7 Years of Decluttering: "If I Was STARTING FROM ZERO, This is What I Would Do!!" | MINIMALISM

this summer marks the seventh anniversary of my family's decluttering journey and it's hard to believe that what started as a simple conversation about downsizing with my empty nester neighbor would lead us down a path to decluttering hundreds of thousands of items as we sold donated or gave away 95 of our belongings and I know back when I had that conversation in 2016 I felt like I was drowning not only in clutter and mess but also beneath the weight of juggling all of the expectations that I felt that Society was putting on me but also that I was putting on myself as a wife and as a new mom to two young boys that chat with my neighbor was the life preserver that gave me hope and that helped me keep my head above water and the thought that I might be able to do the same for someone else out there who is just like me is what inspired me to start the ages in life blog and YouTube channel which have now grown to the point where they reach millions of people every year in countries all around the world and I absolutely love connecting with you and all of the questions and the comments that I get from you but the other day I got a question in particular that asked me if I could go back and do it all over again what would I do differently so that's why today I wanted to share 10 lessons that I've learned over the past seven years of decluttering my entire home in life and maybe some things that I wish that I'd done better or differently back when I first started decluttering in the hopes that you might find something that helps you as well let's dive in number one is don't be afraid to start small and when I had that conversation with my neighbor back in 2016 the book that she referred me to was Marie kondo's the life-changing magic of tidying up and don't get me wrong that is an amazing book and it was a really great starting point for me but one of the things that she says in the book is that decluttering should be a Sprint and not a marathon it was a lot of pressure on me as someone who had two young children and so it was really overwhelming for me to feel like I had to pull all of this stuff out of my closets and cabinets and spread it all out and go through it all at once and I think that if I could go back and do it all over again I would try to do smaller declutters at a time because those would have been less overwhelming for me I would have had a lot more success in the beginning and I probably wouldn't have so much starting and stopping that kind of prolonged my decluttering journey so if I could go back and tell myself just do 15 minutes or 30 minutes here and there each day is better than trying to put it off until I feel like I have enough time to do a massive declutter all at once number two you are not the things that you own when I first started decluttering one of the roadblocks that I hit was that so much of what I thought was my my identity was kind of wrapped up in the things that I own so it was hard for me to let go of all of the books that I've been accumulating over the past 30 years because I'd spent so much of my life reading that my identity as a book person had become a huge part of who I felt like I was all of those books that I had had been sitting on shelves for years without me touching or reading them a single time but yet when I was confronting myself with the idea that maybe I should let go of some of these books that I knew I was never going to read again I had like a mini identity crisis am I I don't know I guess I have a lot of things to ponder so I had to release and let go of these attachments and remind myself that I'm not the books that I read I'm not the clothes that I wear I'm not the card that I drive any more than my parents and my grandparents are inside the things that they left behind and although our things can bring us joy or add value to our lives our stuff isn't what makes us who we are on the inside and I'd rather be defined by my actions and by the relationship that I have with myself and the people that I care for versus letting myself be defined by the stuff that I own number three the internal work is just as important as the external work so a while ago I got a comment on one of my YouTube videos that was about decluttering and the person said you talk too much I don't need a therapist I just want to see cool suggestions and what's funny is I get a lot of comments about this actually where where people are like I just want to see a list of things to declutter and I just want ideas for stuff that I need to toss in the trash and for those people I have bad news for you because external clutter is just your internal clutter on display and so if we don't do this internal work and self-reflection to ask ourselves why this clutter accumulated in the first place and kind of think about what we want our life to look like and making our choices to let go there's a lot of negative things that can happen you might experience decluttering regret because you didn't take the time to do the internal work and think about what kind of life you're trying to build and maybe you get rid of something that you later regret and decide that was important to me or if your habits are what created the clutter in the first place and you don't work on addressing those the Clutter is just going to start building right up again almost immediately which happens to be the next point on the this list number four to put your spending on ice so I'm no stranger to spending freezes and in fact going on spending freezes is something that helped me pay off twenty five thousand dollars worth of student loan debt and help us eliminate a total of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of debt between my husband and myself but I used to think that spending freezes were something that you did when you wanted to save money and you know Be Be Frugal but what I didn't realize is that spending freezes can also help us with decluttering our home because if your home already has a lot of clutter to start with why in the world would you go shopping and bring more stuff into your home when you already have too much stuff and you're trying to get rid of the Clutter it just doesn't make any sense and I don't know why this took so long to sink in with me but when I was first starting decluttering and I would go drop stuff off at the charity shops or the thrift stores then I would drop it off and I would always go up and park in the front and then go into the store and look for some great deals on cool stuff to buy whether it was clothes or knickknacks for my home and I wish that back then I would have put myself on a spending freeze and challenge myself to be more thoughtful about the things that I was spending my money on and bringing into my home because that would have made the decluttering process go so much faster spending freezes are also known as no buys and if you've never done a spending freeze or a no buy before I would highly encourage you to do one if you're trying to declutter because it really just boosts the impact that you're declaring makes and it makes you helps you make so much more progress in a shorter amount of time and I will make sure to link some no spend printables for you down in the description box below if that's something that you're interested in because I have some beautiful printables that are in my shop that can help you do a seven days spending freeze or a 30-day spending freeze or you can get the entire minimalist budget bundle which also has things like the 30-day minimalist shopping list which will also help you save more money if you're not ready to do a complete no buy or no spend you can put things on a list and leave them for a period of 30 days and kind of think about if you really want to bring them into your home and even that small step can help reduce the amount of incoming clutter so much number five stop waiting for the right time I used to think when I especially when I first was starting with the konmari decluttering method that I had to have like the perfect environment to declutter my kids had to be at school and the house needed to be clean and not distracting me so that I wouldn't get distracted by the mess and I had to have finished all of my errands for the day so that I could really focus in on my decluttering and I wish I could go back and tell myself that there's no such thing as the right time you just need to make time and make things work so like I learned that when my kids got sick which happened quite often I could have them there with me in the room as I was decluttering and actually that was great because I was modeling good decluttering behavior to them or like if I was trying to declutter my kitchen and I saw the dirty dishes in the sink I shouldn't get caught up in trying to wash and clean and put away those dishes because that's a slippery slope to cleaning the rest of the kitchen and then the decluttering would never get done so all of us have busy lives and there's always going to be things that happen and situations that can't come up and we need to learn to work around it and doing things like I said before small declutters here and there finding 15 minutes penciling it into your schedule so that you know when you're going to declutter each day and adding that into part of your daily routine so I would love to go back to tell myself to stop waiting for conditions to be right for me to declutter because Perfection is the enemy of progress number six ask the right questions especially when you're first starting decluttering there are so many things that you need to make choices about and I wish that I would have taken the time to put my thoughts down on paper a little bit better before I first started and thought about what kinds of questions I needed to ask when I was trying to decide if I wanted to keep or let go of my clutter and if you you like decluttering checklists make sure you go and grab this 10 page decluttering checklist that I can link down for you in the description box below and that's going to kind of help you work through you know what questions to ask yourself to make decluttering choices easier and it'll also talk about the steps to decluttering and that will give you a better framework on how to reduce the decision fatigue that you're feeling when you're confronted with all of these decluttering choices number seven what to do if you get stuck so another thing that trips me up when I was using the konmari method is I felt like I needed to follow her categories that she said so she says you should start with clothing and then do books and then do papers and then do kimono and sentimental items last and I felt like I had to follow this specific progression because it was the right way to do it but then what I realized is there were things that I would get really really stuck on and so when I got stuck I didn't want to move on to the next category because I felt like I needed to finish that category completely and so what I wish that I could tell myself back then is if you get stuck if you find yourself in a decluttering rut it's okay to set that clutter category aside and move on to something else I think the perfect analogy for this is it's like taking a test and I used to be very good at taking tests like I don't consider myself a particularly smart person but I was an excellent test taker and one strategy that I always use is when I'm taking a test especially if it's a time test and I know that I'm running out of time if I find a question that I am hung up on and I don't know the answer to I will Mark that question I would Circle it with pencil and then I would move on to complete all of the rest of the questions and then if I have time I will come back later to that question but I don't allow myself to waste time getting stuck on this one thing when there's all of these other things that I could address instead for example if you were an avid Baker but once you had kids you didn't have so much time for baking which used to be your passion and one of your biggest Hobbies but maybe you're stuck on baking stuff should you get rid of it or should you not what you might find is that if you set that aside and move on to declutter other clutter categories when you finally clear those other clutter categories and you come back to your baking supplies maybe all of the space and time that you've freed up gives you the bandwidth to be able to take up baking again so if you find that you're getting stuck on a particular item or a category of clutter it's totally okay to set it aside for later and come back to revisit after you've done other categories maybe put it in a Timeout box and set it aside and then come back to it six months or a year later and see if you've missed that thing and if you're ready to use it and if not then you can can get rid of it number eight the power of setting intentions so a lot of people talk about finding your why when you're decluttering and I think that a lot of us have similar whys like we want to spend more time with our family we want to worry less about cleaning and feel less overwhelmed with the housework and those are great whys but then something else that we can do is go a little bit deeper in all of the spaces of our home and set intentions for how we want that space to function and what kind of feeling we're trying to create in that space so for example in my children's bedroom we want their toys to be able to fit in one space and we like having these more open concept shelves where they can put their toys in and put them away themselves we want the floor to be able to be a large clear space so that when they want to play with their toys in their bedroom they have the space to spread out and do so and we need all of their clothes to fit in the one dresser that we have against the back wall and having fewer toys means that they know where each of their toys go in their room and it makes it easier for them to very quickly pick it up and put it away now this is something that I feel like I did right so this is a lesson that I'm trying to encourage people because I see so many people on YouTube talk about how they regret getting rid of something in favor of trying to get a look so I would really encourage you to think about how you want your home to function and how you want it to feel over what you want it to look like and it's totally okay to keep non-aesthetic things like most of our books are almost falling apart because the ones that we have we've read them so often like my set of Harry Potter books I literally have owned almost I think 20 years now and my son is the same way he reads the books that he has over and over and over and sometimes the covers warn but that's okay because we're not trying to create the perfectly aesthetic bookshelf we're trying to have books on hand that we love reading I think that decluttering works best when you focus on what you want to keep and if the things that you want to keep are not the most beautiful or as items that should be totally okay and finally number 10 on this list is decluttering once is not enough a lot of people seem to think that decluttering is a one and done thing and once you do it you'll never have to do it again but in reality it needs to become a habit and you need to put systems into place that will help you keep your home clutter free and sometimes that takes a little bit of work and experimentation until you find the balance that's right for you and decluttering is one of my favorite forms of self-care because it allows me to make life easier for future Me by spending a few moments to purge worn out or unwanted items here or there and if you want to hear more about why decluttering is a form of self-care and more self-care habits that can help you simplify your way to a life you love make sure to go check out this video or I'll see you next week until then take care bye

Channel: A to Zen Life

Views: 215,803

Keywords: decluttering, declutter, declutter tips, declutter lessons, how to declutter, how to start decluttering, decluttering and organizing, decluttering minimalism, decluttering 101, decluttering tips, decluttering motivation, declutter your home, home declutter, extreme decluttering, i got rid of everything, i got rid of almost everything i own, minimalism, minimalist, minimalist mom, how to declutter your home, minimalist home, clutter-free, clutter-free home

Id: 90mkhSjZGQU

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023