If you frequently have trouble discovering and locating items in your own home, whether it's in the closet, storage area, or even your own working table, it may be time to start your own decluttering endeavor.
In addition to freeing up previously unoccupied space in your home, decluttering is thought to have a favorable impact on one's mental health in a variety of ways, including
Because there are fewer things to clean, it saves time and energy: Keeping the house clean is difficult at best, and it becomes even more difficult when you have to clean items that you don't use and are accumulating in the corners of your home.
Overcoming stress: For some people, getting rid of superfluous items can provide a sense of accomplishment. Apart from being liberated from a cluttered environment, decluttering can provide a sense of control over one's home and life.
What Is the Best Way to Begin Decluttering?
When starting a decluttering project for the first time, it might be intimidating and perplexing. We may not know where to begin or when to begin, and discovering the overwhelming quantity of clutter that exists throughout one's home can be intimidating. But don't panic; there are some basic and helpful strategies to assist you start decluttering your home one step at a time.
1. Make a list of all the items in a category (such as types of things or rooms).
In general, there are two approaches to decluttering a home: one is to start with the types of items you wish to get rid of, and the other is to go room by room. If you wish to begin decluttering based on the categories of items you have, establish a list of the items whose quantities you need to reduce.
Clothing, bags, books, shoes, culinary utensils, glasses and mugs, jewelry, old magazines, electronic gadgets or sports equipment that are rarely used, CD and DVD cassettes, and toys are only a few of the items that frequently become a clutter.
From such lists of items, you can rank them according to their projected value and order them from high to low. As a result, you'll know which items to prioritize during the decluttering process.
Another option is to start by decluttering one room at a time. Before you begin, draw a map or make a list of clutter hotspots across your home. The closet, kitchen cabinet, storage room, and garage are all common places where people store their belongings.
After that, you can rank those spots from the most cluttered to the least cluttered, similar to the declutter checklist, to be more effective in cleaning and decluttering the spaces.
2. Provide five different containers in which to sort your belongings
After you've decided where to begin decluttering, the following step is to gather five different containers in which to organize the items you wish to get rid of. The following are the five categories:
Put Things Away: Use this container to store items that aren't in their proper place. The next step is to return all of the items to their proper locations. A coffee mug on your dressing table, for example, or a book left in the bathroom.
Recycle: As the name implies, this category is for recyclable items such as old magazines and paper, plastic and glass bottles, and used tin cans.
Fix/Mend: This category is for items that need to be fixed or mend, which means they need to be modified before they can be used. For example, a shirt with a lost button, a skirt with a damaged zipper, or a pair of shoes that need to be polished.
Donate: If you have items that are still in good shape but that you rarely use, it is preferable to give them away to those who might need them, whether they are toys, books, over-sized clothing, or even cosmetic products that are incompatible with your skin.
Ttash: Finally, use this container to dispose of items that are broken beyond repair or do not fall into any of the other categories.
3. Gradually begin.
Cleaning items that have been accumulating dust for years may be both physically and mentally draining. That is why you should not expect to complete the decluttering in a single sitting or in a single day.
Instead, decluttering should be done gradually and incrementally. For example, you could begin by spending 5 minutes of your time each day to decluttering your home and getting rid of unnecessary items. You can also begin by removing one item per day, with the goal of removing at least 365 items from your home by the end of the year.
During that time, you can also begin to notice which items you rarely use, particularly in terms of clothing and shoes. Separating the clothes and shoes you just wore is a straightforward approach to figure this out. You can, for example, hang your recently used clothes in the other way from the clothes you haven't worn in order to distinguish them from the items you haven't worn.
After a month or two, you'll be able to tell which ones you never use. It's also a good idea to declutter them.
4. Seek assistance from others.
You can also enlist the assistance of others to assist you in determining which items need to be discarded. You might invite that person to come to your home and assess which items or areas need to be eliminated, since a fresh set of eyes is usually beneficial.
If you insist on keeping something later, you must explain why to that person. This is also significant since others will be able to evaluate our arguments more objectively and rationally. Because, let's face it, many individuals have an emotional or sentimental tie to their possessions, even if they provide no value to their life.
5. Take Before-and-After Photographs
Choose a small space in your house to clean, such as your work desk, dressing table, or closet. After taking images of the area/place, clean out all of the items on the surface or in the wardrobe that were previously cluttered. Then take a photo of the areas that have been removed.
You can see how clean and gorgeous a place/area may become once it has been decluttered by comparing the two images taken before and after it was cleared. This may serve as a motivator for folks to begin decluttering more of their cluttered homes.
