How to Stop the Clutter from Coming Back

by Susan McCarthy

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Everyday practice: When you are finished in a space, "reset the room" so when you return everything is ready for you to enjoy and use the area.

Chances are that at some point in the not-too-distant past, you decluttered an area only to notice a month (or a week) later that clutter had crept in. You sighed in exasperation, cleaned the area again only to have the clutter reappear. At some point, life got busier than usual and by the time you lifted your head and looked around, the clutter had not only returned but spread. Ack!

Ack! Ack! Ack!

Unfortunately, no matter how much effort we put into decluttering, we’ll always have to engage in maintenance. While picking up things that clutter our spaces here and there during the week does help, you already know that a routine of daily maintenance is best. But, yeah, life, time, and all that stuff

What Is Clutter?

Although we may think of clutter as something that can be thrown out, clutter can also be anything that’s left in the wrong place. A mug put away in the cabinet is in the right place. A mug sitting on the coffee table hours after someone finished with it has become clutter.

This is why organized folks will often recite the axiom, ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ Annoying but true. Look around your home, when something doesn’t belong where it’s been left, it sticks out.

The Ten-Minute Tidy-Up

A ten-minute tidy-up is a laser-focused, high-speed clean-up. Each person’s tidy-up time will look different. However, a tidy-up does not involve:

• Dusting
• Sweeping
• Washing
• Wiping, etc.

A tidy-up is not cleaning. Nor is it decluttering. You don’t:

• Sort
• Order or organize or reorganize
• File more than five pieces of paper
• Empty an entire drawer, cabinet, or shelf

A tidy-up does involve returning items to their home. This could mean:

• Putting a coffee mug in the dishwasher
• Tossing the day’s newspaper in the recycling bin
• Clearing away supplies from a task like wrapping a gift or paying bills
• Clearing off the surface of your desk (at home or at work)
• Returning a book to its shelf

How to Select Your Space to Clear

Now, if you are at the beginning of the decluttering process, you may be frustrated doing a tidy-up because you’ll see projects that need to be done and you might get drawn into decluttering. I know, it’s difficult. You want to be done with decluttering, but, realistically, that’s going to take a while.

• You want to maintain what you’ve already decluttered. This means, if you’ve decluttered your office, then you want to spend ten-minutes at the start or end of every day filing the few papers that you acquired during the day, popping pens in your pen cup, taking your mug or glass to the kitchen.
• If you and your kids struggle in the morning to find everything they need to get out the door, then devote your ten-minute tidy-up to putting backpacks, sports equipment, musical instruments, and anything else needed for the day somewhere near the door. In the morning, you can add in lunchboxes and go.
• Walk through a room and put things away where they belong. If you haven’t yet found a ‘home’ for an item, this isn’t the time to figure out where it should go. You know something is out of place because you’ve already given it a home. If an area is bothering you, make a mental note to turn it into your next decluttering project.
• If you have kids, they can do a ten-minute tidy-up in their own room or play space. Be specific with what you want them to do – put art supplies in the proper bin, pick up toys off the floor, put dirty clothes in the hamper, move their backpack by the front door.
• Teens and other adults (adult children, spouse/partner) can choose an area to tidy (bedroom, office area, man cave, hangout spot). Again, this isn’t about cleaning dirt, it’s about putting things away.

At some point, you may get to the point in your decluttering journey, where ten-minutes allows you to tidy your home. 

How to Make these 10 Minutes a Habit

Some of the challenges of doing a tidy-up revolve around making it a regular habit. Once or twice a week probably won’t be enough. If you do it every day, then it will become a part of your day. If you only do it every so often, it’s easier to brush off the task until “tomorrow.”

• Decide when during the day to do your tidy-up. It can kick off your evening routine.
• Set an alarm for five-minutes before your determined time so you have a warning to wrap up what you are doing.
• Next, set an alarm for the start of your tidy-up. Then, set up a third alarm for when the ten-minutes is up.
• If you or the kids get pulled into a larger task or otherwise get distracted, you may want to create a five-minute warning at the halfway point to act as a reminder for what you should be doing. You can set these times as recurring alarms on your smartphone – do it once and you’ll be set. You can even create a different alarm sounds to act as warnings or definite start/stop time.
• It's also very effective to tie tidying to another task. Maybe you brush your teeth and then do a walk through your home. Since you brush your teeth every night, it will help prompt you to act.
  

Create Calm in Your Home

Although ten-minutes won’t organize your home, it will create time to put away things that were moved out of place during the day. This can help create calm because as you move through your home you won’t be faced with looking at loose ends and things to do.

​Ten-minutes of tidying your home is just one of the techniques I describe in my brief eBook, Why Can't You Stay Organized? which offers eighteen ways to maintain your hard-won order and keep the clutter from returning to your home.

As you continue to declutter your home at your pace, you’ll remove excess items that don’t really need to be in your home and you’ll also make decisions about where to store items.

This will make you feel more organized and calmer because you won’t have to decide where to put something, you’ll know. Don’t wait until you’ve finished decluttering to start a ten-minute tidy-up habit; maintaining the work you’ve done is just as important as starting to declutter a new area in your home.

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