Maintaining a less chaotic feel in your home (when it comes to clutter) is within your reach. I’ve come up with 5 ways to stay on top of (or maintain) your space, so it doesn’t get more chaotic. Earlier this year I posted about ways to stay on top of daily mess in the blog Maintain your Home with Declutter Rules. Continuing along the same idea, here I have listed tips and suggestions on easy practices to help keep on top of the ‘things’ that accumulate so readily.
Implement the “Other Room Box” Method
This maintenance method stems from the WellSorted 6 Tub Method. Items that are being kept, but belong in another room, get placed in the ‘Other Room Tub’. At the end of your session, you take the time to put them into their homes.
To use this as a maintenance step, you would have a designated ‘Other Room’ box in your common living areas. You would place items when you come across them into the ‘Other Room’ box and then dedicate time each day or week to empty it.
A variation of this method, if you have several people in your household is that you could create baskets for each member of your household. Each day, you can gather up misplaced things into the corrosponding person’s basket, and that person is responsible for emptying it daily.
If you’re tidying on behalf of your household or family, this box creates a ‘home’ for misplaced items for the interim. Then allows a vessel to carry it around to quickly rehome items.
Regular Resets
Following on from the above, carrying out regular ‘resets’ will help make the house feel less chaotic. By regularly dedicating some time to get the house back to it’s status quo is useful. It means clutter wont build up. Yes, you might need other dedicated time to focus on decluttering items, but the reset will keep things at bay. You could do this by collecting items that don’t belong in the room you’re tidying (like the above method). It means there will be less to deal with at the end of the week or month.
Choose the frequency of your resets to make it work for you.
Five-Minute Focus Sessions
Combat clutter in bite-sized chunks with five-minute focus sessions. This might be focusing on specific tasks, such as collecting the rubbish in each room, collecting dishes, organising the recycling, or choosing a particular item to collect, such as picking up books or toys. Follow the 60/40 time split for your five-minute focus session, so you’re not just gathering items, but completing the decision making process for what you’ve looked at. For example – all dirty dishes are in the dishwasher; the rubbish is in the bin, or the papers you worked through are filed properly (not just placed in a new pile). Once the five minutes is over, move onto your other tasks for the day.
Create Homes for Items
Chaotic spaces often result from items not having a designated home. So, within one of your five-minute focus sessions, pick up one thing that’s lying around that’s been there a while and create a home for it. Sure, that might take your entire five minutes, but when you find more of the same sort of thing, now you will have a home for it!
Let Go of Unnecessary Items
This last suggestion is really what we all strive for but struggle with. The easiest way to have less chaos, and less to clean up, is to have less stuff. Choosing to only keep things that help you live your life the way you want will get you over the line, always.
Incorporating one or more of the tips that I’ve shared will help you maintain order and prevent chaos from accumulating. A few simple strategies and a positive mindset can make all the difference!
If you’re still unsure how to start, I have created the Decluttering Card Deck and Keep the Clutter Away Maintenance Deck; Designed to help you take your organised home to the next level, providing fun tools and words of motivation to keep you inspired along the way.
