4 Tips to Declutter Quicker & Stay Motivated!! (Simple Living 2020)

do you remember those commercials that say have you become a nose blind and it's for air fresheners and it's implying that we no longer smell the things around us especially if we have like pets or kids or I don't know other things like that so we need air fresheners right so that we're not Noah's blinded to those things around us well I think a very similar thing happens when we start to declutter our house and it makes us feel like we have made absolutely no progress and so how do we work against that how do we keep the momentum going when we're declutter een I'll share a few favorite tips coming up next well I am gone from the minimal mom if we haven't met before I'm married to Tom and we have four kids ages five through five through ten I haven't said that for a while so I thought I should throw that in again the kids keep getting older when I started I was saying we have four kids ages 4 through 8 and now they're five through 10 then oh my goodness but we love sharing tips and tricks about how you can simplify your house quickly and this question comes up very frequently of I've gotten into this process of simplifying my house and I feel like I have made no progress I've taken 20 loads to Goodwill and I come back home and it feels like nothing has changed and so if you are feeling that way you are definitely not alone and I have a few tips for you today and how you can to keep the momentum going keep your spirits up feeling encouraged and keep powering through to get your house simplified so tip number one is to take before and after pictures because this is so common our brains adjust very quickly to these newly simplified spaces so we could take our like our closet in our bedroom and take half the stuff out of it and donate it and get rid of it and within a couple days our brain has already adjusted to this new simplified space and so we can go back to our closet and be like I just declutter that a week ago why does it feel like there's still so much stuff in here and it's because our brain has already adapted our brain loves simple spaces it loves simplification it loves having fewer things to manage and it adapt adjust to this very quickly and so that's why a lot of times we talk about the onion method that we end up going through our house in layers we go layer by layer the first layers are very easy there easy decisions and then it gets a little tougher and we do we find ourselves where we've gone through some layers and we feel like we haven't made any progress so before and after pictures can be incredibly powerful if you know someone that you can share them with my mom loves to send us pictures and I think it's so fun and she'll take a before picture and then she'll be like I'm going in and you know and then she'll show us everything pulled out on the floor and then she'll show us the after picture and it's really gratifying but it could also be helpful to keep those so that when you do feel like have I made any progress that you can go back and revisit those and see that yes you absolutely have made progress the second tip is the power of tidying so of course Marie Kondo wrote a whole book about the life-changing magic of tidying up and you know I think most those be like oh is tidy and really life changing but it this especially while you're in the process of decluttering it absolutely 100% can be a life-changing because what tidying does is it helps us to feel like there are changes happening in our house and so I like to talk about when we're decluttering if we look at the week ahead to look and say okay what days are gonna be active decluttering days what days do I have a little bit bigger chunks of time where I can really tackle some spaces in my house some specific drawers or closets and I know I'm gonna have at least 15 minutes to an hour to really do some good decluttering and which days of the week are gonna be maintenance days so on those days maybe the kids have more activities I have more activities at work late at work and so those are maintenance days and so on the maintenance days the best thing that we can do is to tidy up and we've talked about what tidy and actually is in the past tidying is not it's not the same as cleaning we're not washing surfaces or even vacuumed or anything like that tidying is simply grouping like items together and so if we look at our kitchen counters we're gonna get all the dishes put together by the sink we might not even run the dishwasher I mean it that's awesome if we can but we're gonna clear off the counters where you get all the food back to where the food goes we're gonna get the dishes where they go paper that's found its way there we're gonna put that where it goes and we're just gonna go through all the spaces of our house and do it a quick tiny the idea is that it doesn't take a lot of time but it does make a huge difference in how your house feels and you know this you know if you just take a few minutes to straighten things up that yeah it's not perfectly clean like you wouldn't necessarily invite company over like this but it feels like things are under control so if we can put in place this habit of tidying up on these maintenance days then when it comes to the decluttering days you're not going to be torn between well I want to declutter this closet but I really should be cleaning up my house because the house is gonna feel like it's it's picked up so it's fine and you really can dedicate that time to decluttering alright the third thing is to recognize what generation you're from because that might give a clue to what potentially might be holding you up and so I pulled out this chart because I'm I always go back and forth like am I really a millennial because Millennials get a bad rap right but what's good to know no matter which generation because okay I'm a millennial I'm 37 that goes up to people who are like 38 or 39 right now and then we have Generation X and then we have the baby boomers which are like my parents age and so what's good to remember is that every generation was looked down on by their elders so like the Boomers they were seen as entitled and spoiled too and so it's okay that the Millennials are kind of getting a bad rap in a lot of ways but the whole reason I bring this up is that when you look at where you find yourself which generation you're in there could be some ways of thinking that you've inherited from your parents or how you were raised or because of your experiences and so a lot of times when we look at the Boomers they have a very hard time getting rid of stuff because they don't want to be wasteful they don't want to waste money and for a lot of boomers what's interesting is that you didn't even necessarily yourself experience lack some of some of you have but you were raised by parents that still very much remember what it was like to go without and so they were very conservative and they waste anything and so then that potentially was passed on to you and so a lot of times when we feel like we're spinning our wheels with de cluttering it's because we don't want to waste money we don't want to be wasteful we don't want to get rid of things that we could potentially use and what I do love about Millennials even though I don't always like to identify myself as one is that we actually really value experiences and time together don't get me wrong as Millennials we can pretty much get caught up in consumerism just like everybody else but we are very aware of our time and having experiences in fact a lot of Millennials now in their job situations are looking for more flexibility I want a remote working condition I want to be able to take time off when I want to go on vacation with my family and so what I what I want to challenge you though is to evaluate which currency is actually the most important to me because right now when we're having a hard time getting rid of stuff its money we're worried about wasting money and we don't want to waste that however what I'm coming to realize is the commodity that I am actually that actually kind of haunts me that I might waste is time it's time with my family it's time to achieve the things that I think are actually gonna make a difference and that are gonna have an impact on other people and I do not want to be spending it managing this stuff anymore or being embarrassed to have people over to my house I want to spend it doing the things that are most important to me well okay that's kind of a heavy one but my last tip is to recognize if you're in the messy middle I think almost any project has a messy middle and it's really easy to get discouraged when you're in this so even right now we're doing this whole like staircase remodeling project and yesterday tom was working on it some more and we like opened up a whole nother can of worms which we'll talk about coming up on Saturday but it like pardon me was just like can we just put it all back how it was pretend we never started and it just starts to feel overwhelming at times and I remember that with our kitchen too getting into a party when we ended up we had to replace sheetrock that we weren't planning on it and what I have to remind myself is but look at this beautiful kitchen that we have now and I wouldn't have this now if we hadn't gone through that messy work of demoing it and rebuilding it and model in it it took it took time right all the good things in life would do but I'm so glad that we kept going in the middle we didn't stop and just put it back how it was because we do get to enjoy the benefits of it now so decluttering can be messy work and it can feel discouraging when we get everything pulled out and it looks way worse than when we started but say you know what okay I'm gonna recognize I'm in the messy middle but I am gonna keep my eye on the prize I'm gonna power through this I'm gonna make decisions quickly and easily so that I can start to enjoy the benefits because I know it's gonna be awesome and so again here is a recap of these tips take before and after pictures celebrate your progress and when you're feeling defeated go back and look at the pictures again the second thing is to tidy tidy tidy this is not my nature I know for other people it comes more naturally but on the days that you can't be actively decluttering tidy trained your kids to tidy and make a habit of tidy and anytime you leave the house you can develop this habit really quickly and then it is second nature and it's it no longer feels like a lot of work the third thing is a slight mental shift to say you know what I'm more concerned about wasting time than I am about wasting money and then the last tip is to just recognize if you're in the messy middle I think even just being able to acknowledge that can be really encouraging and say you know what there's no turning back now I am gonna keep my eye on the prize and I'm gonna keep moving forward and so I hope that helps I'd love to know if any of these resonate with you or if you found other tips for keeping the momentum going when you get discouraged so please share that down below coming up next week we're gonna talk about sentimental items I know I know flippy things are not easy but we can get through it together and I have some good questions that you can ask yourself that'll make it a little bit easier and like always a thumbs-up is the best compliment that you can give us I hope you subscribe so that we can keep doing this work together we know it's not easy but it is literally one of the most worthwhile things that I have ever done so we hope you subscribe and we'll look forward to visiting it with you again soon

Channel: The Minimal Mom

Views: 253,648

Keywords: minimalism, family minimalism, minimalist, the minimal mom, the minimalist mom, minimalist home, simple living, decluttering, tips for decluttering

Id: 4I58i2zqT78

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2020