Declutter Your Home with These Products & Tips

4 Tips for Decluttering & Getting Organized

1. Start Small: If you're short on time with many piles or areas to cover in your home, begin with one room and only focus on that room. If that still seems like too much, pick a box or a drawer to sort through, creating piles of what to keep, donate, and recycle/throw away. Or, grab a bin and pick a room. Then, simply put things to donate in that bin. When it's full, you've achieved your goal. Next, schedule out the other decluttering tasks on your list so that you can chip away at it little by little over time. This will help you set small yet achievable goals. We often dive in head-first and then get so exhausted by a full day of decluttering, cleaning, and organizing, that we burn out. The rest is left for "some day" and months (or years) go by before we ever get back to it.
2. Create a New Routine: Our homes often get cluttered when we don't have a system in place to deal with it on a regular basis. Create a new routine to build decluttering into your daily or weekly life. For example, pick a weekday or weeknight and a time that you can stick to where you spend 15 minutes dealing with stacks of mail, your kids' toys, projects, etc. Maybe Wednesday nights at 8:00 PM seem doable. If so, simply setting a timer and work on that one task for 15 minutes every week. If it's something you dread but know you should do, reward yourself after you accomplish that task by watching a show, calling a friend, or doing something you love to do. Pretty soon you'll be so used to doing that every week. It will seem as natural as brushing your teeth before bed. If you have a child or a partner, bonus points for getting them involved in decluttering or cleaning.
3. Be Honest About Actual Usage: Sometimes the clutter piles up because we don't want to face having to throw away, recycle, or donate anything. It's easier if it's all "somewhere around the house" – that is, of course, until the day you get overwhelmed by all the clutter. When you're finally ready to dig in and get organized, it's important to be honest with yourself. How long has it been since you used that item? Are you really going to use it again in the next six months? Have you used in the last six months or year?Is it really worth keeping if it's going to collect dust? These are especially important questions to ask when it comes to clothes. Some reports suggest we only wear about 20 - 25% of the clothes we own. If that's true for you, consider what you could donate to declutter your closet, providing clothes that someone else could actually use. Many of us have mementos that we treasure and we're not saying you should throw everything out, but we're willing to bet you have some items that are at the point where they're just taking up space.
4. Treat Storage Space Like Functional Displays: Whether you have tons of shelves, cabinets, and drawers in your home or very few, we suggest treating every storage space like a display – a high functioning display. We're not saying it needs to look pretty, but it should be well organized and nice enough to look at. The big goal may seem like it is to properly organize your pantry, garage shelves, or kitchen cabinets. But the ultimate goal is to keep that storage space organized. If you think of it like a functional display that you want to look good, you'll care more about whether you shove things in at random or take that extra minute to put things in the right place. Labels, dividers, and color coding can also help keep things tidy. If that's over the top for you or not realistic given your grabby family members, simply pick one storage space that you want to keep as organized as possible for the next few weeks. The weeks will hopefully turn into months, thus creating a new habit or routine, as we mentioned above.

Products to Help You Declutter

Here are some ideas for products that will help you declutter your home and get more organized:

• Storage cubes or baskets to organize toys, craft projects, and tools
• Shelving units for your garage to maximize vertical space
• Multi-functional furniture pieces with built-in storage like this storage bench or this kid's bed with built-in bookcases
• Closet organizers like this and decluttering solutions for kids' rooms
• Wall hooks and racks so items stay off of counters, desks, and tables – check out this versatile mail holder as a place to start
• Tiered organizers like this for better visibility
• Tech cord organizers like this and a cable zipper to tidy up your electronics
• Clear storage solutions to make things easy to find like this makeup storage unit, these containers for your bathroom, and this underbed storage drawer