Yours, Mine, Ours: Sharing or Delegating Responsibility for Clutter

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.

Negotiate for What You Need

This week’s assignment is to engage a member of your family or household in an organizing task or project. For example, an audience member mentioned needing her husband to make decisions about old tools that he never uses, but that are taking up a lot of space in the garage.

As you discuss the task or area in question, set aside judgment, blame, and any history the item or project may have. Focus instead on things on which you can agree and on constructive ways to move forward, such as:

• improving your communication about the situation, how you use your space, and your shared roles in caring for your home
• learning more about and accommodating one another’s different tastes, habits, and organizing styles
• clearly communicating your needs about organizing to the family member or housemate in question
• negotiating specific solutions to address the most problematic areas—the things that bother each of you the most.

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