Eleven myths of de-cluttering

Gretchen Rubin, author of the forthcoming book, The Happiness Project, offers several good de-cluttering tips in a blog post titled "Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering."

Here are the first three:

1. "I need to get organized." No! Don't get organized is your first step.

2. "I need to be hyper-organized." I fully appreciate the pleasure of having a place for everything, and perhaps counter-intuitively, I believe it’s easier to put things away in an exact place, rather than a general place (“the third shelf of the coat closet,” not “a closet.”) However, this impulse can become destructive: if you’re spending a lot of time alphabetizing your spices, organizing your shoes according to heel height, creating eighty categories for your home files, etc., consider whether you need to be quite so precisely organized. I find this particularly true with toys – I’ve spent hours sorting pretend food, Polly Pockets pieces, and tea sets, only to find everything a jumble the next day.

3. "I need some more inventive storage containers." See #1. If you get rid of everything you don’t need, you may not need any fancy containers.

In short, she's a fan of getting rid of stuff. Me, too!

Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering

• [fnc]

  I think my wife has something related to that condition where they feel anxiety when getting rid of something. Further, I believe there is a related condition wherein she feels -more- emotionally comfortable when a cabinet does not close. There are several cabinet doors in our kitchen that do not close entirely because there is so much stuff inside. I’m nowhere near a neat freak myself, but it drives my programmer-logical-brain absolutely -bonkers- to see doors that don’t quite close, whereas oddly enough I think it causes her less distress to know that they don’t. At any rate, she’s made it clear that organization of the kitchen is not my domain (or apparently anyone’s for all I can tell).

  But I like the empty shelf idea, I’m going to work on that this week.

• [Anonymous]

  There’s a name for that condition — pacratitus.

• [MetaGrrrl]

  Lovely stuff! Yes, getting rid of crap is bliss-inducing. I’m looking forward to my copy of The Happiness Project very much.

  I’ve been writing about similar topics for quite a few years now at
  http://www.discardia.com/
  and
  http://www.metagrrrl.com/discardian/

  Funny how 2006 was such a big year for us both – that’s when Gretchen started her happiness-project.com blog and I wrote a Discardian tip-a-day. :)

• [Anonymous]

  I had several bottels of liquer left over from my wedding I am really enjoying decluttering that cabinet.

• [Anonymous]

  Whatever else you may do, having a place for the Polly Pocket pieces is vital, unless you plan to wear boots at all times when indoors. My kids got great entertainment from PP toys, we all got excruciating pain from treading on the tiny and almost indestructible little blighters.

  • [celia]

    Likewise, lego storage is VITAL. Between the delicate bottoms of my feet and the evil stomach of the vaccuum cleaner, much grief and pain and loss was caused by those tiny colorful blocks.

• [Anonymous]

  This has helped me letting go of stuff more than anything else: take a photo of it first. That curbs the “but I might miss this” hunch.

• [Anonymous]

  I read the title as “Elven myths of de-cluttering”. Disappointed.

• [AirPillo]

  I once set out to declutter a 100-square-foot bedroom full of stuff I thought was mostly necessary and needed to be kept and organized.

  By the end of the day I had discarded about 60 gallons worth of trash bags full of paper waste and assorted clutter. I was shocked I had kept so much stuff that I had no regrets whatsoever about getting rid of.

  Since then whenever I clean or declutter I try very hard to throw away anything I can justify getting rid of. It’s vastly improved the process.

• [PattyCake]

  I am a declutterrier too, but I’m glad there are a lot of people who aren’t, because then we get awesome Boing Boing posts about Popular Mechanics articles from the 1940s.

• [magickalrealism]

  After one incident where I ended up using 35 garbage bags for each room of my apartment, I’ve become an enthusiastic and vigilant declutterer. It still amazes me how fast crap adds up. What amazes me even more is how much I spend on that crap – and how little value it actually has.

• [braininavat]

  De-cluttering is a bad idea – having lots of stuff gives you security. When they come to get you, you can pile your stuff up against the door!

• [witczak]

  Along the same lines, I wrote this blog post a few weeks back when I was cleaning out my mom’s house after she moved into assisted living. http://www.markwitczak.com/Blog/?p=7

• [Sork]

  The first step of decluttering is reducing the purchases and enjoying the stuff you already have.

  I’m a big gatherer but I find that getting rid of i.e. ugly crap you made in school 25 years ago is easier when you take photos and then destroy the stuff without hesitation. Of course photos also gather on disk but I find all my disk clutter much less distracting than physical clutter. Even more so with tagged photos.