Clutter Hacks: Five-minute Maintenance Habits to Make a Big Impact

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.

Five-minute Habit Formation

This week’s assignment is to add one five-minute maintenance habit to your daily routine to stem the incoming clutter in a problem area.

• Identify a room, area, horizontal surface, or category of stuff in which you struggle to stay ahead of the buildup of clutter or mess.
• Reflect on the habits that lead to the accumulation of clutter in the space or category you’ve identified.
• Design a simple routine you can carry out once a day to keep clutter in this area or category in check.
• Try to connect the new habit with a chore that you’re already successfully accomplishing every day.
• Post sticky notes to yourself or set up reminders on your phone to help you remember to practice the habit.

For example: If recyclable materials routinely pile up on your kitchen counters leaving you no space to work on food prep, consider adding a five-minute daily routine to handle any empty recyclable containers that have accumulated since the previous day. This practice could follow your daily habit of rinsing breakfast dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. (You might need to repurpose existing bins or buy new ones as needed to support this new routine.)

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