Today I’m going to give you five tips to help get you started decluttering in the new year.
Tip number one schedule time to do it.
People think that they’re going to organise things and sort things out like in amongst all the rest of life that’s going on. We are far too busy, we’ve got too much stuff going on, so you need to allocate the time to do it.
It is not just gonna happen, and you know make sure you’ve got a good chunk of time to do it as well. People think ‘oh I’ll do that in half an hour’ and it might take a little bit longer.
Once you start getting into it, you will be able to see how long it takes you so you will have a better idea. But schedule some time, set it aside to get on with it.
The next tip is to think differently about your stuff.
If you always did what you’ve always done, you’re always gonna get what you’ve always got.
The way you think about your items at the minute is how you’ve always done it.
Now you’ve got to turn that over, you’ve got to do something a little bit different otherwise you’re just gonna get the same result. There may be many times where you’ve looked at something and thought ‘oh I’m gonna need that’
You’ve got to think differently about it.
So you’ve got to challenge yourself, you’ve got to ask yourself different questions. If you find yourself saying ‘yeah I need that’ – Why?
Ask yourself why?
Again ask yourself why again.
And you’ll get down to the root of why you think you really need it and then that might be able to change your mind.
So think differently about your items.
Tip number three is you can get help with that.
Often we can’t see and we can’t get to the kind of reality of why we keep these things around us, so having somebody else there to help us with that can be brilliant. Because they can ask questions, they can say; ‘really? Do you really think that? Are you sure you’re gonna use that? You know when did you last use it?’
And they can they can sort of challenge you to question what you’re doing and why you’ve got this stuff.
Tip number four don’t leave bags lying around.
One of the greatest things that people do is they’ll sort lots of things out and then they’ll have bags lying around for ages.
Now this mentally is not a great idea.
When you’re allocating your time, allocate the time to get the items out as well. So if you’re gonna do a charity shop run allocate that within the time. So you sort all your stuff out and you get it to the charity shop. It’s gone, it’s done, it’s all complete, you know.
If you’ve still got stuff hanging around, one of the dangers is you can start pulling things out as well, so that’s a bit dangerous.
The fifth, the most important tip is to get actually started.
You’ve just got to begin.
A lot of people are like ‘I’ll do it tomorrow or I’ll do it next week’
You’ve actually got to begin.
That’s one of the most crucial ones.
So just a bit of a reminder;
- First thing you’ve got to do is schedule some time,
- Second thing to think differently about the items that you’ve got,
- Third thing get help, get somebody else to ask you questions about it.
- Fourth thing get everything out, get it to the recycling centre, get it to the tip and get it out of the place.
- Fifth, get started, that’s the most important.