Survey #258—Full Response from Kit
| Pronouns | They/them |
|---|---|
| What useful decluttering or organizing strategies or methods did you take away from the book? | - The Container Concept was crucial for me understanding that I really just needed to get rid of excess perfectly good stuff. Once I saw every space in my home as a container - and began to Define the Spaces - decluttering and organizing became much easier. Defining the Space has made all the difference in our gameroom, and we're starting to apply it to the garage as well. - The Visibility Rule and the No-Mess Decluttering Steps made knowing where to start easy, which was critical in overcoming overwhelm. I just started in the front room entryway and got rid of trash. After that, following the steps in the front room got it tidy and peaceful, and moving on to the next most visible rooms was simple. - Dana's tactics for dealing with clutter have been extremely useful. Dealing with the procrasticlutter is key in our house. We still have cool pictures that need to be hung in the gameroom - after Spouse decides which ones are less favorite and can go. I still have a box of clothes to remove cat hair from before they can be washed and put away. But I have completed many other "I'll get to it someday" tasks to make our home much more tidy. - Her recommendation to Use It Up has been very helpful with excess cleaners, pantry items, and holiday and sentimental things. I've created lots of space under my sinks and in my cupboards by actually using things I had spent money on. And when I accidentally broke an heirloom tile trivet on Mother's Day and *no one else* in the family felt sentimental enough to glue it back together, it was easy to let it go. - Also, the assertion that driving things to the donate center is a valid use of your decluttering time has been key for me. Making that task a formal part of the process has meant that it actually gets done! Spending a Saturday and nearly $200 to finally get large donations and trash out of our house and garage eventually made sense, got done, and opened up room for us to function. - Dana's advice to look, look, always look has recently been helpful in the garage with sentimental/heirloom items. This spring, I found it easier than expected to donate things I'd been fearing to deal with, because I gave myself permission to just open the bins, look at the things, put the lids back on, and walk away for a few weeks. I'm now taking the same approach with boxes of my children's school papers. - Finally, using the recommendations in Part 3: Helping Others Declutter - especially doing my own stuff first, building trust by being non-judgmental, and focusing on functionality - worked really well with Daughter and Spouse, who didn't want to follow the steps but still felt overwhelmed. Gently suggesting changes that might make their rooms more functional, then pointing out that various shelves, drawers, and bins were reasonably-sized containers that they could put their favorites in first, somehow made their decluttering projects feel manageable. |
| What parts or aspects of the book did you find difficult to grasp or challenging to apply to your home or situation? | - The Container Concept is harder to apply to books in our house, primarily because Spouse's mantra is, "Books are our family. We don't get rid of family." He was very distressed when I started trying to declutter our front room bookcases to hold only a single row of upright books on each shelf, rather than 2 rows deep with books piled horizontally on top of them and more on top of all the bookcases! Daughter and I - knowing that his very favorite books were the science fiction and fantasy ones - defined the front room bookcases for those genres only and moved or donated the others. Then we and Son purged hard on the sci-fi / fantasy books that we personally had no interest in and thought Spouse might let go too. We put them in boxes and asked him to veto and put in his personal collection any that he couldn't bear to part with. I gave him my bookcase in the bedroom, which he quickly filled up. He's now putting books on top of the 6-foot-plus cube storage shelves in there, too. But he did let go some computer programming textbooks from the 1990's this spring, so I think there's some hope.... - Dana's thoughts on minimalism, where "maybes are nos," "what-ifs become let's-assume-probably-nots," and "wouldn't-it-be-nice-to-haves turn into I'm-sure-I-could-get-replacements," are harder to embrace in practice when one is out of work and uncertain of the future. At least when thinking of getting rid of perfectly good things that you very well might use again. It feels like a fraught balancing act when deciding on tools and organizing supplies. - I mention the Head Explosion Rule to Daughter when she's overthinking an item and spinning out on whether to keep it, but honestly we're all too cautious about getting rid of things to embrace it. Instead, we use Dawn Madsen, the Minimal Mom's, Time-Will-Tell bin instead. Just a few weeks ago, we rearranged items on the kitchen counter and in the nearby cupboards to make room for a new small appliance. To do so, we removed a lot of cups and glasses. Though many were donated, a sizable subset were instead moved to the cupboard above the refrigerator for "just in case." Sure enough, only a week later we had occasion to pull some down when we had guests over! A whole-family rejection of the Head Explosion Rule and creation of a Time-Will-Tell shelf helped us navigate a decluttering project that initially felt impossible. - Dana's No-Mess Decluttering Steps clearly can work well for storage areas; I've watched her help people use the process in their attics, basements, and garages. And I generally embrace them when decluttering my functional spaces. And yet somehow, for my own garage, they're still difficult for me to feel hopeful about implementing. Even looking at the corner of yard tools and thinking, "Just look for trash," feels overwhelming. And that's *after* we used that truck to haul away donatable and broken furniture and appliances! My current theory is that we're going to need to define (zone) the spaces in there, moving the yard tools to the newly-defined space, and getting rid of things as we move them over there. Then do the same for each of the other categories. I'm not sure, it still feels like other people can do this fine (I know because I peek in their garages as I walk around the block), but we're still hopeless. Still, we persevere. |
| Please share your favorite quotations or key ideas and concepts from this book. | - "If a space in my home consistently gets out of control, I have too much stuff in that space." I'm noticing that this goes for small spaces as well as large ones. If my Get-Ready Bin is messy and poorly-functional, if my desktop makes me stressed and avoidant, I have too much stuff in those spaces and need to get rid of some. - "My family needs space in the container, too." No more goat trails in here! I'm aiming for lots of floor space, and we recently cleared enough in the front room to have guests over *and* a large LEGO project on the floor, if we want. (Maybe at the holidays....) - "Take it there now." This step eliminates procrasticlutter just as it's about to be created. It also bleeds into other parts of your life; you start doing lots of smaller tasks now instead of putting them off. Then they're done! - "Less is good. Better is good." Such peaceful permission to just get started and do what you can for now! It's made a world of difference in our household. Both Spouse and Daughter quote it back at me, especially about the blackberry patch and the bedrooms. - Procrasticlutter (is a thing) that must be dealt with, not ignored - a major lesson in our house. Dana often says to "go ahead and do the thing" when it's difficult and would normally halt the process. Do the research, make the phone call, list the item for sale; take care of the procrasticlutter. - You can keep anything, but you can't keep everything. This means that sure, you have to let things go; but also, you can keep your favorite things. - "Decluttering is a constant task and will be a constant task for the rest of your life." This means that I don't have to get my home to a perfect state and keep it there. Instead, it's always in flux and can be worked on a bit at a time. |
| White suggests a decluttering process that requires making a final decision about each item (keep, trash, or donate) and placing the item in its appropriate home right away rather than into a “keep pile” or “keep box” for later organizing. If you’ve used her method, how has the “take it there right now” approach worked for you? What are the pros and cons of her suggested strategy? | Take it there right now works most of the time for me. It absolutely helps me accept the realities of my space in real time and make adjustments while I am in the midst of the project, instead of trying to muster the willpower to do so after I've run out of energy. However, sometimes I am firmly on the bubble about whether to keep something. In those times, I use a tactic promoted by Dawn Madsen, the Minimal Mom: the Time-Will-Tell Bin. I'll designate a real "we'll see if we actually use it" space out of the way - like above the refrigerator - and let the item live there for the next 6-12 months. About 1/3 of the time, I do rescue something and give it a real home integrated with the rest of the stuff instead of donating it. But "take it there now" is a little nagging voice in the back of my mind when I'm doing things all day long. It's a reminder to just do whatever small task it is now, because I'm ADHD and will get distracted. But the task will already be done! Of course, I *might* get distracted on the way, but that's actually *less* likely than leaving a Keep Pile on the floor indefinitely. |
| A big part of White’s decluttering philosophy is the “container concept”—the idea of setting firm limits on the containers you use to hold your stuff, where “containers” are understood to mean the boxes, bins, racks, baskets, drawers, cabinets, shelves, etc., that you use to hold stuff, as well as the rooms that must contain the containers—and then decluttering to fit those limits. If you’ve used her method, how has the “container concept” helped or hindered your decluttering? What are the pros and cons of her methodology? Are there areas or categories of stuff for which it works better than others? | The Container Concept was crucial for me understanding that I really just needed to get rid of excess perfectly good stuff. Once I saw every space in my home as a container - and began to Define the Spaces - decluttering and organizing became much easier. Our front room bookcases were containers that properly should have limited how many books we held in them, if they were going to be both functional and under control. Our bedroom closet was a container that should have limited how many clothes we kept on the hangers. Our gameroom was a container that needed space for people and games - not for boxes of keepsakes that I didn't know what to do with. With practice, I think the container concept is properly understood as a physical fact of nature. There actually is a physical limit to how much stuff a space can hold. But it's also open to personal interpretation, in that it also incorporates "room for people" and room for them to do stuff in the space. So feeling reluctant to give up some kinds of things to make that room for people seems inevitable. In our home, the more difficult categories are books, computer stuff, sentimental things, and seasonal items. I think this is mostly because we want to be infinite collectors, have difficulty decluttering identity items, or preserve things that somehow feel even more precious because no one else would care about them. I'm noticing this last one with Daughter's pennies and the kids' school papers that they doodled on or said funny things in.... |
| White suggests following the “visibility rule”: Start every session of decluttering in the most visible places in your home. If you’ve used her method, how has the “visibility rule” helped or hindered your decluttering? What are the pros and cons of her suggested approach? | The Visibility Rule makes knowing where to start easy, which is critical in overcoming overwhelm. I was mortified of my house when my in-laws came to visit, but had no idea where to start or what to do. Dana's advice to start in the most visible places in my home really spoke to my specific situation and offered an easy-to-implement solution. She actually has a blog and video series called "14 days to opening your front door to guests." I used that method to prioritize the rooms in our house, then began decluttering them in that order. I started in the front room, where we sit and talk with guests, then moved to the game room, where we eat with them. Once those 2 rooms were mostly tidy, I moved on to the guest bathroom and the kitchen. The greatest pros for me were that my embarrassment was being alleviated each and every time I worked on my house, and that having any kind of bit-by-bit strategy felt doable. The only con I've noticed is that spaces do get recluttered, so you might feel like all that work was wasted. This is where Dana's (nearly) daily 5-minute pickup comes in. Since implementing a daily tidy of our front room and kitchen, I've felt much more capable of keeping our home under control and of welcoming our guests with only moderate amounts of stress. I've adapted this strategy in the yard, too. Nearly every yard work session, I work on things in visibility order. So I generally focus on brambles, weeds, and pruning in the front yard before the back yard. I work on the blackberry patch in the back yard before the thistles in the lawn. And so on. We've also decided to focus this year on the front yard xeriscape project instead of balancing our time between that and the back yard project. Of course, if focusing more on the front means that the weeds in the back garden plot get out of control, then that means that they're now more visible and must be destroyed! |
| Here’s your chance to ask Gayle and Ed any question you’re curious about. It need not be related to this survey’s topic(s). If we think that your question—and our answer—might be useful or instructive to The Clutter Fairy Weekly audience, we’ll share them in an upcoming episode. | Do you have Ed's book decluttering algorithm anywhere for reference? I've been wanting to recommend it to people, but have been resorting to trying to list specifics as I can remember them. |
| Future topics | Just another plug for a book club on Cassandra Aarssen's book The Clutter Connection. Her concept of organizing for your personality type: Visible vs Hidden and Broad Categories vs Detailed has been vital in making our home more functional for 4 adults sharing spaces. Also, I very much enjoyed hearing you all discussing set points and thought that concept dovetailed interestingly with Dana's concept of a clutter threshold. I've been slowly, strategically decluttering and decorating (!) to approach my own clutter threshold - where I can keep things under control more easily - while easing my family down to lower and lower set points in their expectations of how much stuff we need (or want?) to keep in our house. I remember that the minimal summer decor last year was a peaceful blessing, and notice that the more abundant spring decor this year has been a bit much for me. But Spouse mentioned that he really like the spring decor, so I'm going to have to try to reduce the inventory while keeping a similar effect. I'm wondering how others are dealing with this tension between our own clutter thresholds of what we can handle easily and our set points of the amount of stuff we're used to/comfortable with having around. And between those of other household members, too. |
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