Declutter with a Spring Cleaning

Declutter with a Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning is a perfect time to declutter and organize. Over the year, as we accumulate new things, our spaces can go from tidy and neat to messy and unorganized. Once a year, it pays to take the time to go through things to declutter and reorganize, both your home and your office.

When your home or office is disorganized, it can be stressful. Instead of knowing where to find something, it becomes a chore to locate. Take a fresh start as you clean out what you do not need and make room for what you do. Here are some tips on doing a spring clean out.

Take it Slow

It can be overwhelming to think about giving your office or home an overhaul. To avoid feeling stressed by your spring cleaning, do not take on too much at once.  Start with one space at a time, such as one closet, one cabinet, or one drawer. Do not feel like you need to tackle the entire house, room or office all at once. Set aside a set amount of time each day or each week to work on this to avoid feeling overwhelmed with such a monumental task. Take twenty minutes a day, or set aside just a couple of hours on a weekend.

Donate or Keep

This is always the big question; do you keep it or do you donate it? What do you do with items that are still in good condition but you just do not use them anymore? If you haven’t used it or worn it within the last couple of years, you can donate it. Unused items just add clutter and clog up closets and cabinets.

Realistically, you cannot hold onto everything. If you have boxes of mementos and limited space, pull out some of the ones that mean the most, make scrapbooks or shadow boxes with what you can, and then donate the rest or pass them down to other family members.

Donating your items means that your items will just go to another home and continue to be used. It is much better than just taking up space for something that rarely gets used. Be careful of falling into the trap of setting aside items to sell and then never following through. If you intend on listing anything online, get them posted right away.

Finish what you Start

If you do not get one task fully completed in the time you set aside for that day, pick up where you left off the next time you get back to it. Do not bounce around from room to room without having a plan. Create a plan that involved having you do one area at a time and then move on. Also important is to follow through with what to do with items once you are going to get rid of them. Do not allow that stack of things to donate to linger in your garage or house for weeks. Drop them off as soon as you are done with your decluttering. 

Sort than Organize

It is easy to be so enthusiastic about doing a major clean out and organization project that you run out to get boxes, totes, and closet organizers. However, hold off on buying what you need for reorganizing at this stage because you have no idea what you need yet. Wait until you have gone through each room in the house before you know what you need to reorganize. Otherwise, you will have a surplus of storage items, all unused, taking up the space that you just created. Or worse, you feel like since you have them that you have to go buy things to store in them.

Cleaning out your Office

Your workspace also accumulates a lot of things and could do with a periodic reorganization.  Here are some tips for keeping your office in a workable and tidy condition.

·         Do you have old files that no longer are needed? Pull these out for shredding or have a shredding service come and pick them.

·         Organize your desk. You should only have the things that you need frequently within easy reach. Using every inch of space on your desk can actually hinder your productivity. Create areas for your various tasks and use a system instead of just setting things down and going through them later.

·         Clean out drawers of any out of date information or paperwork that no longer needs to be kept.

·         Do a digital clean out of your inbox. Instead of keeping emails in your inbox, create and sort them out into folders.

No matter if it is your office or your home, spring cleaning is the best way to get things organized and tidy, which will cut down on your stress and increase your productivity.