Even if you are not a regular reader of this blog, you are probably motivated to declutter your home.
After all, we’ve all been spending more time at home this past year, Spring cleaning is right around the corner, and more and more media outlets are covering the rise of minimalism. Younger generations are going to extremes by putting all they own into a van, while Baby Boomers are retiring, downsizing, and choosing to save money, time, and energy.
No matter where you fall on the spectrum, decluttering is a great idea! It will help you feel emotionally lighter and allow you to focus on what really matters. It’ll save time, money, and energy. You’ll love it.
Of course, there are different ways and strategies for decluttering your home. If you’re just getting started, or looking for an approach to help you reach the next level, here are 9 modern voices in the decluttering movement.
Find one that works best for you.
9 Decluttering Strategies To Create a Home With Less Stuff
1. Marie Kondo: What Sparks Joy
Professional organizer Marie Kondo, introduced her Spark Joy strategy to the world with her best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And she followed that up with a popular Netflix series.
Marie’s strategy focuses on decluttering by category (rather than room-by-room). These 5 categories include clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous items, and sentimental items. Her strategy encourages you to bring all your items from a category (clothes, for example) into one room and begin sorting.
When decluttering, Marie focuses on getting rid of items that no longer have value to you. She asks you to physically hold a possession and ask yourself if it “sparks joy,” and discard it if it doesn’t (after thanking it for its service).
Her KonMari method will bring you a clutter-free home that will spark more joy in your life.
2. The Becoming Minimalist (Joshua Becker) Method: Room-By-Room Decluttering
My decluttering method focuses on room-by-room decluttering, starting with the easiest, most lived-in areas first. When you begin this way, you’ll immediately notice the benefits of your decluttered spaces, which will motivate you to work on more difficult areas.
It is the strategy that forms the basis for my book, The Minimalist Home, the Clutterfree App, and my Uncluttered Course.
I have found the Becoming Minimalist strategy to be the most effective for the most amount of people. Needless to say, I’d recommend you start here.
There are 5 main steps to my method, which is heavily goal-oriented and makes sure to include your entire family:
- Set and define goals for your home and specific rooms so you know what you’re working towards.
- Work to include your family in the process and let them know why you’re decluttering. Getting everyone on board is important.
- Start with the easiest, high-traffic room, and then continue to work room-by-room until complete. Starting with the removal of duplicates, handle each item to determine if it can be removed or relocated in the home.
- Take notice of the benefits of owning less as they arise. Decluttering is life-giving and will affect you in a positive way!
- Finally, revisit and revise your goals; looking for greater impact with your home and life. The process is ongoing and evolving.
3. Peter Walsh Method: Declutter Any Room in 5 Easy Steps
There are just 5 easy steps you need to take to declutter any room with the Peter Walsh Method. The main difference here? Remove every single thing from the room you’re working on. When doing so, make sure to arrange similar items together so it will be easier to sort through them later.
Empty the space. Remove everything from the room! Next, declare your intention for the room and create a vision. Ask yourself, “What do I want from this room?” This will help you decide what to keep and what to get rid of. Next, take the items you’re decluttering and donate or trash them immediately. Last, return the items to your room to complete your vision. Peter Walsh uses these simple steps in every episode of his show, Enough Already! to help families get rid of overwhelming clutter.
For the past 20 years, Peter Walsh has been working internationally helping families declutter and organize their homes and their lives. He is the star of the new Australian series: Space Invaders.
4. Fly Lady: Do a Little Every Day
With the Fly Lady method, you declutter in short bursts and use a 15-minute timer. The goal is to avoid burning yourself out, since decluttering can be a mind-boggling task.
Sort your items into three categories: “Give Away,” “Throw Away,” and “Put Away.” When considering individual items, ask yourself if you love the item, and if you’ve used it recently. Remove duplicate items and keep the better one. Also, think about whether an item has sentimental value, or if it gives you guilt and causes sadness when you see it.
Fly Lady recommends moving fast when you’re in a decluttering sprint. By doing a little every day, your whole house will be decluttered in just a couple of months.
5. Colleen Madsen: Remove 1 Item a Day
Colleen Madsen’s site, 365 Less Things, debuted when she made the decision to remove one item from her home every single day. She committed to giving away, selling, or throwing away one thing each day for one solid year as a promise to herself via a New Year’s resolution. This journey continued for Colleen for four years!
Colleen urges you to start a little purging of your own. Whether you choose one item per day with her philosophy, or more than one to increase the speed of your decluttering, the goal is to declutter every single day—don’t overwhelm yourself.
I tend to think you can make faster progress in your home than just one item per day, but there are many people who have found the slower pace helpful and doable (just be sure you’re not bringing more than one item into your home each day).
A similar decluttering strategy is the Minimalism Game where you remove a number of items coinciding with the day of the month. On the 1st day of the month, you remove 1 item… on the 5th day, you remove 5 items… all through the entire month.
6. The Minimalists Packing Party
If “Party” is in the name, it must be fun, right? Why not make your decluttering journey enjoyable? With this decluttering philosophy created by The Minimalists, the packing party invites you to put all of your possessions into boxes as if you were moving. Invite friends over to help and order pizza.
After the party, remove items from your boxes only as you actually need them. These are the things that add value to your life.
After 3 weeks, you’ll find most of your belongings are still packed away in boxes. At this point, you can donate, sell, or trash these items, and because they’re already packed, you’ll find it much easier to part with it!
7. Leo Babauta: A Comprehensive Guide for a Minimalist Home
Leo Babauta, longtime writer at Zen Habits and one of my earliest inspirations into minimalism, offers a comprehensive guide to creating a minimalist home. There are 3 compelling benefits Leo mentions about having a more minimalist home: it’s less stressful and more calming, it’s more appealing, and it’s easier to clean.
A minimalist home will have only essential furniture, clear surfaces, will prioritize quality over quantity, and will still have personal touches with accent decorations. Leo invites you to change your philosophy on possessions and aim for the ideals of a minimalist home. In his guide, he provides 16 simple tips to declutter, some of which include plain visuals, having a place for everything, and focusing on displaying only the essentials.
Leo’s approach may sound too extreme for some. But it’s your home, you apply the principles how you want to apply them.
8. 40 Bags in 40 Days
In 2011, Ann Marie introduced a simple idea: A forty-day period (coinciding with the 40 days of Lent) where you go through your home and declutter one area a day.
The idea immediately struck a chord with many volunteering to do the challenge alongside her. Annually, it results in one of the largest decluttering movements of the year, including a Facebook group with over 80,000 participants.
This year’s 40 Bags in 40 Days Challenge started on Wednesday, February 17th. But if the idea resonates with you, I’d encourage you to get started right away.
The strategy is helpful as you choose the 40 areas that you most want to declutter over the 40 days. And the idea of “filling a bag” encourages more decluttering than just 1 item/day, without becoming overwhelming.
9. Hire Some Decluttering Help (NAPO or NASMM)
Don’t want to declutter by yourself? Enlist the help of NAPO: the National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals. The organization has over 3,500 members worldwide who are dedicated to help individuals and organizations bring order and efficiency to their lives.
Or, if you are moving, you may consider enlisting the help of NASMM: the National Association of Senior & Specialty Move Managers.
Both organizations would help guide you on how to hire the right professional for your needs, whether you need decluttering help, a professional organizer, a professional mover, or any combination. As you might expect, fees depend on the professional’s experience, your location, and the services you request.
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Without overthinking the options, which strategy resonates the most with you? Pick one, and jump in.
No matter which approach you take, you’ll quickly discover the benefits of decluttering your home. You’ll love owning less.
Dawn, The Minimal Mom, should be added to this list. Her videos have been extremely helpful in keeping me encouraged along this journey. Your memes, articles, and videos have been helpful as well, Joshua. Thanks to all of y’all for showing us how to get it done.
How would you describe her specific decluttering strategy?
Please forgive my ignorant hurried comment. Reflecting back now, I do recall her mentioning your method being a big influence in her own decluttering journey, so I would have to say that her strategy would be akin to yours. If I could delete my ignorant comment(s), I would do so, but not sure how to do that. Blessings to you and yours, and thank you again for the good influence you do have on so many of us who are discovering the importance of “less.”
Joshua, Dawn calls her strategy the “Onion Method”… she goes through getting rid of the most obvious stuff first, then goes a little deeper, etc. like peeling an onion
I work for a senior move management company. That is also a good way to declutter. I would purge and declutter regularly before I started this job 3 years ago. Some days when I leave work, I just want to go home and take off anything on a surface in one big swipe.
Dana K White, a slob comes clean. She needs to be on this list. ADHD, getting easily sidetracked. Can’t do a bigger mess it just turns into another pile.
Dana was the best one for me too. Her two rules make so much sense. Now if only I could get DH to try it!
What are her two rules for decluttering Karen?
i like dana’s approach too, especially for people who are overwhelmed. It results in stuff getting gone without making a big mess.
If I wanted to find this item, where would I look for it? Take it there now. If I had no clue that I had this item, donate it to charity because you will never look for it again. Her key directive is to deal with each item that you declutter without making piles to deal with later.
Dana’s two rules are actually questions:
1. “Where would I look for this?” If there is an answer, take it there and put it away immediately. If you need to trash or donate something else to make room for it, do so, but don’t get sidetracked.
2. If there is no answer, ask “If I needed this item, would I even know I have it?” If not, then get rid of it. There is obviously no reason to hold on to it.
These are simple, non-emotional questions that help you do a little decluttering at any time without getting overwhelmed and without making a bigger mess.
I read Marie Kondo and did my closet straight away. It was so exciting and I’ve rediscovered things l love to wear. I know do 15 minutes every few days tackling areas where clutter has begun to gather and am now really noticing the difference. If I need to use something, it’s in its place and is easily accessible
That is me. Piles everywhere. I get wound up ADHD- and tear into everything. I need to do the one room at a time thing as described in this post. Yes, that will be very helpful!
Cas from ClutterBug and Dana K White from A Slob Comes Clean (YouTube) have a lot of helpful strategies for decluttering with ADHD.
I love the packing party. I take a slightly modified approach though – and it works out to be more practical for me – what’s the point of packing away my toothbrush if I already know I’m going to need it in a few hours, right? So I pack away anything I haven’t used in the last year – i make no hard decisions – it’s not going far. The house is instantly clean and fresh – I can breath and taste the benefit of minimalism instantly: time, energy, space – mental and physical. It’s life changing. The clear mind that follows helps me power through and make changes in my life. Sometimes the ‘bit by bit everyday’ just takes too long.
Joshua,
I have a membership to Simplicity Magazine. I could not log in & asked to change the password. But no matter how many times I tried, it would not take any user name I entered. Please help! I’m trying to read the new issue.
Just use the Contact us form right there on the magazine website: https://simplifymagazine.com/contact/
We can get that all sorted out for you.
Dana K. White’s books and blogs inspire me. I think each individual has to find what works for them. It may be that my personality relates to her more than some others, especially those with “systems”.
I love all of these ideas and have no problems eliminating things. But I live with a husband who easily becomes sentimental about everything he owns, even newly acquired purchases. He loves to go to yard sales and thrift stores for ‘The Find’, something he may need. So I end up giving away more to keep the home from getting too cluttered. It’s tough cleaning out the houses of deceased parents. It seems you always end up saving more than you need because it tugs at your heart strings.
I admire couples who can both be on board with making the commitment to minimize.
KEEP – DONATE – TRASH … these are the typical sorting categories. One more suggested category with two sub-catagorie: SELL.
I-Garage Sale: Sell large items; gently used children’s clothing/furniture/toys; sports equipment and kitchen specialty items you no longer use, as long as they are in excellent condition.
II – e-Bay: Offer small and medium size collectibles and/or vintage items which parents have left and that have sentimental value to you but which you do not wish to or cannot store. Selling items which parents treasured to someone who desires and will appreciate them, may ease your guilt over letting the things go. It takes some effort and usually produces only small financial rewards but provides a comforting solution.
Of course, profits from these sales can be used to purchase.new, lovely, correctly-sized storage for your newly minimalized home.
I spend a lot of time giving away gifts people give me; I am in a business/profession in which I receive 100 gifts a year or more; some are perishable, so I have to deal that challenge; some are specialty items and not appropriate to take to Goodwill,e.g. an autograph of a past president worth a few hundred dollars; some the battery runs out by the time I need to donate it, so I don’t like donating something that is not working. I spend so much of my free time giving away gifts–I have come to the conclusion that there is no solution. I will have to give my weekends and evenings dealing with the gifts. Bottles of wine are very difficult and some are extremely expensive (I look them up), and I don’t drink wine. I sometimes struggle to find people to take the wine off my hands. People in my situation will just have to live with it giving up their free time. Some of the gifts have my name engraved in them, e.g. clocks. Maybe just accept that you have to rent a storage unit; there is no other way.
This gift giving is not a universal custom in many other countries; people in the USA think you should hug people and people in USA think you should give gifts.
That must be terribly frustrating. I can’t imagine. Is it not possible to say NO THANK YOU to many of these gifts? If you must take them why let them pile up and use all your free time? That’s very unfair and a great inconvenience to you. Why not talk to your head of HR, explain this problem, ask them to help you out, that this is not a pleasure for you, but an extreme burden. Or find one charity to donate them to, they can sell the wine and pocket the benefit. Quite worrying about the perishables. If you don’t want them tell the person giving them you will throw them away, then do it right in front of them if they pressure you. No business practice ought to be this onerous.
Furthermore, this practice is wasteful, insensitive, and even insulting, to push items onto someone who does not want them and has no need for them. Just think how much good that could be done with the money spent on these gifts helping food banks or the homeless, or putting it into a foundation for so many charitable and needy causes.
Would it be possible for you to create a letter and send to all the people giving you gifts asking that instead of a gift, a donation to a local charity would be much more appreciated? Tell them you will not be accepting any more gifts, period. I can’t imagine anyone being offended at your honesty. Good luck.
Many nonprofits besides Goodwill might love your new, still-in-package regifted items for their charity auctions, basket raffles, fundraiser prizes, or event door prizes. Your weird wine bottles, autographed photos, and eclectic mix would probably be a hit with the donors and attendees at events I volunteer with since there’s something for everyone.
Being a member of NAPO for over five years, I can personally attest to the work and commitment that Professional Organizers have for helping and supporting our clients during their decluttering and organizing needs. Thanks for the shout out.
I agree with Claudia! Thank you, Joshua, for shining a light on our organization and profession. Having been a professional organizer since 2006, I can’t even begin to explain how honored and blessed I feel to have helped make positive changes in my client’s lives!
I like learning about all these different methods. I think I’ve been doing a combination of the Fly Lady – doing it in short bursts – and going room by room. Last year, I got rid of a ton of stuff – my next task to tackle is my bedroom closet.
xoKaelen |
Plus – of course you can always combine. If you look for the eleven things to get rid of on the eleventh and suddenly you catch a frenzy and find yourself emptying out your garage, nobody will accuse you of cheating. This has happened to me several times, and sometimes you don‘t even realize how quick that happened…
Were you talking to my 10 year old daughter?
Thank you for this comprehensive list! After decuttering before selling a home several years ago, I find that I still need inspiration from time to time. This was the perfect reminder.
Call it, “fire “. What would I grab if the house were engulfed??
Everything else is questionable.
Or, if there were a fire and everything were gone, what would I bother to replace? That’s the criteria I use.
I like the idea of the Minimalism Game, getting rid of the amount of items coinciding with the day if the month. That works!