Decluttering Your Home – Simple Tips to Reduce Stress and Mess

If you are feeling stressed out about the state of your home, you are not alone. Many people feel that their house is in less than a perfect state of organization. So here are some simple tips for decluttering your home to reduce stress and mess:

Identify the State of the “Mess”

It’s best to be honest with yourself and admit that you have a problem at hand. The problem may have been building up over the months. If you are part of a family, it’s easy to lay the blame on other members of the family who are creating the mess around the house!

Allocate Responsibilities to Members of the Household

Regardless of who is creating more mess around the house, it’s a good idea for the family to sit down and discuss any ideas for improving the way that things are organized around the house.

Share different household organization tips and brainstorm to find the best ways to get organized around the home. After all, it’s everyone’s responsibility to keep the house clean and tidy.

What are Your Acceptable Levels of Cleanliness and Tidiness?

Part of the problem is that everyone has different ideas and levels of what constitutes cleanliness and tidiness. For some, it may mean no foodstuff or dirty dishes lying around the house. For others with higher expectations about cleanliness and tidiness, it may mean keeping the house dust free most of the time.

It’s important to determine what the household’s acceptable levels of cleanliness and tidiness is. That way, even if things do get a bit hectic (which seems to be all the time these days!), the minimal chores, which are of the highest importance, are always completed each week, and the lesser priorities may be earmarked for tackling at a later stage.

Log Your Time

Don’t know where your time goes each day?

It may be time to create a simple log of where you spend your time on household chores. Review your time log after a week, and assess where your time has been spent. Work obviously takes up a large chunk of our time each week. Take care to scrutinize how your weekends and evenings are spent.

Small chores can be tackled in the evenings, and this would potentially free up weekends for increased leisure time to catch up with friends, and to pursue fun and interesting hobbies.

Maintain a Roster of Chores

If you have a big family, keeping and maintaining a roster of chores is a splendid idea. That way, the kids can be assigned responsibilities for helping to clean common areas of the house. Simple tasks such as sweeping the floor can be completed even by the younger ones with a little supervision.

The kids should also be taught to clean up after themselves, to tidy up their rooms, to organize the clothes in their closets, and the toys in their playroom.

The above tips for decluttering your home can be used as the basis for achieving the goals of home organization for your home.

In summary, firstly identify the state of your house, then determine what your minimum standard of cleanliness and tidiness are, then maintain a roster of chores to be completed each week. A time log is useful as well for those who like to track more carefully how their time is spent each week.


Decluttering Your Life – Don’t Fall into the Trap of Buying More Stuff

Choosing to accumulate less material possessions in our lives can be an uplifting experience. This is one important step to consider when decluttering your life.

We count ourselves lucky if we have a job, and can support our family, and make ends meet to pay our bills. Over time, once we get past the stage of making ends meet, we often enter into the territory of spending our hard earned money on items which we could class as “non essential” items and “luxury” items.

Perhaps we got that pay rise or promotion that we were hoping to get at work, so now you have decided that you can afford to splurge a little. So you buy a few more luxury items ie. new furniture, new appliances for the kitchen, and that new car you’ve been wanting to buy. It’s time to show your neighbors that your family is doing more than all right.

If you have reached capacity with accumulating too many possessions and material items in your life, here are a few tips on decluttering that you can apply. It’s a great way to reduce both physical and mental clutter in your life.

New Fangled Items

Stop right there in your tracks, and think about whether you really need these new fangled items. Yes, I realized they were on sale, but did you really need to buy that new item? New fangled items seem fun at the time – they can do this and they can do that. But then when you take these items home, somehow the novelty of these new fangled items start to fade away.

The classic case is whilst you’re walking through the mall, that ultra enthusiastic guy manning his stall that sells kitchen gadgets corners you to have a look at what he is selling. He does his little sales pitch about why his kitchen gadget is so wonderful, and before you know it, you’ve bought this gigantic kitchen gadget that you didn’t really need. Stop your urge to buy new fangled items.

The One Week Rule

A good rule of thumb to follow when you experience that urge to buy something in the shopping center, and are about to bring out that credit card to pay for it, is to resist that urge, and let it pass for one week. After a week has gone by, revisit that item that you wanted to purchase, to see how badly you still want to buy that item. If the urge is real strong, perhaps you really need that item for your house. If you have forgotten about it, perhaps you didn’t really need to buy that item after all.

Accepting Gifts

Perhaps you have family or friends who like to give you stuff. You could consider yourself a charity case because anything that they got tired of using or didn’t need anymore in their house, seems to falls into your hands. Though your family and friends are well meaning and kind, try and resist the urge to accept these gifts. If they no longer have any need for those items in their house, perhaps you also don’t need those items in your house.

Hope you have enjoyed these tips on decluttering your life. Reducing clutter in your life successfully all starts with adopting the right attitude to keep your house and life clutter free. So the next time you act to buy some more stuff, think about it again. Perhaps you didn’t really need that item after all.

If you are ready to eliminate clutter from your life, check out my Ebook “Stop the Clutter Bug!” at the following link:

Stop Being a Clutter Bug! – Easy Tips to Declutter and Simplify Your Life


Tips on Decluttering Your Home – The Humble Basket is a Great Storage Solution


Here are a few more useful tips on decluttering your home to reduce stress. Today’s article focuses on the use of storage baskets to create low cost storage options around your home.

Laundry Storage Baskets

The laundry in your house can get messy, with dirty clothes strewn around the laundry area, and clothes that have been washed, and ready for ironing or to be placed back in your closets.

Create at least two baskets, one for dirty laundry, and one for fresh clothes. If you live in a larger house with a big family, you may need to increase the number of baskets that you use, and assign baskets to individual family members. That way, family members can be responsible for taking their dirty clothes to the laundry, and for placing new clothes back into their closet.

Magazine Baskets

In your living room, use baskets to place all your favorite magazines in. It helps to keep your living room well organized, with no mess scattered on the sofas, on coffee tables or on the floor. You could also be creative and decorate your magazine baskets to complement the décor of your room.

Enticing Fruit Baskets and Lovely Food Baskets

Have you noticed how enticing fruits look when placed in nice woven baskets? The baskets seem to make the fresh fruits much more enticing to try, and also adds color to your kitchen or dining area.

Using baskets is also a great way to monitor whether you need to buy more fruits for the week, and to make sure the kids are eating plenty of fruits throughout the week, and taking enough fruits for their school lunches.

You could also use baskets to hold other food items such as snacks for the kids, ie. muesli bars, and other food items that they can easily grab to take with them for sports events and the like as they are heading out the door.

Choose the “In Basket” Option

If you work from your own home office, try using a basket in the study as your “in tray”. Its much more appealing than using those traditional “in trays” that you find in the office cubicles of most companies.  Choose a reasonable sized basket to meet your needs. Though keep in mind, that your “in-basket” needs to be regularly sorted, and any paperwork filed away. Taking regular action to clear your “in basket” will pay dividends when it comes to improving your work productivity.

Stay tuned for more household organizing tips about organizing your home and being productive so that you can get things done quickly.

Hope you have enjoyed these tips on decluttering your home by using versatile baskets for storage around your home.