Hooray For Spring

Spring Cleaning: 5 Steps to De-clutter Your Life
By Wanda Austin-Williams

Hooray for spring! As we move into spring and prepare to put away our winter boots, bulky sweaters and those nasty winter blues; it is also a good time to start thinking about clearing the clutter from our lives as well. Clutter is one of the biggest challenges people face when trying to be organized. The external environment we create for ourselves is often a fair reflection of our internal environment, thus, when our lives are filled with clutter, we end up spending too much of our time managing the small stuff, and we never have time to manage the things that really matter. Here are 5 ways to spring-clean the clutter from your life.

1. Breakdown the project, and lose the all or nothing approach
Start with one room at a time, or one area at a time. It is unrealistic to say that you are going to complete an entire house in one day. By doing that, you set yourself up to fail by having unrealistic expectations. It is best to decide on a starting point and decide on the length of time you will work on the project. For example, “I will organize the den area of my home starting Saturday morning at 10am; I will work on the project for 2-hours”. After the allotted time has passed, make a decision about when you plan to resume the project and congratulate yourself on the progress made.

2. Collect like items
Put like items together; put all the clothes in a pile, all the papers in a pile, all the shoes in a pile and. Collecting like objects, helps to break the project down into smaller pieces; by doing this, the goal of completion becomes more of a reality. Once you have the room separated by like items, you may want to continue breaking the piles down even further by continuing to separate items that go in the same area.