Balancing Act: Managing Your Decluttering Projects and Priorities

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Seeking Clarity

This week’s assignment is to bring clarity to an organizing project or category of stuff that you find difficult or confusing:

• If you haven’t already taken the survey related to this week’s show, identify a category of stuff, an area of your home, or an organizing or decluttering project or task that you find particularly challenging.
• Visualize the goal or objective of the project or task. Try writing a short, simple “mission statement”—for example, “Organizing papers with sentimental value will make it easy for me to retrieve any item I’d like to share with my family.”
• Design a sorting algorithm or list of criteria to facilitate decisions for the project or category in question. For example, if you’re wrestling with photos, you might decide to cull any photo that’s out of focus, unlabeled, or too damaged to keep. Your algorithm or list may designate what you’ll keep, what you’ll discard, or both.
• Get into action! Schedule a block of time and dig into the project. Working on a project that’s been stalled or ignored can help you figure out the right questions to ask or research you need to do to get greater clarity on the stuff you’re struggling to manage.
• Ask for help. Seek assistance from a friend, family member, or a professional who can provide a clearer perspective on decisions or aspects of your project that trip you up.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.