Mistake #5: Products first

What does every American do when she wants to start a project? She goes shopping! Everyone wants to start getting organized by purchasing organizing products first. The result: several hundred dollars added to the credit card balance and a stack of not-quite-right containers in the house, piled on top of the clutter.

The Clutter Fairy alternative: Sort through the entire contents of one room first, sorting to determine what you will keep and what can be trashed, recycled, put in another room, or given away. When you get down to the real “keep” pile, then you can go shopping with a plan for exactly what and how much you need to contain, and you’ll only buy the products you actually need.

Mistake #4: Clear-time blindness

No one looks forward to clearing out a long-neglected space (except maybe professional organizers). There’s a common mental disconnect between the time it took to create the chaos and the time it’s likely to take to clear it out. So people tend to make a mental adjustment, reducing cleaning time from how long it will actually take to the amount of time they’re willing to put in. If you’ve neglected organization for six months, it’s going to take more than a Saturday afternoon to get your space under control.

The Clutter Fairy alternative: Be realistic about the time a project will take. Don’t underestimate the scope of what you’re trying to accomplish, or you’ll set yourself up to be disappointed when the project isn’t complete at the end of the afternoon. Take delight in incremental progress, and stick with the plan until it’s complete. Think how proud you’ll be when you’re truly done!

Mistake #3: Premature “keep” decisions

Once you begin sorting, you’ll find yourself touching everything in the room. Each object grabs your attention, and they’re all saying, “Keep me!” It’s easy to get bogged down in trying to decide what to keep as you touch each object. It may seem efficient to make your keep decisions at this stage, but it’s not—for two reasons. First, you’ll tend to get fatigued by continuous decision-making, and you’ll want to shut down. Second, you’ll keep too much because until you get through the initial sorting, you’re not choosing based on the whole picture of everything you own.

The Clutter Fairy alternative: Don’t confuse sorting with decision-making. Your first step is to sort the whole room, gathering like with like, pulling out items you can readily identify as trash or recycling. Stay focused on the task of sorting the entire contents of the room before you make keep decisions. Then process each pile and make keep decisions, also adding to your trash, recycle, and relocate piles. This sort-first, decide-second process will yield sensible, informed keep decisions, and the volume of what you keep will almost certainly be smaller.

Mistake #2: Keeping things for the wrong reasons

What’s even worse than making keep decisions prematurely? Keeping things for the wrong reason. For example, you throw something on the keep pile “because it was a gift.” Are you sure you want to make space for something not because you like it, or use it, or even want it, but for no other reason than that it was a gift? That’s not a good enough reason for it to take up your valuable space and attention. Another bad reason for keep decisions is cost. You don’t have to compound an expensive buying mistake with a bad keep decision.

The Clutter Fairy alternative: Your goal is to “thin the herd.” Don’t manufacture reasons to keep things, or you might as well not be trying to organize. Be truthful about what you like, what you will use—not just might use—and what genuinely suits your lifestyle. If something doesn’t make the cut, get rid of it in favor of things that do. Don’t waste your valuable time storing, living with, and working around a bunch of stuff you don’t really love.

Mistake #1: Deciding not to decide

If all you’re doing is putting the same stuff in new places, you’re wasting time and effort. Sometimes you find that you can’t decide whether to keep an item, so you put it back on the pile. All you’ve really done is made an unjustified keep decision, postponing your pain to another day. Do you want to go through this whole process again later? I doubt it!

The Clutter Fairy alternative: Put aside the item that trips you up for the moment, and move on to something else that you can decide about. Don’t let one problematic item stop the great progress you’re making. Tackle some easy decisions first, and your success will give you strength to make harder choices. At the very least, you’ll reduce the pile that needs your attention from what it would have been if you’d let that one hard decision stop you in your tracks. It’s okay if you have to spread out the tough decisions over a few days. Your ultimate goal is to make good keep decisions based on what’s truly part of your lifestyle—then let the rest go.

Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

“Green” is everywhere these days—in the news, in the workplace, and on store shelves. So wherever I speak to audiences in this environmentally conscious climate, I get a lot of questions about recycling. I started collecting the questions that have stumped me, and then I went online to look for answers.

I live in Houston, as do many of my clients, so I started with the City of Houston recycling web site. What I found there was chaotic, inconsistent, full of confusing acronyms and ambiguities, and spread across a mind-numbing array of pages. I despaired of ever tracking down all the answers I needed. But the Clutter Fairy makes her living bringing order out of chaos, so I dug into the project of making sense of it all. My staff and I deconstructed a huge mass of information and rearranged it in what we hope you’ll find a user-friendly guide to recycling in Houston.

View the recycling guide here.

A special note to our readers elsewhere in Greater Houston: the City of Houston, Abitibi Consolidated, and H-E-B have created a partnership to offer recycling at 22 H‑E‑B grocery stores in the outlying areas. See the list of accepted materials and a map of participating locations (PDF).

In a previous newsletter, we promised a “comprehensive guide,” but I’ve since realized that the City of Houston is only the tip of the iceberg of recycling efforts in our region. The good news: There are more ways than ever to keep things out of our landfills and to safeguard the environment. We couldn’t cover them all here, but this is a solid start, and we plan to add more resources in the future.

I encourage you to think of recycling as one part of a larger strategy for eliminating clutter from your life, managing the waste you generate, and “greening” your lifestyle and the planet:

• Reduce: First and foremost, you can save time, storage space, and money by planning your purchases carefully. Don’t buy more than you need or more than you can store. Remember, it’s not a bargain if you have nowhere to put it when you get home. If you shop as a form of recreation, look all you want, try things on, handle them in the store, but don’t buy them!
• Reuse: Before you recycle or dispose of something that still has usefulness, consider giving it to a friend, family member, posting it on the Houston Freecycle™ Network Yahoo Group, or selling it on Craig’s List. Don’t fall into the cluttered recycler’s trap of thinking, “If it’s still useful, I have to keep it.” No, you don’t! If you want to be organized, find a way for someone else to benefit from whatever usefulness remains.
• Recycle: More materials than ever before are being accepted for recycling, and the increase in volume, along with improvements in technology, should continue to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of recycling processes. Check out our guide below for methods and facilities to recycle a wide variety of common materials.
• As a last resort, dispose of waste in a safe and appropriate fashion.

Editor’s note: We here at The Clutter Fairy are not infallible. If you discover any factual errors or important omissions, or if you find information that’s been updated since we prepared the guide, please let us know so we can update our data.