Tips on Fighting Clutter

Deborah Branscum can’t offer personal counseling, advice or tips on conquering clutter. This busy mom shares her home with plenty of dust bunnies, so she is not a poster girl for simplicity, organization or clutter-free living. Luckily, others are willing to offer tips. Below are three favorites:

Tip No. 1: Avoid Stores

Your mother, Buddha, Jesus and science all agree: Possessions do not lead to heaven or happiness. Unless you really need it, don’t get it. Fewer purchases mean less clutter!

Tip No. 2: Think Simple

For organizing a drawer to a room to an entire home, Julie Morgenstern recommends adopting the Kindergarten Model of Organization. That means divide the drawer, room or home into activity zones. In a living room, for example, you might consider areas for reading, TV watching, music listening and computer use. This works, she says, because:

Activity zones make it easy to focus on one activity at a time
Items are stored where they are used
Everything has a home, so it’s easy to put things away
Clearly defined visual clues make it easy to decide what you want to do.

Morgenstern’s best-selling Organizing from the Inside Out is a terrific resource for the organizationally challenged.

Tip No. 3: Ask for Help

It doesn’t have to be paid help and it doesn’t have to be someone who does your organizing for you. It turns out that simply having another person in the room can make it easier for some people to get organized, especially if they have an attention-deficit disorder.

Judith Kolberg discovered the concept, called body doubling, when she was hired to simply sit next to a client as the client went through mail and paid bills. As Kolberg explains in Conquering Chronic Disorganization, “the presence of a human anchor focuses another person and makes it possible for her to ignore distractions.”

Kolberg understands that traditional organizational methods fail many people. Her excellent book is filled with clever examples of how clients fight clutter by using audio, touch, vision and other non-traditional organizing tools.