How I Declutter: 7 easy steps (What Camping Taught me… I can live with less)
Camping taught me that I can easily live with less, however we do tend to live in some kind of permanent structure and that means a house with bricks and siding. We tend to accumulate things that we don’t need for camping, but that we think we need to live every day. However, many of the items we can actually live without, so I’m working on decluttering, organizing, streamlining life and making things easier to maintain. If a room is organized and declutterred, it is easier to vacuum and dust, apparently two things we have to do till we die… lol… sorry to break the news.
Seven steps in decluttering:
How I Declutter: 7 steps
1. first you must pull out all items, for example, empty a closet,
2. Then sort by style, color, use, category, size
You create groups of items = organizing
3. Try not to linger too long on any memories
If you stay too long you will get derailed from the process, stay too long reminiscing and potentially throw everything back into the cupboard thinking “This is too hard.”
4. Avoid procrastination: you dig in and start a timer even to help motivate yourself to keep moving, sort, organize, categorize,
When the timer goes off, take note of how much you’ve accomplished
Maybe your pile of items is small, but keep going, it’s still an accomplishment.
5. Set small goals for yourself and pat yourself on the back for each step accomplished
6. Set up three boxes or signs,
1. Keep
2. Donate or sell
3. Discard
7. Getting a set of boxes helps, or plastic bins with lids to help categorize, organize and store some items
Label each box such as: camping cooking items, clothing, pictures
The goal is to get rid of items and so, I like my friend Marty’s rule… each week, discard three things.