Declutter Secrets

Home organization is my passion. When you come to my home, it’ll be quite obvious. But there is one thing I’m quite struggling about -> decluttering. I’ve focused too much on organization and kept buying organization tools but I haven’t completely finished decluttering yet. The right thing to do is declutter first before organizing. To keep myself inspired, I subscribed to some eCourses on home organization and one of them is Declutter Secrets! by Sarah Mueller of declutteringschool.com.

As always, I’m putting my notes out there so that I can review them whenever I need to. I honestly think the course can take way less than 1 hour but I understand the passion of Sarah in sharing with us her tips in ensuring that we don’t get afraid of decluttering and what it really means to declutter.

If you’re unhappy with your home, the answer is not more time, not having a bigger home or more helpful family members. Those things are nice but they are not the solution. The key is to declutter and do it in a very specific and structured way. If you feel so bad that you didn’t get to use much of the stuff that you have, it’ll result to a feeling of guilt. You continue to buy more stuff then you’ll feel guilty all over again.

Decluttering is cozy, fun & comfortable. From now on, our new goal should be: getting rid of stuff as much as we can! It’ll take a long time to get there and people makes lots of decluttering mistakes (pissing off family members for giving away stuff, etc) but in the end, we’ll feel free, happy, peaceful and liberating!

Some people do the following to ease the stress of clutter:

• more shopping
• avoiding the problem through overeating
• disconnecting via social media
• hiring a professional organiser ($40-200 per hour)
• going into therapy ($25-200 per session)

Those solutions are only temporary. We should address the cause and not just the symptoms:

Cause: over-shopping, DEAL with this
Symptoms: messy house, do NOT just hire someone to clean up!

Here are three Declutter Secrets on how to stop feeling embarrassed by a cluttered home without throwing out the things you love even if you don’t know where to start and hate cleaning:

Stop Trying to Organize

Adding more storage is the worst thing you can do if you’ve got a messy home

• what you need to do is trim down your stuff.
• organized chaos is still chaos.

No Fear of Regret

The five words that will allow you to never be afraid to declutter something again -> The exception proves the rule.

if you’ve got lots of clutter, the waste occurring around you is continuous. 1 in 10 families has a storage unit ($40/month, $480/year, $2400 over 5 years).

Decluttering Regret is when you think the following:

• just in case
• what if
• murphy’s law
• wasteful

Decluttering regret is mostly a myth! It almost never comes true! Also, we are wasting far more by keeping the clutter than we will by getting rid of them!

Embrace the Mistakes

The drop-dead simple reasons that you should embrace decluttering fails instead of avoiding them:

• “I tried that and it didn’t work me.”
  • how do babies learn to walk? They never say this statement, “I’m a failure at walking!“. They get up after falling down and try to walk again.
• Making mistakes results to Learning!
  • Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games 26 times. I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shots and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that’s why I succeed.“
• the only way to gain experience is to be willing to fail.
• decluttering is a skill you can learn.
• decluttering fails aren’t actually fails at all
• mistakes are just an opportunity to learn.
• follow the 20/20 rule
  • if you can replace something for $20 within 20 minutes then it’s safe to declutter
  • you’re not going to need to replace the things you declutter.
• there’s a slight risk but a greater reward when you declutter.
• stop expecting yourself to be perfect!
• you shouldn’t avoid decluttering fails. They aren’t fails at all! Seek them out and you’ll learn faster and faster!

Decluttering School is offering a paid course ($197) called Declutter Your Home which includes a 4-week video course and tons of freebies! If you’re interested, you can just go to the link: declutteringschool.com/go.