With all the gift giving and receiving at year end, now is the perfect time to clear out clutter to make room for the new items in your life at the beginning of a New Year. Where to start? It doesn’t really matter because each person and each home is different. Your home’s living room may look like a disaster after the long weekend of college football games, with memorabilia and dishes still strewn around the furniture. On the other hand, your guest room may have been Ground Zero for organizing festivities, with wrapping paper, gift tags and shopping bags piled in every corner. The key to feeling better about kicking off the New Year right is to jump in as quickly as possible so that you feel you’re getting control of your life…and home.
Start with sorting tools closest at hand. Whether that’s leftover empty boxes or garbage bags, designate three places or containers to begin the sorting: one for throwing away, one for keeping, and one for the undecided junk. (You can sift through those belongings a bit later to decide if they’re keepers or not.) If you can designate a fourth bag or box for charity giveaways, all the better.
Dig in! Where does your eye land first? Just begin grabbing whatever is within reach. At this time of year, many of us feel overwhelmed and have a sense that we’re still too far behind getting things done for the previous year that it’s hard to get a clean start for the New Year. Our feelings of drowning in clutter and disorganization practically stop us in our tracks, like deer in headlights, preventing us from simply jumping in and kicking off a great New Year.
Just do it! It doesn’t even matter how far you get into the project. Over the next several days and a couple of weeks, we’ll post lots of organizational tips and tricks – for the mind and body – to help you get off the sidelines and up to the scrimmage line, where all the action is, to help kick off your New Year clutter-free.
For now, just grab everything you’re sure is trash and get it out of the house. Then sort through the “definitely stays” and “not sure” items. If you know where the “definitely stays” stuff is stored, put it away. If it may need a new home, we’ll have lots of tips on designating new, permanent storage locations for your belongings.
You need as much peace of mind to start the New Year off right as you can create. And ‘peace of mind’ truly is a state of mind you must create for yourself by doing all the things – including clearing clutter – that get you to that place. It may take five minutes or five hours. But once you get on the road to a little peace, you’ll begin to feel like you’re starting off the New Year with a fresh attitude and a fresh space.
You can’t do it all at once, but if you keep chiseling away at it, bit by bit, room by room, project by project, you’ll be completely organized in just a couple of weeks. Get started! — MM
Tags: clutter, Organization, organize, sorting, storage
