Decluttering your home should be about more than making your home look neater. When your home is organized, it gives you the time and space to work on goals that important to your life. But first, set a goal to organize your home.
You may think of January and New Year’s Resolutions when you think of the goals you want to achieve. But you can work on goals during any time of the year.
In fact, you may want to space out different goals throughout the year, so you aren’t overloading your schedule at the beginning of the year.
Maybe in the past you’ve woken up on January 1st and worked out for an hour before buckling down to do some decluttering.
You feel fantastic (“This will be the year!) and then your everyday life catches up with you. The problem isn’t a lack of motivation but a lack of planning. Wanting to achieve a goal isn’t the same as figuring out how you’ll get there.
Envisioning having achieved a goal feels great, trying to figure out how, when, and what you need to do to get there? Well, that requires effort.
These techniques apply to getting organized as well as any other goal you want to achieve.
Capture All the Thoughts
Grab a sheet of paper (or several, you’ll likely need several) and start listing all the things big and small that you want to do and would like to do. It doesn’t matter whether you want to do it this year or in a year or two, note it on paper (you can do this using a notetaking app if you prefer digital).
Just keep listing things related to any and all aspects of your life. Every activity draws from the same well of 168 hours a week. If you are choosing to take time to declutter, you are also choosing to not do something else during that time.
Instead of just saying, “declutter house,” list the rooms, closets, and storage areas separately. Don’t worry about capturing every possible activity all at once. Keep adding to this list the rest of today and beyond.
BTW, this is not a to-do list!
Organize Those Thoughts
Take the list from yesterday and start grouping the activities into categories. (This is good practice for organizing your stuff.) Give each category its own list. Yes, you’ll be rewriting your list from yesterday.
For example, are there activities related to your relationships, finances, school or work, personal interests (if you have a few, you may want to put each on a separate list), physical and mental health, and home? Make a list for each area of your life.
Take the list from yesterday and start grouping the activities into categories. (This is good practice for organizing your stuff.) Give each category its own list. Yes, you’ll be rewriting your list from yesterday.
For example, are there activities related to your relationships, finances, school or work, personal interests (if you have a few, you may want to put each on a separate list), physical and mental health, and home? Make a list for each area of your life.
Clarify Your Vision
Using your lists from yesterday, consider what outcome you want to see in your life in each area. An outcome isn’t a goal with specific actions and a deadline. Instead, it’s more about the results you want to achieve as opposed to the process you need to engage in.
Don’t look at your lists as you describe your desired outcome. Write about how you’d love to be in the future. These descriptions can be as long or brief as you want. You may even find yourself writing out one description that flows from one area of your life to the next.
Yes, this ties in with decluttering your home. Organizing your home may give you more time to focus on relationships or personal interests. Or you may realize that decluttering isn’t important compared to other goals you want to achieve.
Next up will be tying together your desired outcome and your lists.
From Desired Outcome to Goal
Read through the outcome or vision you wrote for the different areas of your life and then compare it to the list of projects and tasks that you compiled for that part of your life.
As you look down this list, are there activities that you realize you can cross off? Are there projects that you could move to a “someday” list because you realize you have neither the time nor inclination for them now … but you don’t want to give them up entirely.
What projects and tasks are your priorities? Note that you don’t have to work on all of these at the same time! Are there things you could do that would support both organizing your home and another goal?
For example, selling unnecessary things around your home may help your financial goals. Making time for your schedule to sell things supports clearing unnecessary things from your home.
Maybe you decide to host a few themed swap parties throughout the year as a way to build your relationships and clear things from your home.
Identify Your Priorities
Priorities aren’t the most urgent things that come at you during the day. But without a plan, you may end up focusing on the in-the-now urgent as opposed to priorities that may have a deadline but also may be connected to habitual actions and routines that you’ll do forever to maintain your priorities.
For example, you can give yourself deadlines for when you want to declutter the different rooms in your home. However, if an organized home is a priority, then you will need to engage in daily actions to maintain your hard-won order.
You may think, “I’ll just fit in tidying my home when I find the time,” however, we know that if something isn’t assigned a time, it’s unlikely to happen.
On paper, identify your priorities and then list the tasks that support those priorities in the long-term.
What Do You Want to Accomplish?
Sometimes it’s all too easy to name our goals as things that we think we already should be doing. This can be frustrating because we feel we’re behind before we even start.
Or we label a goal without really considering the work involved in achieving it. If it was easy, we already would have achieved it! And let’s not forget if it’s a goal you really want to achieve (or is it something you feel that you should do?)
It’s too easy for these thoughts to swirl around our mind, undefined. Instead, write a journal entry or two about your goals for your home. If you don’t like writing, talk to yourself, a friend, a pet, or make a video just for yourself. Get your thoughts out of your head so you can see what you expect and why you want to invest the time in doing it.
Create a Vision Board
This is optional, but it can allow you to capture your goals on a single page. You can go the old route of posterboard and magazines (or images found online and printed), you can use design software like Canva, or you can even try an app to create a digital vision board.
What image summarizes your desired outcome in the different areas of your life? Include that on your vision board. Place this board someplace where you can see it each day to remind yourself of your reason for your actions.
Is Your Goal Achievable?
Chances are rare that decluttering your home is your only goal. Unless you are canceling appointments and other scheduled activities because you have a tight timeline, it’s very likely that decluttering is one small part of your life.
You have relationships with friends and family. You engage in activities for your mental and physical wellbeing. You work or volunteer. You have personal interests. And you have other things besides decluttering (like doing laundry and vacuuming) to do around the house.
When you set your goal, is it achievable? Can you do the allotted work in the time you’re designating? When you first start working toward your goal, you may consciously or subconsciously trim other activities from your schedule, but eventually Book Club or a volunteer event pops up on your calendar.
While you may feel that your goal is achievable, is it possible with the time frame you are setting, based upon the other things you have going on in your life?
Define Your Goal
What do you want to accomplish? Can you word the desired outcome in a sentence or two? What do you envision as the result? The more clearly you can identify the outcome, the easier it will be to plan because you can’t plan a vague goal.
How do you define your goal for organizing your home this year? Are you referring to the living spaces or are you also including storage areas like the garage and basement?
What would “organized” look like for you? Finding what you need when you need it? Minimalist décor? Functional spaces that are easy to tidy? If you don’t know your destination, how will you know when you’ve arrived?
Why Have You Set a Goal to Organize Your Home?
Why do you want to get organized? You may have an easier time listing what you don’t want and then translating those anti-goals into your reasons for wanting to take action. If you feel indifferent about your goal, will you really want to devote time to it?
How can you bring an emotional context to your goals? Will you feel happier? Less stressed? Less scattered? Empowered? While a tidy room or home will look nice and be more functional, what does that mean to you?
Remember, there are so many things you could do with your time, why is decluttering and organizing your home going to take precedence (for a while) over other (maybe more enjoyable) activities?
Word Your Goals in Positive Language
Wording your goals in a positive way isn’t about wishful thinking. It also helps you to identify what you need to do to achieve that goal.
Maybe you realize that the laundry piles up during the week and by the weekend it is overwhelming to face a day of washing, drying, folding, and putting away clothing, sheets, and towels. You do some of the laundry but procrastinate on most of it until your situation is dire.
You may decide your goal is, “I won’t let the laundry pile up.” But that doesn’t give you a plan. Instead, “I’ll do the laundry on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays after dinner,” is more proactive.
You won’t feel hopeless about the laundry piling up because you know when you’ll take care of it.
Unreasonable Expectations
Chances are that you’ve had the goal of decluttering and organizing your home for a while. Maybe you’ve been working toward this goal or maybe you’ve been thinking about it. When you think about getting this done, you may be thinking about how much you wish it already was done.
This can lead to a tight timeline of activities because right now you feel motivated and you think the less time decluttering will take, the more likely you are to get it done.
But wanting to declutter your home in a week or a month isn’t the same as having the time, energy, and attention to give to this task.
The more stuff you have, the longer it will take you to declutter. It will take you more time when you start because you need to practice making decisions about everything. You may need to choose the charities or methods you will use to give away things.
You can get so discouraged by the amount of time it is taking you to declutter in the beginning, that you may give up thinking that the entire process will drag on and on. However, as you get comfortable making decisions, you will work more quickly.
If you don’t know what your expectations should be, time yourself decluttering one drawer or cabinet. You can then count the number of equal-size spaces in the room and come up with an estimate.
Note: You will be unhappy with this estimate because it will be much higher than you’d like it to be. It is better to finish in less time than to need more time to finish a task. You’ll bolster your mood and your sense of accomplishment by getting tasks done in their allotted time.
Deadlines
Do you need a deadline for decluttering your home? If you aren’t moving or expecting someone to visit or move it, or even planning an event, do you need to give yourself an artificial deadline?
A deadline reminds you that you want something done. Remember, if you don’t assign a time to do something, it won’t get done. When will you be more inclined to schedule an activity like decluttering? When you see that you expect to completely organize your family room in January.
If it’s January 15th and you haven’t started, it’s your deadline that will remind you that you need to plan time to declutter … or reschedule that project to another month.
Without a deadline, mid-January can roll around and you won’t be bothered by your lack of progress because you figure you’ll just fit things in later. Was that your plan last year?
Writing a SMART Goal
Chances are you’ve heard of SMART goals, and even if you haven’t, the activities of the past week or so, has had you thinking through the components of your goal.
Specific – You can define what you want to accomplish.
Measurable – You have a timeline with milestones that will keep you on track. Whether you decluttered your kitchen this month or not will be clear.
Achievable – You are planning for adequate time as opposed to simply the amount of time you’d like a project to take.
Relevant – Decluttering isn’t just something you feel like you should do but is something that will benefit your life in some way.
Time Bound – You have a deadline which encourages you to declutter even on the days you don’t feel like it because you know this is something that you want to accomplish.
Mental Blocks
When you look at the SMART goal you wrote for decluttering your home, how do you feel? Excited? Afraid?
Decluttering does involve change, or more correctly, it involves acknowledging that change has already occurred in your life. Why would you have boxes of jewelry making supplies if making jewelry hadn’t once been an important part of your life (or you wanted it to be).
Letting go of stuff acknowledges this change. It can feel a little scary because it’s pushing you out of your comfort zone. As long as you own those beads, you can view yourself as a jewelry maker, even if that is a past identity no longer supported by time doing this activity.
When you get rid of those supplies, you are truly closing the door on that part of your life. Instead of thinking of this as a fear of change, reimagine those feelings as excitement. For example, you are excited to spend time with a new interest or you’re excited to free up space in your home.
Break Down Your Goal into Smaller Steps
Identifying what you want to achieve is only part of the goal setting process. You then need to identify the steps that will get you there so that you can figure out when to work on them.
These small steps will come in two flavors – the type that you will do once and the type you will do repeatedly. Emptying a drawer and eliminating the things you no longer use is a one-time action.
However, making sure the contents stay organized is a habitual action. You can achieve this by doing a few seconds of tidying whenever you open this drawer.
The action doesn’t take long to do, but it does need to be defined as a step you will take. Otherwise, things will gradually become disorganized until one day you realize you need even more time to declutter the drawer … again.
You may dislike the idea of breaking one project into 50 small steps. While a reality check, it also can feel overwhelming. I’ll address that tomorrow.
Use Trackers and Checklists
A tracker is a good tool to use for repetitive actions. You can see how many days during the week or month you did them and when you missed.
Since the mind likes completed tasks because they feel less stressful (because your thoughts aren’t swirling around what’s incomplete), you’ll be more encouraged to do daily habits each day.
On the other hand, a checklist is good to keep track of the individual steps of tasks that aren’t done daily but still have a repetitive quality to them.
Instead of forcing yourself to rely upon your memory, you use the checklist to remind yourself of your weekly household chores or the tasks you want to complete during your weekly home office time.
Focus on the Current Task
Productivity expert Alan P Brown calls this technique “What I’m doing right now,” while life coach Marie Forleo refers to it as a “onesie.” Whatever it’s called, it’s about making the 50 tasks you need to do to complete a project more manageable and less intimidating.
Basically, you look at your long list and you write what you will work on right now onto a bright sticky note or piece of paper. You keep this visible where you are doing the task. Whenever you feel tempted to work on something else, you look at this one item list that reminds you of what you are doing right now.
I realized that I often keep my planner or to-do list for the day right next to where I’m working on my laptop. This ends up being a stressful distraction because I see everything I expect to get done and often feel pulled to start working on several tasks instead of completing what I’m working on.
Your One List can remind you that you are decluttering your desk drawers and not looking through and reminiscing over photos you found in an old film processing envelope. You’ll get your task done without feeling like it gobbled up a chunk of your day (but only because you were really doing a half dozen activities in that time.
Create a Schedule
You’ve identified your priorities and the tasks that support them. Now you’ll want to assign a time to those tasks, so they get done.
Batch tasks that occur in the same tasks or that flow together. For example, you could tidy the living room and then stream a fifteen-minute exercise video on the television.
If you can’t see when you’ll be able to do a task, you may be overcommitted … or you may make inefficient use of your time. How can you tell which is which?
Can you fill out a weekly calendar with appointments, commitments, and regular activities? You may not have the time to add in the work it will take to achieve your goals without adjusting your schedule.
On the other hand, if you feel busy all day but can’t identify what activities filled your day, you likely allow distractions and inefficient ways of doing things to suck up your time. Practice working with a schedule to claim back time that you can use to work toward important goals.
Use a Planner
I have ADHD and time management seems like a magical skill that other people have. If you deal with ADHD, depression, anxiety, or physical health issues that sap your energy, planning may seem to be a waste of time.
You can at least start by filling out a planner page with appointments, commitments, and other things attached to specific times. If you have a deadline for a project, do more than write that date on your calendar, work backwards and fill in the times you’ll give yourself to work on that project.
If your energy and attention are variable, give yourself more downtime or longer buffers between activities as opposed to trying to cram your 168 hours a week full with one task after another.
Identify the actions related to your goal and put them on your calendar along with commitments you have to others. Using a planner doesn’t have to involve scheduling every minute of your day. However, if you don’t see what you need and want to do on the page (or screen), it will be too easy to overlook it.
Expect the Unexpected
How often during the day do you get thrown by distractions and the demands or expectations of others? Maybe you’ve gotten into habits, but you ignore the time that they claim.
You can plan an ideal schedule, but if you know that your mother, sister, or friend calls you for a half hour after dinner every day to catch up … and you don’t account for this in your schedule, you’ll feel resentful when you fall behind with your plan.
There are some things that are beyond our control (someone gets sick) and there are other things that we know are headed our way.
Be honest and plan time for regular “interruptions” that are really a “planned” part of your day. If it’s something you can and want to change, you’ll need to be clear. “I need to make time to declutter. Can we switch to talking on the phone three times a week? I’ll have so much to talk about on those days!”
Or can you plan to declutter while talking on the phone? Create a plan for obstacles that you can predict. If your plan doesn’t work after you enact it a few times, you can always adjust and try something different.
Playing Catch Up
There will be days with demands that pull you away from your intended plan. You can adjust your deadline, or you can try to catch up. Maybe you realized that if you decluttered and organized two cabinets or drawers each day after dinner, that you’d be done with your kitchen in a month.
But then you need to stay late at work one evening and other tasks at home are more important than decluttering. You can play catch up by doubling up on your decluttering the next day or dividing the work over a couple of days.
However, at some point you won’t be able to play catch up. If you miss a week, then you’d need to double up your tasks the next week. That can be a strain on your schedule, because you’ll be cutting into other tasks.
This is where a schedule can allow for flexibility because you can see what activities you are adjusting and where any adjustments would cause more hardship.
Another way to counter the need to play catch up is to work in a week of buffer time at the end of a month or a project (like decluttering the kitchen). If you finish on time, you could enjoy a week of downtime as a reward. However, you want to avoid using this buffer time as an excuse to not do activities when you planned to do so.
Know Yourself
Knowing how you will best work can make you more efficient and effective. If you aren’t a morning person, then planning to declutter first thing in the morning will involve too much decision-making that you are too fuzzy minded to handle.
When do you have the physical or mental energy to give to a task?
If your schedule doesn’t permit you to optimize for your energy level, can you choose tasks that align with the effort you can give?
Also, do you need quiet to work on specific tasks or can you focus better if someone else is nearby? You may require quiet for you to pay attention to the contents of your old files. Or you may prefer to sort papers while you’re in the room with your kids or grandkids while they are playing because their energy keeps your mind engaged.
If you are dragging through a task, or if you feel more stress than you feel is warranted, question if the way you are trying to do the task is making it more difficult for you.
Use a Timer
You can use an alarm to remind you of when you want to start a task. You can also use one to cue you to stop and shift to another activity.
If you struggle to get things done in the time you allotted, is it because you allow interruptions and distractions or because the task takes you longer than you wish it would.
You may give yourself fifteen minutes to declutter a drawer. If the drawer is filled with tee shirts or sweaters, this is likely enough time. However, your junk drawer will take longer to do since there’re a number of small items that you need to sort and group together.
A timer can keep you focused because the countdown reminds you to shut out distractions and get things done.
Celebrate Small Wins
Behaviorist BJ Fogg, in his book Tiny Habits, recommends celebrating even small actions because when you feel good about doing something, you’re more likely to do more of it in the future.
His recommended celebrations can involve telling yourself, “Good job!”, smiling, giving yourself a thumbs-up, imagining fireworks, etc.
These little boosts encourage you. You may naturally do this with others by saying something like, “Thank you,” “I appreciate that,” and so on because you want them to feel good about what they did and repeat that behavior.
You can also plan for larger rewards when you achieve a series of small steps. Consider if you can tie the reward in with the task. For example, your reward for decluttering your closet is that you’ll buy matching hangers to make the space look nice as well as neat.
Give Yourself Breaks
Plan breaks into your day and even into activities. For example, if you plan to declutter for two hours, give yourself a five-minute break after twenty-five minutes of effort. Plan in buffer time between activities so that you aren’t straining to get things done when “unexpected” interruptions come up.
To plan in buffers, you could expand your expectations for how long things will take. Maybe you need to make a series of phone calls, and you figure they’ll take you 45 minutes to complete.
Schedule the calls for an hour but still work to complete them in 45 minutes. You can take a break for a few minutes, or you can get a head start on your next task, or you can keep a list of small tasks that you’ll do during these buffer times.
Breaks and buffer times create breathing room in your schedule.
Review Your Day
Plan for a few minutes at the end of every day to reflect on what you got done and where you need to improve your planning skills.
Reflecting on what you got done boosts your motivation. You can see that you are making progress toward your goal. Be sure to use positive terms when reviewing what you accomplished. So, “I decluttered four drawers today,” as opposed to, “I wanted to declutter six drawers, but I only got to four.”
Then, identify where you can improve a little bit tomorrow. For example, you realize you didn’t get to those two drawers because you hadn’t checked what they contained when you set your intention for the day. You forgot that one of the drawers contained infrequently used kitchen gadgets that took more time to make decisions about keeping and storing.
You now know to quickly view the areas you want to declutter tomorrow so you can adjust your plans for what you’ll do.
Revising Your Goals
As you review your days, you’ll start to see a pattern emerge. Maybe there is a temporary or permanent change in your life. Or you realize that you need to adjust the order in which you’ll declutter your home … or you need to work slower or faster.
It is better to revise your goals than to try to work with a plan that no longer makes sense for you. You may be disappointed that it takes you two months to declutter and organize a room as opposed to one, but you will be making more progress than if you tell yourself that you’ll fit in decluttering when you can.
Review your goal each day so it stays fresh in your mind. May take a minute each day to write about the outcome you are working toward so that your goal stays an active and evolving aspect of your life as opposed to something you wrote down months ago.
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