Note: This is a guest post from Courtney Carver of Be More with Less.
Decluttering is usually the first step people take to simplify their lives. It is often the easiest and most effective place to begin. Removing the excess from our homes naturally encourages us to look at the more challenging, often hidden things that also complicate our lives: debt, busyness, mental clutter, just to name a few. But it often starts with physical possessions.
Decluttering teaches us how to let go and create space. Owning less helps us save time and feel lighter. And it often causes us to rediscover the joy of giving.
If you feel overwhelmed with stuff or struggle when it comes to letting go, start with some of the items that don’t come with major emotional attachment—or at least, the items without positive emotional attachment.
If you are looking for a good place to start, let go of these 10 items to jumpstart decluttering:
1. Clothes you don’t wear. Clothing is a great place to begin. Most of us have too much of it, but we still wear the same things over and over again. Donate the jeans that don’t zip. Toss the socks with holes. Remove the outdated fashion. And if you have an extra coat or hat, give it away. There are lots of people who could use it this time of year.
2. Unidentifiable items in your junk drawer. It might be too soon to jettison the entire junk drawer, but you can easily remove the items that have no name, no place, and no meaning instead of saving them just in case you remember why you put them there in the first place. If you don’t know today, you won’t know tomorrow.
3. Lotions and potions. Get all of your lotions, potions, makeup, shampoo, and other products into one place. Put the things you use every day back where they belong. Toss the rest.
4. Lonely items. If it can’t be used without a match, and the match is long gone, it’s time to let go. Think cassette tapes without a cassette player, Tupperware tops without containers, and lone socks.
5. Kid stuff. Instead of shaming your kids into decluttering, make it fun for them. Announce a prize for every 10 things they can collect for donation. The prize can be a family activity or your child’s favorite meal. If you have more than one child, offer a bonus if everyone hits their goal to encourage them to work together.
6. Stale food. Set a timer for 15 minutes and go through your pantry, freezer, or refrigerator. Dump anything out of date, or opened and stale. If you find things that are good but you’ll never eat, bag it up and drop it at a homeless shelter or church.
7. Extra dishes. If you have two sets of dishware, silverware, or glassware, one can go. If you love your good dishes, use those every day. If they are stuck in a box somewhere and you never use them, give them to someone who will.
8. Other people’s stuff. If your home has become a storage facility for friends and family, make a few phone calls. Be kind, give notice, and politely ask them to remove their stuff or offer to help if they aren’t interested.
9. Things that bring you down. Sentimental items are usually saved for later on in the decluttering process, but letting go of things that remind you of people, places, and events that have hurt you in the past will make room for more joyful memories.
10. The guilt. This might not fall in the “easy” category, but if you let it go now, it will make the rest of the journey more meaningful. You paid enough already with time, money, and attention. Guilt is the worst payment of all. With guilt, you continue to pay with emotion, by holding onto the past and by punishing yourself for old habits. Say goodbye to guilt.
Letting go of these items will lighten things up and encourage more decluttering, more simplicity, and more freedom. Once they are gone, celebrate your progress and dig back in.
A simple life is waiting.
For more, check out our The Declutter Your Home Checklist.
retail therapy answer- for me i found shopping at our good thrift store when it’s half price day is practically as fun as the mall. shop and shop— final bill around $25.00
I love the suggestion for kids. I have a 10 year old who may be a bit of a hoarder (seriously…when he watches Hoarders with my husband he gets upset that they are making the people get rid of their stuff). Helping him to get rid of stuff is always a challenge, I may need to try tying it to some reward system.
My wife took photos of all her sentimental chachkis (sp?) with the digital camera and put them in a folder called “memories” so she can think of her travels and good times whenever she wants. And I got my shelves back!
That would be tchotchke. New word for me, took me a minute to find it. I love expanding my vocabulary because it doesn’t take up any space on my shelves! But back to your comment — so many people have suggested taking pictures, but I especially like the way your wife did it — putting it in a folder called “memories” so she can go back and reminisce. Thanks for the new word and thanks to your wife for the good idea!
Photos are wonderful, but if you have thousands on your hard drive, and probably backed up in the cloud, and/or an external drive, you are a hoarder. I think I have literally thousands of pictures ‘saved.’ I’ll never make use of any of them–way too many. I’m retiring at the end of 2015 and will spend hours each week purging my computer’s files. I’ve been pretty good at decluttering the things I see every day, but those files are way beyond me. I’d love to know if anyone out there has been able to do an itelligent purge of electronic files.
I’ll go through an old file of pictures every week, for the fun of it, and for clean-up. It easier to permanently delete older photo’s rather than the new.
But … for someone like me for whom photography is a passion, thousands do not feel like a lot.
to #8 I always give this warning when the in-laws try to unload some huge piece of furniture on me, “We will take it, as long as you don’t mind never seeing it again.”
We don’t usually end up taking it.
The tenth point is amazing. All that simplicity finally leads to living “in the now”, and that’s when you find out what you really need and need to work on. I think a lot of emotional issues just get overcast by desires that advertising provokes in us.
Old socks make rags.for dusting and cleaning out the fridge.
Terracycle (www.terracycle.com) is an option for recycling containers of lotions/potions, and there are municipal sites where you can take plastics (and electronics, etc.) that won’t go curbside. Otherwise all this *stuff* just gets transferred to the wider population, via landfill/garbage patch.
Aha! Very timely post. I really needed this. Thank you so much!
I love donating items, but more and more charities are requesting “brand new” items, some even asking for tags attached. It took me a while to figure out whom to give good, used items to!
Seriously? NWT? Who are these charities? I usually donate to the ARC and The Leukemia Society. They pick up donations and they certainly are not so presumptuous as to ask for new with tags items.
These are great suggestions, all. I am a longtime minimalist, AND i have benefited from Courtney’s 333, apartment therapy January challenge and regularly take lists like yours above and do maintenance. In fact, just this week,
1. Got rid of a big bag of clothes that were worn out — one benefit of having less it that things I love get worn out.
2. Put a bunch of random plastic from the plastic container drawer in recycling
3. Went through the apothecary (I don’t by products anymore) and made a lot of left over infused oils and old herbs into cleansers, body butters, butter bars, and lip balm, just in time fro dry winter skin! I look great and have more space in there for the next harvest!
4. See above!
5. Part of my simple life is opting out of parenthood, and taking the shaman path.
6. When we went on vacation (to a cabin in the woods, I filled one whole insulated box with food to use or compost on the trip!)
7. Freecycle is my friend!
8. As an only child of people with stuff, it is hard to say no to, “dont you want .. from ___?” but I have developed the practice.
9. I became aware recently that three gifts from someone I care for deeply actually make me sad when I look at them. It was too painful to let them go, so I put them in a box out of sight. That is a first step!
10. No. is a complete sentence. I takes practice but works well when used.
Great advice, made me get up with real perspective! Thanks :)
I like the fact that you talk about donating the good stuff (and not so good) to charity. Instead of just throwing it out
A few years ago, my husband and I had to declutter in a major way when we decided to downsize. We found it was a blessing because living more simply is, in fact, very enjoyable. You can read our story here:
http://www.ahhthesimplelife.com/living-more-happily-with-much-less/.
School and craft supplies are other areas that are not sentimental and easy to remove duplicates. We have tons of extra pens and pencils, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I found a website where children in Africa are in desperate need of school supplies, so if you have extras, Develop Africa is a good place to donate and keep gently used items out of the landfill. http://www.developafrica.org/collect_school_supplies
Also, your local elementary school. Most teachers buy quite a bit of their own supplies because the districts don’t put money into that sort of thing. So, the onus falls on the teacher. My wife works at an elementary school is why I know. There’s a reason there is a question on the tax form asking if you are a teacher and purchased school supplies, and if you have the receipt to write off on taxes.
It’s sad it’s like that, but it happens almost everywhere. Education and creativity within the educational system are not valued as strongly as it should be.
I took a bunch of paper, scissors, pens, pencils, envelopes and stickers to a local preschool. They were thrilled to get them.
Thank you for sharing the link for Develop Africa. Sometimes local schools are not as interested in used supplies. I have tons of pens and pencils and would love to see them go to students who would appreciate them.
I struggle with #4. Cassettes. I have an extensive punk rock cassette collection from the early 90s I find impossible to let go of. If Spotify had all of the albums, it’d be gone in a second. But Spotify doesn’t. Example: Dead Kennedys. Second Example: Shower with Goats.
One day I would like to convert them all to digital, but until then, they will remain boxed up in my attic.
I know. Terrible. Not very minimalist. But most of these cassettes were difficult to find when I was younger and are impossible to find now in any format and I refuse to re-purchase the ones that are because it’d be like buying a paperback book and then buying the ebook. Like burning money.
There’s also this: my kids discovering these old cassettes one day and buying an old cassette player from Goodwill to play them, the same way I bought a record player and played my dad’s old Sabbath records when I was a teenager when rock music was the soundtrack of my adolescence.
Discovering your dad’s music is a rite of passage.
The struggle is real.
The sound quality of cassette tapes isn’t all that great. And I imagine they don’t last for a long time–especially in a hot attic. I would weekly start digitizing the tapes to get it out of your system (and attic).
Also, your kids wanting to play your old punk rock tapes when they are older: how likely is that? I had saved childhood stuff thinking my kids would love it. Most of the time, they did not. And they dislike my taste in music. Lol. Our wisdom, values and life-experience stories are probably the best “things” we can pass on to our kids.
The sound quality of most punk rock isn’t all that great — cassette or otherwise. Ha. But it’s my thing. Was in 1994 and still is in 2015. Bad Brains, “Omega Sessions.” “Damaged” by Black Flag. My wife would describe the sound quality and everything about it as torture to the ears. I call it music to my ears.
But yes, I agree with you that our wisdom, values, and life-experience stories are the best “things” we can pass on, and I do that daily as is. I also think that to be minimalist or aspire to minimalism doesn’t mean you have to part with every/or most every physical thing in one’s life, particularly if those things bring value into your life in some way. Music does that for me. And, I am by no means implying that you are saying that. It’s just that certain blogs (not this one) that espouse minimalism tend to do so in a very OCD-like manner, which is not very realistic for most people’s lifestyles. I am picturing a workspace that has a beautiful iMac without a single cord in sight. iMac’s have cords. Life has cords.
I do plan to digitize though, some day. It’s just that right now I don’t have the equipment to do so, nor do any of my friends. So, before buying something to do this, I plan to pay off my remaining credit card debt. That’s a priority over cassette-to-digital. It’s also a very time consuming process, which might push me toward sending the tapes to someone else to do. I have two small children, so the thought of sitting around recording one tape after the next for what would likely be hundreds of hours doesn’t sound very enjoyable (or efficient). We’ll see.
Cassettes are my one area of weakness in the clutter department, so I don’t beat myself up over it too much — and in all reality it doesn’t take up very much physical space. You can pack cassettes like sardines. Will my kids enjoy discovering my music one day? Maybe, maybe not. I enjoyed discovering my dad’s old records. I wouldn’t trade the day I dusted off his old Sabbath albums and placed the needle down for the first time for much of anything. It’s a fond memory.
i have over 300 cassettes. i also have a player that can play them records and dvds…love all my music..never can have enough!! and i won’t get rid of them..too many great ones!!
agreed, some things can’t be replaced or found. even many of the books I have can’t be located in libraries.
Tossing usable things won’t help you nor the environment. USE them.
Use up all the lotions and potions and don’t replace them. Next time, only buy what you really need.
Toss anything unusable, however.
Damaged clothing.
Sell or donate anything that you don’t use but is usable. Not your style, not your size, duplicates, etc.
Don’t just toss things because someone says so.
I don’t think she was saying you should toss everything in the trash – just get it out of your house. Other commenters made good suggestions about where to take lotions that you don’t use/no longer want.
I love the idea of giving a prize to decluttering 10 items. My 10 year old would love that! Thanks for the idea!
Please send all these articles directly to my email address. Thank you so much. This is my favourite site and it has helped me immensely in my efforts to declutter and simplity. :)
This is the best site ever. I would love to have these articles delivered directly to my email address, rather than Facebook. I go onto Facebook and resend them to my email so I can read them in peace. When on Facebook, my FB friends can tell I am on there, and sure enough, someone will start a conversation when I just want to get on with my day. Thank you so much.
I refuse to use FB. You can have this site delivered to you inbox. Just sign up! It comes “hot off the press” to you as soon as a new blog is posted. Look on the site to see where you can plug in your email address for the RSS feed.
Linda, you can turn off the chat so your friends don’t know you are on FB. Click on Chat at the bottom, then click on the starry-like symbol to see your options. Then click on Turn off chat. They will never know you’re there! It works for me!
Love the “lonely Items” suggestion. I’ve got a few of those.
When I first started bagging up clutter (I put my family on notice that I’m “pitching”), I stared with the storage cabinet underneath the bathroom sink. Could not believe how long some of “that stuff” had been tucked away down there.
The enormous satisfaction that resulted when I was finished was just a lovely feeling.
What helped to keep me in forward motion was telling myself that I’d do one medium-to-major de-clutter task a day so that I would never feel like I was metaphorically climbing a mountain. Bite-size activity kept me at this – keep me at this,
Thanks for a great tip-sheet on how to get started.
Last week I cleared out a kitchen cabinet and got rid of some excess stuff. I donated it. Such a great feeling. I plan to do more. :)
The clothes that I don’t wear take up almost the whole of my closet – there are a hundred items that I love to keep and look at and admire, but I never get a chance to wear. Those would be the first ones that I would work on decluttering. Thank you for your list – it helps clarify my decluttering approach.
I almost succumbed to buying another handbag, still can,t believe how tempting it was, had a few niggles and decided to walk away, glad i didn,t give in, how many bags can you use at one time, silly after getting rid of so much stuff, i still think that would be very nice to have, sometimes therapy shopping is good but like all things a bit of discipline is needed, i don,t want to become miserable and not treat myself but i still need to be be careful, if your not sure about letting something go, keep it on one side and then ask yourself in 6 months do i still want it, i would start by getting rid of old, dated,damaged, boring and then once you make a start you will be amazed at how good it feels, sometimes we need to make room for the new, happy days love Jacqueline
I agree that denying yourself something that you want is a recipe for disaster and ultimately lead you to give up.
The approach that I am taking is that whenever I buy something new that I already have at home, I throw away 2 of those items…. For example… I saw a pair of boots that I really liked, I thought about what Joshua would say if he saw me buying boots when I already owned about 5 pairs… I walked away and didn’t buy them, Then I thought that I would buy them only on the condition of getting rid of at least two other pairs as a condition of the sale.
I bought the boots, went home and gave away 4 other pairs of boots that were in fine shape but hardly ever worn… So now my closet has 3 pairs of boots less and I have one pair that I really love!! I now have something really nice and 4 people are walking around in good boots that were just gathering dust in my closet.
It is not about depriving yourself, it is about making good sound decisions..
Same here. I’ve been praciticing this ‘mantra’ – Buy one, give away one or more. That’s why my closet is never full/crowded yet sometimes I still declutter it for unused items. The place I really need to declutter is my kitchen
Same here. I’ve been praciticing this ‘mantra’ – Buy one, give away one or more. That’s why my closet is never full/crowded yet sometimes I still declutter it for unused items. The place I really need to declutter is my kitchen
You could fill your unwanted handbag with toiletries, lipstick, gum, aspirin, bandaides, etc. and give it to a homeless person. Might just make her day!
Great ideas. I operate best in a de-cluttered space and clean house = clean mind for me.
I like your suggestions of combing through perishables such as toiletries and foods. I think that’s a great way not only to de-clutter, but also to more thoughtfully inform future buying habits.
My husband and I did a challenge where we ate everything in our pantry, fridge, and freezer one month and it was so enlightening! Our grocery budget is dramatically reduced as a result because we realized we were over-buying and not using food efficiently. Now we buy less food and waste almost none of it.
Our house needs to do the same….eat from the pantry and freezer!
I make it a habit of every January or February to eat down our pantry and freezer. It is a way to make sure that some food does’t set there indefinitely. It also helped on the budget when we had kids at home. February was a tight month.
thanks for all the advice! I really need to sort through all my lotions & potions, people buy me way more stuff than I use. But I’m really uncomfortable with the tides of just tossing it all out. ‘Out’ might be convenient for me but probably ends up on someone’s landfill, polluting aTer sources with chemicals. Environmentally, that seems really bad. Any alternative ideas?
I donate toiletries to a local shelter and I know they’re quite welcome!
Yes.— shelters for the homeless would love to have those potions. Also churches that have monthly clothing closets would be able to pass those on to people who are not as fortunate as you. Do a little inquiring on the internet and you’d be surprised how many eager charities in your area are waiting for your extras! :)
Some school programs will accept donations. A local school has a collection that students can get what they need from without others knowing (shampoo, toothpaste, etc). Even slightly used shampoo & lotion, like when you realize you bought the wrong kind or just don’t like it…
I volunteer at a thrift shop that accepts open containers/bottles of lotions, potions, perfumes, hair products. They are sold for about 25 cents to 1 dollar depending. You should see them fly off the shelves. Women who don’t have a lot of “pampering” money eagerly buy these inexpensive indulgences. As long as the products are still good – why not?
Just wanted to add—check with your local village hall. Most take food and toiletries. :)
lotions and potions go surprisingly well at garage sales so my guess is they would do the same at goodwill.
Except the Goodwill store please! Not one cent goes to charity!
Joshua Becker, Would you comment of this statement, before I march down to Goodwill with my stuff…. Is a national
thing… or just a just junebug’s hometown???
Lynne
We took a lot of our stuff to Goodwill—still do when donating things.
Any shampoo, bubble bath, or shower gels you don’t like are great for cleaning toilets. Just pour a small amount in and swish around. They are all soap and clean well when done on regular basis. It’s more environmentally safe than the harsh chemical cleaners. Plus it makes the bathroom smell nice.
Freegle. I put all my stuff on there and started decluttering 10years ago. One in two out is my motto.
Local Women’s domestic abuse shelter. The women there often leave violent situations with nothing more than the clothes on their back. I also donate hosiery that’s never been used.
I bring lotions to work and place them in the ladies room for everyone to use.
I agree, I think it’s better to make an effort to use them all up before buying any more products or give them to someone who will.