Other People’s Stuff: Setting Clear Boundaries to Control Clutter

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.

Setting Boundaries on Other People’s Stuff

This week’s assignment is to set a boundary to address an item of “other people’s stuff” in your space.

• Identify an item of other people’s stuff in your home that bothers you. The item might be an unwanted gift, something you’re storing or saving for a family member, a hand-me-down, an item you share with family that hasn’t been returned to its rightful place, an item in a common space that belongs to someone else in your household, or anything else that triggers negative feelings.
• Reflect on why the item is where it is. What behavior—yours or someone else’s—resulted in the item’s presence in this space?
• Consider what kind of boundary you might have set to prevent this item from ending up as your clutter. What boundary could you set going forward to stop the accumulation of similar items?
• Remove the item in question by disposal, donation, regifting, returning it to its previous owner, or putting it in its rightful place elsewhere in your home.
• If the troubling item belongs to someone else in your household, plan a conversation to discuss the boundary you’d like to set and the cooperation or participation you’d like to request from the other person.

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