Does the idea of decluttering your home – in other words, removing anything you no longer want or need and making things tidier – fill you with dread? It’s natural to feel this way; decluttering always feels like a huge task, especially if you haven’t done it for a while and there is a lot to sort through. However, the many benefits of decluttering show that it is certainly worthwhile. You will improve your mental health, make your home safer, and you might even make some money, depending on what you choose to do with the clutter you remove. With this in mind, it’s clear that you need to get started. Here are some easy tips to help you when it comes to decluttering your home.
Learn To Let Go
These tips aren’t easy, and learning to let go of your possessions and, in effect, your past is not an easy thing to do – at least not at first. It can become easier, though, as you start to get into the practice of it.
We do associate a lot with inanimate objects. Still, if you can detach the memory and good feelings from the item itself, it will be much easier to look at it objectively and realize that it is no longer required. Once you see how much better your home looks and feels without it and that you don’t really miss it, you’ll understand much better about how to let go, and anything you declutter in the future will be easier to deal with.
Have A Plan Ready
If you can make a plan about how you’re going to go about your decluttering task, it will automatically become much easier not just physically but mentally too. Start by making a list of the rooms in your home and determining which route you’re going to take. Will you start upstairs and work down? Downstairs and work up? Small rooms then big, or vice versa? How you do it is down to you, but having a plan means you won’t get lost and distracted, and you’ll be able to work methodically.
Your plan should also include what you intend to do with each item. You might want to store it away somewhere outside of the house. This is not ideal, but if you really can’t bear to part with something entirely, it’s a good way to get things out of the house, at least. Or perhaps you have decided to sell these things to raise money for a good cause, such as a Ramadan Charity. Maybe you want to simply throw things in the trash. Think carefully about the best thing you can do, and plan it in advance.
Start Small
One of the biggest issues with decluttering is the size of the task at hand. Going through your entire home and removing every item that you no longer need is something that can take many hours, perhaps even days, and that is exhausting. Not only that, but the modern world is a busy one, and when we do have enough time to spare, it’s unlikely we’ll want to spend it decluttering when there are many other things we could be doing.
This is why it’s important to start – and often stay – small. Just try to do ten minutes of decluttering a day – perhaps when you finish work or while you’re waiting for dinner to be ready. Even this small amount of time will be enough to fill one box with charity items or trash, and if you break each room up into segments, you can do one segment in ten minutes without even thinking about it. In this way, although it might take many weeks, the job will be done without too much hardship for you.