The Clutter Fairy Weekly #143
Significant Others: Organizing with (or in Spite of) Other People
Do the people with whom you share your space complicate your decluttering process? Spouses, partners, housemates, little children, big children, adult children, and elderly parents with conflicting—or non-existent—household habits and routines can sabotage our efforts to get organized. And sometimes even those who live alone aren’t free from outside meddling in our spaces. In episode #143 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, discusses how to work with—or around—the other people who contribute to clutter to our homes.
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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.
All Hands On Deck!
This week’s assignment is to engage another member of your family or household in an organizing task or project. As you discuss the task or area in question, set aside blame, judgment, and any history you may have with the project. Focus instead on things on which you can agree and on constructive ways to move forward, such as:
- improving your communication about stuff, how you use your home, and your shared roles in caring for the space
- learning more about and accommodating one another’s different tastes, habits, and organizing styles
- clearly communicating your needs and desires around clutter and organizing to the family member or housemate in question
- negotiating specific solutions to address the most troubling areas—the things that bother each of you the most.
For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.
This came in perfect time for the weekend when many parts of Sweden got the first snow, so my husband and I stayed indoors a lot. We agreed to work on the basement storage unit. We took many things to donation / recycling. Afterwards we felt very proud of ourselves and celebrated with pizza. It was a nice experience so we will do it again. The discussion we had based on the weekly tittle was incredibly useful, we decided that the stuff that is not worth the trouble of moving, should we need to move, can just as well go now.
Tho we no longer share our home together, my beloved sister and I re connected on the phone over the sudden death of my 18 yr old cat who had been given to me by our Mother and her. Through powerful specific communication we both gave up the fight over blame and loss. Our ending phone call created a tearful promise and date set to meet up to figure out solutions and then outline where we go from here. Neither her nor I want any of it. We also addressed that these many loss s we share of our pets and our Mother…together we are looking forward to dealing what and where to deal with the similar items. Thank you Gayle n Ed.