Investing in an affordable house and lot does not just end upon settling all payments and moving in. Investing continues to the life lived within the house, the quality of life experienced daily—from the connection built within the neighborhood to the comfort inside own homes.
Maintaining a comfortable home can be a challenge. There are a lot of involved factors such as the interior set-up, the quality of furniture and appliances, and of course, the cleanliness of the home.
Nowadays, more people are staying inside their homes for longer hours, leading to double indoor garbage and waste. While the idea of cleaning and decluttering posts challenges and physical exertion, through a series of simple decluttering tips and hacks, it can turn into a fun and easy activity to do in the house.
How to Declutter in 15 Easy Ways
1. Declutter one area at a time
People often respond better to positive reinforcement, where rewards and positive results highly encourage a person to do more. 1 By focusing on one area at a time, the results of the decluttering effort can be easily seen. The immediate results can motivate you to tackle more areas, given the appeal brought by the obvious progress. It is always helpful to keep in mind that small things make up a bigger picture. Decluttering your home one area at a time can fire you up to keep going.
2. Make it a habit
By adopting decluttering into your daily or weekly routines, it becomes as easy as muscle memory. By making it a habit, it will become ingrained in your day-to-day life, requiring less thinking or awareness in the effort put into it.2 Also, the consistency of making cleaning a part of your routine results in developing faster and more efficient techniques as time goes by.
3. Always remember that your home is not a storage box
Hoarding and keeping unused things instead of disposing or donating those increases the clutter and mess at home. It is important to let go of the mindset that you will need unused things in the future, therefore it is unwise to keep piling them somewhere inside the house.
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4. Throw away duplicate items
Unless they are essentials like light bulbs, batteries, or rechargeable lamps and fans, then excess items need to go. While it might seem smart to buy things twice for future convenience, the unnecessary space consumed results in a cluttered and less spacious home. Always go through your stored home items, and only keep what is currently useful, then donate the rest.
5. Schedule your decluttering sessions
A great and ideal decluttering start is to not do all things at once. Aside from the fact that it is overwhelming, it might only lead to a more cluttered home, given the unorganized way of cleaning the house. Allotting a part of your daily or weekly time for cleaning up helps in the bigger picture, reducing overwhelming tendencies and making way for actual progress.
6. Make it a team effort
Encouraging other members of the household to adopt the habit of decluttering will reduce the gravity of the activity ten-fold. If you have family members living in your home, it is better to encourage them to do simple things like getting rid of their unused things or cleaning up after themselves wherever they may be in the house.
7. Follow the 90/90 rule
When you are undecided whether to give away reusable things, it is helpful to ask yourself, “Have I used this in the past 90 days? And will I use it in the next 90 days to come?” If the answer to this 90/90 rule is both “no”, then the better decision is to give it away. The “90 days” may be changed depending on preference, but the rule remains that if you have not used it and will not use it, throw it out.
8. Use the four-box method
The four-box method means labeling four empty boxes as “trash”, “donate”, “keep”, or “relocate”. Upon cleaning rooms inside the house, may it be a bathroom or a bedroom, place each unused item into one of the following boxes, where they fall under. No matter how insignificant you may think the item is, labeling them through the boxes eases the overwhelming factor of decluttering. It also simplifies the tendencies to overthink the use of things, saving more time and effort in cleaning.
9. Stop bringing home more stuff
While decluttering pertains to clearing the existing mess inside your house, it is better to maintain this by limiting yourself from bringing home more stuff. This makes way for progress and, eventually, a change in lifestyle that will not require too much time in decluttering your home. Any progress you make will not last if you continue to add new stuff all the time. This means buying luxuries less than usual and sticking only to the essentials. This is a great way to ensure that the progress made from days of decluttering won’t be undone!
10. Take before and after photos
Think of decluttering as a house project. By documenting this activity through before and after looks, finding motivation for another cleaning session will be easier. Also, these photos may serve as references from when you have to start cleaning your house again. They are also a great way to remember what needs to be done.
11. Visualize the result in your mind
It is always better to know your goal. Visualizing the result of your decluttering session will guide you to the steps you will take, may it be a small or big one. Simply think of your ideal, clutter-free space in every room of your own home, and think about where things should be placed and what things you can live without.
12. Set reasonable expectations
By setting reasonable expectations, you can avoid feeling disappointed when the progress made in decluttering isn’t as big as you thought it would be. It is better to take this task as an ongoing, improving, and evolving process. It is perfectly normal if there are slips for the first few times. As time goes by, consistently decluttering your home transforms into a flawless and continuous habit.
13. Invest in reusable items
Reusable items mean not having to buy things by two’s or three’s, saving more space in the future. While this does not apply to every essential, furniture, or appliance in the house, starting with the likes of reusable bags, bottles, and baskets is a great way to identify what can be deemed as a wise reusable spend in the future. This does not only positively affect decluttering projects, making this a part of your lifestyle will also reduce weekly or monthly expenses.
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14. Set up natural declutterers
If you notice a “problem area” in your home where more clutter than average picks up, always try to avoid that buildup in the future. These are things like paper bills and documents piling up on the coffee table or nightstands. One way to solve this problem area is to set up a recycling bin in the living room or bedroom, which results in the junk going straight to the bin before it had the chance to pile up.
15. Have Fun
The most important among all decluttering tips is to embrace the experience. Relish in the joy of a tidy home. Keep picturing the result, and savor the stress relief this activity gives you. This can be an initially satisfying activity that leads to a clutter-free and healthy lifestyle.
By keeping in mind these 15 easy tips to declutter your home, living a healthy and fulfilling life is achieved, a definite success in investing in a maaliwalas everyday life.
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Sources:
1https://positivepsychology.com/positive-reinforcement-psychology/
2https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.129
