in my facebook feed, and they’re coming in just when I’m in major post-holiday declutter mode, it’s great! I’m managing to be more ruthless than ever because I realized that I’m always getting hung up on what-ifs and being way too practical with my decluttering. So many things could possibly come in handy later. Instead, I’m asking myself if I love this thing, is it really really great and doing its job really well. If so, I keep it. If not, I can let go of it.
And today in my feed, I see your post about having to declutter something you know you love, because there isn’t room (container concept). That’s another good reminder! And the post about it being OK to feel sad about getting rid of stuff was helpful, too.
I’m finishing up decluttering our game cupboard today and I will be armed with the container concept — everything we keep should fit in so that it is easy to access all the games in there.
Haha. Last night my dd went to bed early and the first thing I wanted to do was tackle the linen closet. She then woke up and derailed the plan, so tomorrow we start with the living room. Books. Books. Books.
Want to get really irritated? Try explaining your wonderful new discovery (the container concept) to a non-slob (that you are married to). Keep in mind, this person DOES NOT FOLLOW the container concept in many areas, but still, “they already knew that”…
I’m still glad I tried, though, because now when I lovingly point out that his (insert manly collection here) is overflowing the container, and that the solution is NOT another container, he has to at least consider the suggestion, because after all, he does know this concept! “Been doing it for years” and all that 😉