Your Best and Your Worst: Household Sweet Spots and Problem Areas

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.

Tweak a Problem Area

This week’s assignment is to apply a strategy or solution from today’s episode to one of your clutter problem areas:

• Identify a problem area in your home—a physical space, category of stuff, or collection of items that you find difficult to keep clear of clutter.
• Design a small habit, daily routine, or recurring practice to start getting the problem area under control. For example:
  • Establish a “reset” routine to scan the area for items that don’t belong there and return them to their rightful homes.
  • Stop accumulation of new stuff in this area, category, or collection by choosing a container to serve as the limiting factor for what can go here. (You’ll probably need to cull items from the area to fit the container at first. Plan a separate short-term project to deal with the excess.)
  • Set a threshold for controlling what else can get added to the area, such as a “one-in, one-out” rule.
• Practice your new habit or routine for a few weeks. Be prepared to make further adjustments as you become accustomed to living with less stuff in this area.

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