Right! I have very few bills that come by mail or that I pay by mail. The dentist and doctor are the only ones I can think of.
A lot of the stuff we get is from my son’s teacher. Homework, whatever event they need money or supplies for, etc. It’s a lot of paper to organize.
Then there’s a bunch of stuff to either file or shred, but I can’t do that when my husband is working from home so it’s good there’s a place for that stuff.
My husband has really been receptive to the multiple mailbox thing. He’s been going through his mail every night and now that it’s on the side counter and not on top of the kitchen island, I’m happy. Very happy addition to our home.
And wash the dishes every night/put them away in the morning is working like gangbusters. There hasn’t been anything on our kitchen counters for like two weeks. I am surprised how much easier it is to keep up with it even on busy workdays. We used to have stuff piling up throughout the week. Even yesterday, when my car battery died and I spent most of the day replacing it, there was still nothing on the counters!
it is amazing how little things can make a big impact.
Oh, all of them that I can automate are definitely automated. But I also have the same problem with bills by email. When I have time to do it right away, which is maybe, eh, 3/4 of the time, it’s fine. The remaining 1/4 can get lost in my email, which comes at a much higher volume than the snail mail does. However, I’ve started to get a handle on this now that I have a smartwatch! I can add things to my to-do list by dictation even when it would be awkward to do it on my phone (e.g. if I’m on a walk, or doing things around the house). So I think the problem is just that I need to have systems to keep up with it.
I love my smartwatch for this reason. I’m able to set reminders as soon as I remember I need to do something, and I set the reminder for a time I’ll actually be able to do it (or at least add it to Trello.)
I’m reading Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana K White of the aforementioned podcast. There are definitely areas in my house left that need to be decluttered, but less than I would have thought. The big area is my husband’s office/random storage and I think I have to start. My son’s bookcase in the living room isn’t great either. I’m using the visibility rule to start with what I can see. Then there’s the idea of treating everything as a container and you can only fit what you can fit and have to let the rest go. I just hauled in some more cross stitch supplies - what I need to properly block and frame my first real piece, so these are non-negotiable supplies, and now I’m sitting here wondering what I have to give up to accommodate this new stuff. That’s the mindset shift the book is trying to engender. Like there’s only so much room and stop trying to fit in more stuff than your space can accommodate. I like her approach because she makes room for feeling emotions but says you can’t let your decision be based on your emotions. Your decision should be based on your space.
If you substitute “time” for “space” it’s equally true. Your day can’t hold more than fits. No matter how much you wish it did or however much you don’t want to say “No” to some request to do one more thing.
Boy does that resonate lately.
(It’s also the premise of 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.) Another book I recommend.
Due to changes in my energy levels from the chemo this summer I’ve had to “de-clutter” my time recently. Instead of making a list of all I want to get done in a day I make one based on priorities and deadlines. So I never finish the list, but what needs to get done gets done by when it must be done. Some days I get more done than others, but it represents a big change in how I schedule my time.
Although I could swear I set my internet bill up for autopayment and it turns out I didn’t…? Have to follow up on that one. How annoying.
I have made crazy progress this weekend. After years of steadily purging stuff, I honestly wouldn’t have thought we still had that much stuff to donate, but I’ve got the back of the CRV loaded up to the top and that’s not even everything that needs to go.
Using the Visibility Rule, I started with the living room stuff in my son’s corner. It’s a bookcase which also holds toys. I consolidated all the books to make more space for toys, and got everything off the floor and into the bookcase. I put a little basket on top to hold all his papers - my son is always doing stuff with paper, so there is paper all over the place in his room and the living room play area. We worked on recycling the papers he was willing to part with.
My husband and I decluttered and reorganized the foyer closet, with all of our coats, winter gear, and all my son’s games and craft supplies. With all the freed-up space, I was able to move the vacuum cleaner into that closet from the laundry room closet - it’s all part of my master plan.
I decluttered the drawers holding my pontytail holders, hair accessories, and jewelry. I had no idea I had that many scrunchies.
Today I tackled a big pain point - the laundry room, which was overflowing with boxes, including the recycle bin and broken down boxes (my husband refuses to keep these in the shed with the garbage bin. I don’t know why.) There are also a bunch of bins in there. There’s a big industrial sink in there and I’ve been meaning to wash our second recycle bin but I literally could not reach the sink. The recycle bin and the boxes and everything were blocking the sink and the cupboards and drawers and everything.
It was overwhelming, but I took it one item at a time. I moved the big boxes for my dual monitors into the closet that used to have the vacuum cleaner in it – see where I was going with that? I wanted to keep those boxes for when we move so the monitors are protected, but they are huge boxes. I’m glad we found a spot.
And yeah, one item at a time I hacked through it. Got all the boxes out of the way. Most of the crap on top of the counter is gone, and I decluttered part of under the sink. The other side of the cupboards is like old wall paint and stuff that needs to be properly disposed of. Our next paint and electronics recycle day is not until April 26th and I have marked this as the deadline for getting through that giant box of electronics stuff we need to wipe and recycle.
Laundry room is not all done, but there’s 90% less stuff in the way and clear access to the sink, drawers and cupboards. I also organized by bottom tool drawer including putting all my screws and nails and stuff into a single, neatly divided tacklebox.
I guess this is a mild hyperfixation I have right now - sometimes I get so into things it’s all I can think about for a while, but the cool thing about decluttering is the effects last long after you lose interest in decluttering. So I’ll ride this high as far as it takes me and enjoy the results for years to come.
Ohhhh. Yeah. I need to get this book. (…which means I need to get the e-book or figure out a book that goes out of the house, doesn’t it 
)
Your decluttering is inspiring! I didn’t get any done this week because I was out of town, but I’m hopeful that I can do some next week.
My big thorny issue right now is the Christmas tree. It’s a small tree but it’s in a huuuuuge bag taking up hella closet space. We don’t have a basement to stick it in. And since the bag is lumpy and misshapen you can’t put anything on top of it.
My only idea is to get a smaller bag. It would help, but it might not totally fix the problem.
Can you put it in a garage or garage-like space?
I got the Decluttering at the Speed of Life book last night (right after seeing your post, haha) and I’ve been plowing through it. I, uh, really needed that book. It’s really helping me look at all the clutter and realize how much of it I’m keeping around for a future that not only may never happen, it is extremely likely not to happen. (Thank you so much for the rec!!)
For example: we have had a digital keyboard for more than a decade. Okay, that part’s great, I made sure to get a very good quality keyboard, we use it all the time, it’s an important part of our house. But! It came with an acrylic music holder that bolts onto it. My daughter, probably about eight years ago, had a meltdown in which she punched the music holder and it sheared off the part that attached to the bolts. (That’s a whole separate issue, but anyway we decided piano was too much stress for her.)
You guys. I have kept that music holder for EIGHT YEARS with the vague hope that somehow we could re-attach it to the keyboard. Finally last night I talked to my husband (he is the handy one in the family and is very good at fixing things) and asked him whether it even made sense to keep it. He reminded me that he’d told me at the time that it would be pretty difficult to re-attach, and I guess I had sort of understood that as “maybe it’s possible” rather than what he actually meant, which was “it would be difficult.” (I know, I know, that’s literally what he said!) Because he’s a darling person, he then tried to come up with various scenarios in which it could work (which is probably what he did last time too, which is probably why I kept it), but I can now see (which maybe I couldn’t at the time) that they are kind of far-fetched. So I’m finally throwing it out! There is soooo much stuff like that in our house.
And I got a jury summons in the mail while I was out of town and saw it on my desk this morning – when I didn’t have time to deal with it. But I put it on my to-do list and put it in my folder, and I should be able to deal with it either at lunch or after work. One less thing on my desk! (I have a bunch more things on my desk, of course, but I think if I can make this system work, I can slowly decrease that pile instead of erratically adding to it as has been the case in the past.)
The other thing I’m going to try to do is – I’ve become rather addicted to reddit recently. I’m going to see if I can make scrolling through reddit contingent on doing some decluttering/organizing. I am sufficiently addicted that if I can keep that up, I will be a decluttering monster! I worry that this resolution will last until the first time I get sick again, at which point I’ll go back to my old reddit-doom-scrolling ways, so I’m posting about it here as an attempt to keep me honest 
I’m glad the book is helping! I just read her first one, too. She does talk about how the need to re-declutter is inevitable, but that it goes faster and easier every round. But yeah, it’s a lifetime’s work.
Sadly we don’t have a garage for the Christmas tree. It has to go in a closet. I’m trying to solve it without buying more stuff, but my husband gave me grudging permission to get a more reasonably sized tree bag, if all else fails.
We have these three closets (home office, hallway and laundry room) and all of them are a mess and figuring out what’s going to fit where is a real puzzle. Maybe I ought to declutter all three of them and then maybe the answer will become clearer. I haven’t even touched the home office closet yet.
Good work! It really is a mindset shift.
I decluttered some stuff, then I crammed the tree in the office closet with all the other holiday stuff. That’s really the best place for it.
Don’t tell my husband. He never opens that closet, he has no idea, but once everything is sorted and beautiful in all three closets, I’ll reveal all.
He’s been impressed with my decluttering work, but he’s often skeptical of my ideas before he sees proof of concept.
A lot of that office is stuff he has to do on his own, but I’ll do everything I can do by myself and see how far that gets us.
Ah awesome!
Small steps for me. I decluttered the ski stuff last night, which is, embarrassingly, sitting in the middle of my kid’s bedroom. (It still is, but I’m gonna find closet space for it, which is easier now that it all fits in its container!) There is a set of ski pants that is too large for me and my kids, and too small for my husband, we don’t know where it came from (it may have been my parents? They are now too old to ski), why is it still in our house?? Because i thought maybe someday… someone… might figure out whose pants they are? It could still in theory fit my son someday but they’re sort of a lavender color, I’m all about not gender-dividing colors but I still bet he won’t wear them.
Over the last two days I made significant headway in breaking down cardboard from the many cardboard delivery boxes that piled up during my health crisis last summer followed by the usual retail holiday worker chaos.
This is making me feel better.
It means I can now get to the file boxes to tackle nine months of neglected filing and organizing of “adulting papers”.
A tiny bit every day this week. Yesterday it was going through a big stack of mail (I haven’t finished yet, but I got most of the way through). The day before, I went through a couple of shelves in the kitchen and threw out food past its expiration date. (The book was very helpful here, because it asked the key question, will you actually eat food past its expiration date? And the answer is… yes, if it’s right past it and it’s shelf-stable, but otherwise probably not! Not least because I’ve actually tried with food that I knew was still edible, and I didn’t die but it did not taste great.)
Today and tomorrow I will try to do at least a tiny bit but I’m hoping that I can dive in more on Sunday when I have more time. I keep coming across some drawers I want to declutter that desperately need the treatment of “I know you are saving this for ‘later’ but realistically that’s not going to happen,” but I need a bit more time and brainspace to deal with that.
As Dana White says, “the goal is better.” Not the ideal of a perfectly decluttered space but something where you can say “that’s an improvement.”
I’ve got another full load of donation stuff to drop off tomorrow, and that was stuff I could pretty easily and quickly determine needed to be donated. Just sitting in my house taking up space.
I’m getting a new suitcase delivered today which is decluttering, I swear, because I can donate the old one and put my carry on inside the new one which will reduce the number of suitcases visible in my closet.
I still can’t believe how clean my kitchen is just from running the dishwasher every night and putting dishes away every morning. I took five minutes to wipe down the counters and it was so easy because there was nothing on them.
The book recommended doing a different household task every day, i.e Monday is laundry day, Tuesday is bathroom day, etc. Well I’m pretty busy during the week so I’m not sure I can stick to a schedule like that. But I decided every Saturday can be “pick the area of the house that needs it most and clean it” day. Then I’ll rotate through kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom. Then I’m deep cleaning every room at least once a month.
We’ll see how it goes.
This exercise has taught me that there is SO much stuff in my house just sitting there taking up space!! I’ve just scratched the surface but I could list off the top of my head ten spaces I haven’t decluttered yet but I already know there will be a ton of stuff that I have either never used or haven’t used for years and odds are greatly in favor that I will never use them. I’m sure there’s more than that, that’s just what I could tell you without even thinking about it.
Even if I keep all the stuff where there’s a 25% chance I might use it in the future, there is such a large amount of stuff where it’s more like less than a 1% chance.
Oh yeah, I totally forgot to mention this!! I did implement this based on your earlier post, only I’m running it every morning and having the kids put away the dishes when they come home from school (putting away the dishes is generally their responsibility). We haven’t worked all the kinks out yet, and they haven’t got 100% used to the routine yet, but just knowing “putting away dishes is an after-school chore” is working so much better than the old way of running it at random times and then having to nag them at super random times to put them away.
I was about to write that mornings don’t work because my teenager wakes up too late, but as I was about to write it, it occurs to me that she has late start on Tues/Thurs. Hmm. I’ll think about that. It would be even better if it could be a before-school chore.
Yeah, any cleaning besides routine wiping up after dinner, etc. pretty much is done on weekends at our house.
the thing dana white really helped me with was how little time things take. when i first saw her youtube video back in oct., and she told the person “take it there now, i’ll time you”; that was a clutter changer moment. the person took items from the garage to the kitchen and put them away in under a minute. under a minute!
one thing i always did was a bit of puttering around in the morning. now i organize it a bit better. i set a 5 minute timer now, and either putter around the kitchen or bedroom before getting dressed. just a tidy up. timer goes off, i get dressed and head out. the timer stops me from getting too caught up; which happened when i winged it all these years. a feel good way to start the morning.