Five Easy Tips For Conquering Clutter

Do You Hate Cleaning As Much As I Do?

If you are the kind of person who hates to clean, and tidy up, but you also love the way your house looks when it is clean, you might live with a great deal of tension just beneath the radar, and not understand why it is there. You get a glimpse of the stress your clutter causes when something forces you to take a good long look at it, and perhaps, at that point, you feel overwhelmed.

Because you know that once you start, you are not going to want to stop until it is all done. If bursts of activity followed by long periods of letting the tension build and basically, doing nothing, is an unacknowledged system you have got going, it must work for you.

But if it worked well, you would not be reading this article!

What to Try, Instead

Planned Sprinting

What I mean by that is that, rather than waiting for unplanned marathons of cleaning and clutter-clearing, you could plan briefs sprints. Set aside an hour a day or an hour a week and during that time, work full out at whatever task you have set, whether that is cleaning a drawer or a room.

The reason you will be willing to stop before it is all done despite the discomfort of knowing it does not look at good as it could is that you will trust yourself to the same thing tomorrow or next week. And the week after that one.

I believe that part of the reason you use that unplanned marathon system is that once you recognize a willingness to work on your clutter, you feel compelled to do as much as you can while the mood has struck because you have no idea when it will happen again. If you knew you could count on yourself to come back next week and do it, cleaning until you drop would not appeal to you as much.

Work on One Room at a Time

I suggest working on whole rooms at a time, and perhaps getting help with each room. In most families, even if they are all cleaning at the same time, they are doing it in different rooms.

You vacuum the living room, I’ll mop the floor in the kitchen. And while it is true that you cover more ground that way, it feels more overwhelming because each person has to work alone and has a larger area to work on each time.

Wouldn’t it be easier to conquer each room if you only had to do a section at a time, were not doing it alone and only had to work for an hour?

In the next part of this series, we will identify three more tips for clearing clutter.