All or nothing thinking can trap you into trying to declutter perfectly. But perfectionism leads to nothing getting done. If you want an organized home, it's time to relax your expectations.
Decluttering isn’t the most exciting of tasks. As such, it can be frustrating to find yourself endlessly decluttering. Maybe you decluttered the dining table and new clutter quickly took over. Or you’re struggling with indecision, moving the same items from one pile to the next.
Or each time you take on a decluttering project, you never seem to finish … leaving things messier and more disorganized than they were to start.
Instead of blaming your time management skills or calling yourself nasty names (like ‘slob’), consider that your thoughts may be to blame.
In particular, look for ‘all-or-nothing’ thoughts. These thoughts can leave you feeling stuck because you give yourself only two options, each which happens to be at the furthest ends of what is really a continuum of options.
How All-or-Nothing Thinking Sets You Up for Failure
When your option is this-or-that, right-or-wrong, everything-or-nothing, fear can kick in because you’ve set yourself up for failure.
Why bother if I’m not going to do this perfectly?
I can’t get rid of anything until I find just the right person or organization to give these items to.
If I can’t declutter for hours at a time, I won’t make any sort of progress.
You can fall into all-or-nothing thinking without even realizing it.
Maybe you block off the weekend to tackle a big decluttering project like organizing the garage. But you underestimate how much stuff you have and by Sunday evening you still haven’t touched anything in one half of the garage.
If you feel like you failed (as opposed to successfully getting half the garage decluttered), will you really be excited about sorting through the rest of the garage?
Here’s the thing about human behavior (and not just decluttering). We do things that we feel good about doing.
If decluttering leaves you feeling overwhelmed or unsuccessful, will you be excited about getting organized? Unlikely.
How Small Goals Help
Most people discount small steps when decluttering because they feel that not enough work will be accomplished. However, there is nothing saying that once you complete one step, you can’t take another immediately afterwards. After all, that’s how we get anywhere, moving one step at a time.
Instead of thinking that you need to do it all, stepping off the edge of a cliff to get to the bottom … you could take the staircase. Yes, the staircase will take more time, but the result won’t be a total mess in the end.
A small goal could be to declutter for 15 minutes or to empty and sort through the contents of one kitchen cabinet. When you complete this tiny action, you can then move onto the next small task.
The biggest difference between this method and what you might otherwise do is how you think about your decluttering project. Instead of ‘all or nothing,’ you are thinking ‘step-by-step.’
Eliminate Perfectionism
It’s almost impossible to tell if you are doing something perfectly until after it is done, and you can then see if you gained the benefits you hoped to gain. Hoping to do something perfectly the first time is a form of fortune-telling. You are trying to predict the outcome.
Taking small steps gives you more options for evaluating your actions throughout a process. This means you can course-correct if you realize you’re not getting the results you want … or helps you better understand a project is going to take longer than you expected.
The pause between one small step and the next does not require hours or days. Instead, the pause can last just long enough for you to acknowledge that you’ve completed a task. You even may gain insight into how to make the next step go smoother.
The Most Important Benefit of Taking Small Steps
Small steps help you to see progress. Each step is progress. When you focus on decluttering, say, an entire room, you don’t really feel successful until the entire room is done.
You might complete eighty percent of the decluttering and organizing you want to do in that room, and yet you’ll feel like you failed because you didn’t meet your expectation of finishing it all.
I said it at the beginning of this blog post, people do things that they feel good about doing. Sure, you may not like decluttering, but if you feel like you’re making process, you’ll be more likely to return to do another small step … without dreading what you’re getting into.
Next Action
Break down your next decluttering project into small steps. Write them down in a list to further emphasize the tiny actions you are taking. How small the step should be will depend upon the area you are decluttering.
If a kitchen cabinet is somewhat disordered, you may call the cabinet your small task. However, if things tumble out of the cabinet, you may want to consider each of the three shelves in the cabinet a different small task.
And remember, you can always move onto the next small task immediately after finishing one task if you have the time, energy, and attention to give.
Making Decluttering Decisions
While the physical act of decluttering doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition, however, when you look more specifically at the particular items you are decluttering, yes, a decision must be made.
And that decision involves two extremes, keep it or let it go. When no decision is made, when you get caught in the gray area between those two extremes, nothing happens.
I’ll talk more about decluttering and decision making in next week’s blog post.
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