What does decluttering mean?
To me it is about getting rid of the excess, getting rid of the unused, and getting rid of the unnecessary stuff that we have around us.
That could be in the office or in the home.
One of the big big mistakes people make when they’re decluttering is that they don’t declutter, they just kind of tidy up a little bit really. It’s actually a bit deeper than that and involves a little bit more effort.
We can deal with the surface stuff, so a lot of people will just deal with the piles that they’ve got in front of them, move them around a bit, maybe find a space for a few things, but there’s a few things that will just stay in that heap – we’ll deal with them later on.
The office is a definite sign of this usually.
But with decluttering what you have to do is you have to get in depth, so you have to get to the root of the problem.
That usually is the storage.
So in an office environment, I was with a lady the other day and she got quite a few heaps of stuff around and quite a lot going on. But actually where we started with the decluttering was in the back of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. There was a four drawer filing cabinet and we’d cleared at least three of those drawers because actually a lot of this stuff wasn’t needed and it wasn’t used. We managed to get rid of all that.
Now what that means is that then we’ve created a space for the things that haven’t got a home, to go to. And that means that they’ve got somewhere to live. So the surface stuff that is the problem has then got a place to live.
It’s exactly the same with the home, so I was with the lady and we were dealing with her kitchen. And again let’s start with the obvious problems, this is the area where I haven’t really got enough room and here the plastic tubs are like falling out of the cupboard. She wanted to sort of start there. But actually we dealt with the cupboard in the corner that had all their kind of party dishes, and you know the electronic things that you never use anymore, the juicer that you bought four years ago and it was a really good idea at the time. Got rid of all that stuff first.
But then that gave us a place for things to go.
Decluttering is more in depth than just the surface stuff. It is not tidying up. It’s getting rid of stuff, so you’ve got to get things out, in order to create the space for the stuff that you haven’t got the room for. So that is anything that is unused or unnecessary. It may be that it’s actually quite a good item, but you just don’t use it and so it’s just not useful for you. In which case it will be useful for some for somebody else. Pass these things on, but let’s get them out of our space because we don’t need them and move on to somebody else.
Often we just have too many of things, we don’t need that volume. That tends to be the stuff that gets a bit cluttered.
Ask yourself – when did I last use that item?
So just a reminder, it is about getting rid of the unused, unnecessary and the excess – that’s what decluttering is all about.