Stem the Tide: Tips to Prevent or Reduce Clutter at its Sources

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.

Stem the Flow

This week’s assignment is to slow down or shut down one of your ongoing sources of clutter:

• Identify an area of your home or a category or collection of stuff that suffers from chronic clutter. (For example, the entryway.)
• Reflect on circumstances or situations that lead to the clutter in this space or category, as well as the conditions or people that contribute to it. Write brief statements describing a few such situations or circumstances. (For example, “I take off my shoes when I enter the house, and I never seem to circle back to put them away.”)
• Now, for each statement you wrote, write a resolution or affirmation that encapsulates a habit you’d like to cultivate or eliminate. (For example, “I will go straight to the bedroom when I arrive home and put my shoes in the rack in the closet.”)

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