You have to see the clutter before you can organize it.
I’m a declutter freak. If there’s a book about decluttering, an article about clearing the clutter, or a guru whose shtick is teaching you to get more organized, I’m there!
After reading tons of these books (and some, granted, are better than others — stay tuned for my must-have list of decluttering books), I’ve found that the system boils down to a few key steps. I could get all fancy on you and instill some memorable acronym, but we’re all about speed and impact here, right? So in the interests of time, here are my steps to clutter-busting in your home:
1. Define an area. Don’t try to tackle your whole house at once. Start small, with one bookshelf or closet, or even one drawer. Pick an area where you don’t have a ton of emotional attachments (leave the Keith Partridge memoribilia for another day and begin with a sock drawer, maybe. Unless you have a pair of Keith’s socks).
2. Pull it all out. It’s not worth the effort to try to organize or declutter before you even know what you have. So pull it out, all of it. Warn your friends and family members that this might get a little ugly. Tell your husband to refrain from making comments about the number of, say, tweezers you own. They all have a purpose, dear.
3. Figure out how many you need. “Need” and “want” are two different things (and perhaps a topic we’ll tackle another day). For now, realize that there are only 52 weeks in the year, and if you do laundry an average of once a week, you only need 7 pairs of socks. (I like to allow myself a 25-30 percent increase margin for times when I forgo laundry in favor of some preferable task… such as getting a root canal). So that means 10 pairs of socks is the goal.
4. Sort. Move quickly (really quickly, like when you’re angling for that last piece of Tex-Mex eggroll from the Cheesecake Factory, but you see your better half moving in!). Triage into three categories: Keep, toss, maybe. Quick tip: ANYTHING BROKEN/STAINED HAS TO GO. Face it, if you were going to sew the hole, clean the stain, or fix the hem, you would have done it by now. Just like with those crazy people on Hoarders, if you really valued that item, would it have been sitting in the bottom of your laundry basket, covered with lint, for the past three years?
5. Replace. Put the good stuff back in the drawer or closet (save the organizing for another day — today we’re just purging). It already looks better, doesn’t it?
6. Banish. Take the rejects from the “toss” pile and tie them up in a plastic bag (opaque, please, so you cannot see your discarded loves). Put them in the trunk of your car for drop-off at the dump or Goodwill (these are NOT the same thing!). Take your “maybes” and tie them up, too. Put those in an inaccessible yet safe place (like at the bottom of the swimsuit drawer — you won’t be going in THERE for a while, will you?). If you do not miss something from the “maybe” pile in ONE MONTH, add that bag to your trunk for donation as well.
There, you’ve done it! Put your feet up, turn on an old episode of “House” (gotta love Hugh Laurie), and have a bonbon. You deserve it.
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