Hasta La Ideas

Reader Alex submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

How long do you think it really takes to become uncluttered and maintain an uncluttered life? I grew up in a cluttered home. I could not fit all my clothing in my dresser as a child because it was filled with my grandfather’s underwear. (He died when I was five and my parents never cleaned it.) I am working at becoming more organized but my husband and I work full time and have three kids and I am wondering how long it will realistically take.

Thankfully, uncluttering is not a race. There also aren’t people who will give you grades on your uncluttering efforts, and there are no such thing as uncluttering police. As long as your living situation is not so cluttered as to be a danger to yourself or others, you get to determine how uncluttered your life will be and how long it will take you to achieve that state.

Realistically, it doesn’t typically take very long to get rid of physical clutter. You look at an object and decide if you want to keep it or get rid of it, and then you trash, recycle, donate, and/or sell the clutter. It took me just six days to get rid of the physical clutter from my life, and I had a ridiculous amount of it.

Remember that it’s not uncluttering that takes a large amount of time — it’s organizing the things you choose to keep and learning to maintain an uncluttered and organized life that are the time-intensive endeavors. I’m considered by some people to be an “expert” on this subject, and I’m still learning how to keep my life and possessions orderly. Having an uncluttered and organized life isn’t the goal, rather, living simply is a path to achieving the life you desire.

My suggestion is to set a timer and work with your family for 30 minutes a day on uncluttering and organizing. Eventually, it will all get done. Take as long as you need, and don’t feel pressure to rush through the process — unless you want to commit to more than 30 minutes a day — it’s your choice. Decide what an uncluttered and organized life looks like to you, and then work to make it happen.

For a family of five, if all kids are in school, my guess is that it will take you three months of everyone in the family uncluttering and organizing for 30 minutes a day to achieve a less-cluttered, organized space. You’ll have a few set backs, a few power weekends where you get more done than you ever imagined, but most days you’ll just work through the 30 minutes without giving it much thought.

When it’s time to maintain your newly uncluttered and organized life, come back to Unclutterer and search through our archives. We’ve written on just about every type of maintenance strategy out there. Good luck to you and your family — I know you’ll do a terrific job. Keep us posted.

Thank you, Alex, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column.

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

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Clutter isn’t always a result of owning too many things or being too busy, it is often caused by bad processes. For example, is your purse or wallet overflowing with receipts? Receipt clutter is almost always caused by either not having a process for handling receipts or having a process you don’t use because the method is inconvenient, poorly designed, or not the best process for your needs. Your purse or wallet is stuffed to the brim with tiny strips of paper because you don’t have an effective process in place to deal with receipts.

Receipt clutter isn’t the only problem caused by bad processes — you might have an issue with an overflowing e-mail inbox or suitcases lingering full of dirty clothes for a week after a vacation or shoes constantly in the middle of your living room floor. Do any of these issues strike a chord with you? If not these, maybe you can identify some area of your life where clutter appears because of a bad process?

Take these steps to identify bad processes and replace them with effective processes that work for you:

1. Identify the clutter. This seems obvious, but can be more challenging to do than you might assume. After looking at clutter for awhile, clutter has a way of becoming invisible. So, take a picture or ask a friend to come over to help you really see the clutter.
2. Figure out where you want the object to live in your home or office. Do you want dirty clothes to live in the clothes hamper? Do you want shoes to live in the front closet? Do you want receipts to live in the trash or filing cabinet?
3. Determine a way for the object to consistently reach that storage space. Now is not the time to think you have super powers — be realistic with yourself about your energy levels and commitment to maintaining the process. Mentally map out a plan for how you will process the object so it stops cluttering up your space.
4. Acquire any materials you might need for the process. In my case, I have to put a plastic zip top bag in my purse to hold all of my receipts for a month. Additionally, I have to carry a purse that is large enough to hold the zip top bag full of receipts.
5. Use your newly created process.
6. Evaluate your process. After a few weeks of learning and adapting to your system, take the time to review its effectiveness. If you realize your system was too complicated and difficult to maintain, determine where in the process your system is breaking down and change that attribute. Maybe the object needs to be stored in a more convenient location, maybe the steps involved are too cumbersome, or maybe you don’t have the right tools for the job?

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Physical clutter is easy to identify in our lives because you can touch it, take a picture of it, and point to it during an argument with your roommate/co-worker/child/spouse.

“That thing, right there, should not be there!”

Other forms of clutter are more nebulous. If you are worried all the time, you can’t pack that anxiety up and sell it on Craigslist. If your schedule is overbooked, it’s difficult to know which of dozens of activities is the one too many.

To help identify the non-physical clutter in my life, I give myself a timeout. I’ll sit in a comfortable chair, holding a pencil and notebook, and close my eyes. I try to clear my head of all thoughts. Whatever thoughts slip in, I quickly open my eyes and write them down on the notebook paper. Then, I close my eyes again and try to clear my mind of all thoughts. After about 30 minutes, I’m usually able to settle down and enjoy a few moments of real silence.

When I get up from my timeout, I’ll look at the list and try to address everything on it as quickly as possible. Almost everything I write on the notebook paper is related to clutter in some way — I’ll pick up the phone and call a friend I’ve been worried about to see how she’s doing and if she needs anything, I’ll schedule 15 minutes to research information regarding a decision I need to make, or I’ll make a long-overdue appointment with my eye doctor. Even if I can’t solve the problem completely, doing at least something helps to relieve or reduce the clutter burden I’ve been carrying.

I’ve discovered that a monthly timeout helps me to keep the non-physical clutter from growing out of control in my life. If you haven’t tried it before, give the timeout a try and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you’ll fall asleep and conclude you are free of non-physical clutter.

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One of the things I discovered during my uncluttering process is that silver wrapping paper works for every gift-giving occasion — weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, baby showers, housewarming, etc. — and when you only have a few tubes of wrapping paper to store, it takes up very little space in a closet. A simple wrapping storage solution can easily handle all of our paper and supplies.

Before using silver paper, I’d been trying to use brown butcher paper for all my wrapping. However, I felt the brown paper was too casual for some occasions, like weddings and anniversaries. I ended up buying small batches of wrapping paper whenever a more formal gift-giving experience arose. The same was true for using fabric bags, and fabric puts a storage burden on the person receiving the gift. I also like the idea of reusable gift bags, but these only work on gifts that coordinate in size to the bags, so you have to store multiple sizes of bags for all different types of situations. Plus, reusable gift bags can be significantly more expensive than wrapping paper and after a couple uses start to show signs of wear. Silver wrapping paper doesn’t have any of these disadvantages — it’s inexpensive, always appropriate, fits all different sizes of gifts, can be recycled, and it doesn’t put a storage burden on the gift recipient or the gift giver.

Silver wrapping paper is in stores in abundance this time of year, and is when I typically stock up my wrapping supplies for the next 12 months. (For some reason, silver paper is much more difficult to find at other times of the year.) Before children, my husband and I could usually survive on two tubes of silver wrapping paper a year. Now that we have a son, we’ve decided to pump that number up to four.

The best deal we’ve found this year is at Ikea. Their SNÖVITA gift wrap (available only in stores) is just $1.99 a roll for 2 ¼ yards:

If you can’t find silver wrapping in your area, a white or a gold wrapping paper might also be a signature wrapping that could work in all situations the way silver does. Whatever style you decide to use, consider a method that will help to keep your wrapping paper clutter to a minimum in your home.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

When uncluttering a space, you typically find a handful of objects that belong someplace else in your home, or don’t even belong to you. In your kitchen you might find a tape dispenser that should be stored in your office, or you’ll find a tool in your garage that actually belongs in your neighbor’s garage.

There is a temptation when you find these out-of-place items to stop what you’re doing and return the object to its far-flung location. Unfortunately, abandoning your work can often result in you sitting on your neighbor’s back porch enjoying a beer and procrastinating instead of keeping on task with your uncluttering activity.

Instead of leaving the room, simply put the out-of-place item into a clean clothes hamper. Then, after you’re finished clearing the clutter and organizing the space, you can attend to the significantly out-of-place objects.

Take care of the items that belong in your home first. Group the items in the hamper by area of your home. Next, starting on the top floor of your home, work your way down to the basement, or, if your home is all on one level, work clockwise from the main entrance. Maintaining this pattern will help you to do as little back-tracking as possible.

After the items in your home are returned to their storage places, you’ll need to create a plan of action for items that belong to other people. If there is just one item, take care of it right then (if it’s a decent hour — but if it’s the middle of the night, you may want to wait). If there are multiple items, pull out your calendar and schedule the times when you’ll return the objects to their owners. Resolve to have all items returned within five days so the objects stop cluttering up your home.

The same thing can be done in an office environment, but instead of a clothes hamper you can just use an empty cardboard box. After you’re finished with your office uncluttering project, walk through your workplace and deliver items to your co-workers.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.