How to set decluttering goals this year!
Feel free to scroll to the end if you only want to read my 16 ideas for decluttering goals.
How we set goals is strongly tied to our personality type and what stage of life we find ourselves in! Realizing that you can use your personality and your lifestyle to your advantage can help you achieve your goals a lot faster!
I wrote a post when I first started my blog about how my son who has ADHD functioned much better in a Minimalist environment. He has been on my case to declutter the rest of our stuff!
This is one of my first posts Minimalism and ADHD with Kids Here is an updated version of my first article How Minimalism can Reduce ADHD Symptoms
My decluttering goals for the last year reflected many of my son’s wishes as well as my own.
I am a reluctant Minimalist, but the more junk I get rid of the more I enjoy Minimalism!
Annie Eklöv
I will never be an extreme Minimalist. I live with a family and my home needs to reflect the needs of five people. Joshua Becker’s concept of Family Minimalism better describes what I am trying to achieve in our home!
My goal was to get rid of half of our stuff last January! So… How did it go?
It had its ups and downs! We decluttered as we redecorated! We redesigned all FIVE bedrooms this past year! We honestly put up the last shelves in my youngest daughter’s room on new years eve!
I realized early on that we decluttered many more items because of our redecorating plans. When you are forced to pull everything out of a space you can’t overlook items or ignore them because you don’t notice them!
This happens more often than you think.
When you see things all the time you become immune to them.
Items that have always been in a particular spot in your home are often overlooked. Many times we don’t realize that we don’t need them or that items look odd to visitors because we don’t notice that the items even there!
Unfortunately, our local second-hand shop closed this year and all the odd items that we wanted to get rid of piled up in our guest house along with all the items that were already there waiting to be decluttered!
My long term strategy for this problem was to put as many items as I could on eBay and Facebook Market place!
This did require some time from me because I needed to take pictures of things, put them on eBay, and send them, but I wasn’t working full-time and we needed some extra cash, so this seemed like a good solution.
I sent 1 box on slow weeks and up to 15 boxes on good weeks, but this proved to be an extremely slow way to declutter when I already had piles of stuff we need to get rid of! (It works great if you have already decluttered and you put things on eBay as your kids grow out of them etc.)
I started giving things away, but only to people who could actually use the items.
I began to leave bags at the second-hand store in the city an hour from our home. I never filled the car and drove an hour just to leave my stuff, but I made a point of filling the trunk with bags for charity every time I needed to drive to town.
Even with all of this decluttering taking place the problem of our guest house being so full of junk that we didn’t have room for guests wasn’t alleviated!
The space I made by giving away things and selling items was always filled up with more items from our current redecorating scheme!
This problem came to a head when my husband called a realtor (No we are not selling our home) to appraise the house. There were not many time slots left for appraisals before Christmas, and they messaged us that they were coming in a week!
I completely panicked! Fortunately, my panic threw me into high gear! (Sometimes when I panic I kick into low gear and can’t get anything done!)
Somehow my husband and I managed to get rid of most of the remaining stuff In a WEEK!
A few things that we decluttered last minute we ended up stuffing in cupboards so the realtor wouldn’t see it, but in general we got the entire guest house decluttered, clean, and habitable in a week as well as decorating for Christmas and cleaning our house and my husband’s workshop!
After the appraiser was finished looking around we were exhausted, but happy to have a clean decluttered home before Christmas!
Did I achieve my goal of decreasing our stuff by half?
I believe I did. I did not write down the number of items we got rid of or how many items we have left, but my house, guest house, workshop, and storage room are all functioning as they should with a manageable number of items in them!
I do feel that I should declutter more. I have not yet hit that ‘Click Point’ that Marie Kondo describes. The ‘Click Point’ is the point when you realize you have just the right amount of items in your space.
How should we set decluttering Goals for the next year?
There are many ways to set goals and everyone needs to find the goal and the motivation that works for them. For me aiming to get rid of a percentage of my things gave me something concrete to strive after.
Here are some ideas for different ways to set goals. I hope that some of them motivate you!
16 Ways to Start Goal-Oriented Decluttering
What goal is right for you is greatly determined by your personality. Are you the kind of person that likes to do everything in one go or do you like to find something that works and hit repeat every day?
Doing the same thing over and over reminds me of the movie Groundhog Day! Let us call this the Déjá Vu personality type.
The personality type which does everything at once reminds me of Mary Poppins! We will call this personality type The Fairy Godmother!
Ideas for personality type Fairy Godmother
- Pick a percentage of your stuff you want to get rid of. I picked 50%, but maybe you need to get rid of 25% or 75% then commit to getting it done in a relatively short amount of time. It could be one weekend or 2 months depending on how big your home is.
- Decide how much time is reasonable for getting through all your things in one go and ask for vacation time for a specific date. Schedule child care for these days if that is necessary, and make sure that the recycling center and second-hand stores are open on the last day of your pure.
- Hire a professional to help you. The hourly fee may help you work faster than normal!
- Invite a friend over to help you go through your junk! It’s often healthy to see our stuff through someone else’s eyes! I suggest going through all the easy stuff first by yourself. Make a pile of what you can’t make decisions on and schedule a day with your friend to finish. Knowing you have a looming deadline usually helps motivate you.
- Ask your family to help. Break the decluttering up into smaller tasks and carve out time in your family’s schedule. On Saturday you could help your kids declutter their rooms and you could do something fun on Sunday as a reward. When I was a teenager I often helped my mom declutter her clothes. If I thought something was tacky it was easier for her to let go. Schedule time for different family members to help you with different parts of the house!
- Try The Minimalists decluttering game all in one day! The idea is to get rid of 1 item on the first of the month 2 on the second etc. You can make a game of it by rolling dice to see how many items to get rid of. After 6 you will need to add dice every time you reach the highest number all the way up to 30.
- Another idea from The Minimalists is to have a packing party. Ask friends to come over and pack up all your stuff! You get out the items that you really need or really miss gradually over a month or two then you can donate the rest of your stuff! No need to open those extra boxes!
- Marie Kondo strongly suggests that you tackle an entire category in one go! If you get out all of your clothes and put them on your bed as she suggests then you must quickly declutter them before bed or sleep on the floor! The same goes for getting out all kitchen items you have to reorganize in order to cook!
Ideas for personality type Déjá Vu
- Decide to get rid of a set number of items every day. Pick a number that is achievable. If that is one item great if that is 10 items go for it!
- Set aside a time for every day decluttering. It could be 15 min a day directly after supper or 20 min a day at 5:00 in the morning!
- If your more of a repeat on a weekly basis type of person pick a time every week. For example, 1 hour at 8:00 on Saturday morning or 45 min Tuesday evening at 7:00.
- Pick a percentage of your stuff that you want to get rid of and work away at it slowly over a year as I did with my 50% goal. If you haven’t accomplished it in November think of an idea to force yourself into finishing before Christmas like appraising the house or invite your inlaws to come for Christmas!
- Declutter room by room or category by category and schedule days for decluttering each room or category over the next year.
- Try The Minimalist idea to get rid of 1 item on the first of the month, 2 on the second, 3 on the third, etc. If you’re not done at the end of the month repeat!
- Put a Big box by your door or in your garage to remind you to declutter. Then when you do wash go through the items you are folding and add anything you want to declutter directly to the box. The same goes for any other time you find items you want to declutter in the midst of daily life. When you have a place to put these items it’s more likely that you will actually get rid of them!
- If you have extra square footage try dedicating an entire room to decluttering! I put items that needed to be decluttered in a bag by my door then I took them out to the guest house where I sorted them into several different categories: donate to second-hand, give to friends, sell, and trash!
Conclusion
I hope some of my experiences encourage you! find a way to reach your goals and keep at it!
If you need more simple living inspiration check out some of my favorite posts linked below!