Yours, Mine, Ours: Seeking Clarity in Our Cluttered Relationships

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.

Ask for the Help You Need

This week’s assignment is to engage your spouse, partner, or another member of your family or household in an organizing task or project:

• Identify a room, area, decluttering project, or task for which you’d like help or at least cooperation.
• Start a conversation with the person whose assistance or input you’re seeking.
• As you discuss the task or area in question, set aside judgment, blame, 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 organizing styles, tastes, and habits,
  • clearly communicating your needs and desires related to clutter and organizing to the family member or housemate in question, or
  • negotiating specific solutions to address the most troubling areas—the things that bother both of you the most.

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