Top 10 Cleaning Tips For Decluttering Your Space And Mind

Are you looking to reorganize your space, refresh your mind, and take back control of your life?

Spring is here- the perfect season for cleaning and starting anew. If you desire to learn how to get your home or office organized, create habits that will help you manage your life, and discover a strategy to keep your mind clear, keep on reading.

Keep reading to discover the top 10 ways to declutter your space and mind:

1. Acknowledge The Problem

If you struggle with clutter and being unorganized, know that you're not alone. No one is perfect, and we can all struggle with managing our spaces at times. That being said, it can be easy to avoid or ignore the messes growing in our lives, but they just simply won't go away without our help. If you're looking to improve your organization, you must first acknowledge any present issues before you can focus on tackling them. 

Everyone starts somewhere, and it's okay if yours is at ground zero right now. What's important is to get back on track and do what's best to make your life better. So if you feel like you're ready to improve your space and mind, you're in the right place. Take some time for reflection and see what can be changed, then make a commitment to improving.

2. Establish A Planner

Your time is precious and valuable, so it's time to start treating it as such. Whether you prefer a paper or digital format, having an established planner is the key to managing your time. Utilizing a planner lets you clearly see where your time is spent. You can analyze your weeks and months, see where your energy would fit best, and optimize your schedule for better productivity. This also gives you the ability to fit in personal time for leisure and rest. That way, you are dedicating time to the things that are truly important and spending less of it on unnecessary activities. 

In addition, having a planner helps you to keep track of all the necessary information used to run your life. Think special events, appointments, important dates, and reminders. When our days get busy, having an extra place to record and save everything helps to lessen the load on our minds, freeing up space to focus on other things.

3. Evaluate Your Spaces

Try making it a habit of checking in and periodically evaluating your spaces. Doing this will help you notice clutter buildup before it gets out of hand and also lets you see whether or not your organizational systems are working for you. This also gives you the opportunity to take inventory of what you already have.

For example, let's say that you enjoy purchasing beauty products in bulk when there's a sale. Then, you place those products underneath your bathroom sink or tuck them away in your storage closet for later. Over time, you buy other products that you believe you'll use first, so you put them in front of the older products you bought. Eventually, by the time you're ready to use the products you initially bought, you'll forget you even had them and buy more! 

This is the perfect situation to re-evaluate your current stocking system and serves as a reminder to check your current inventory first before you decide to purchase anything and create more clutter.

4. List Out Your Priorities

Once you have an established planner and you've taken inventory of your spaces, now you can decide what areas to work on first. Making a list of your priorities can help you to see which spaces are most important to take care of now. These will usually be the areas that affect the most of your day-to-day life, like high-traffic areas, your office at work, or your kitchen, but they can vary depending on your situation. When these areas are disorderly, the rest of your day is affected, and it can really disrupt your flow and productivity. 

You could also create a separate list of quick and simple tasks that are easy to do for immediate results. These can be things like checking your daily emails, tidying up the bathroom sink in the morning, or putting shoes away in the closet. Sometimes working on a less intimidating task can give you the motivation you need to accomplish bigger projects down the road.

5. Simplify Your Routine

One of the best ways to fight against clutter and disorganization is to minimalize your spaces and simplify your routines. This is especially useful for busy parents and caregivers. With so much to do, trying to manage a complicated cleaning schedule can be difficult.

Find a routine that works with you and your schedule and is one that you can actually follow without getting burnt out. The purpose of a routine is to help you manage your time, not feel like it's being taken away from you.

Tip: The less items you have to clean and tidy up, the less time and energy you'll spend cleaning and decluttering. So get into the habit of purging often and sticking to the essentials first.

6. Clean-Up Your Devices

One of the easiest areas to organize for instant results is to go through and clean up your devices. Think: Do you have an inbox full of unread emails? Or perhaps hundreds of photos saved in your camera roll that you forgot about? Then now is a great time to organize it all. Since we use our devices so often, it can be easy to forget to pause and clean up the accumulated clutter. Over time, however, this clutter can impede our ability to find the things we really need, and even decrease our loading speed and storage space.

Try dedicating some free time this weekend to sort through all of your emails or clear up your desktop on your computer. You can also look through your phone and get rid of unnecessary photos, messages, and apps that are taking up storage. Not only will your devices run a lot smoother, but now you've freed up space for things you actually want to keep. This will also improve your productivity at work or school- a win-win!

7. Purge And Downsize

The act of purging and decluttering is a necessary one. Holding onto excess items will make it harder for you to see or enjoy the items you actually need and want. For example, you may have a stack of unread letters sitting on your desk. As that pile builds up, you could risk missing out on an important deadline or bill that's now been lost in the clutter of mail. 

This is especially critical when it comes to perishable items in your home. You wouldn't want to accidentally use a product that has expired or gone bad. To prevent this from happening, make it a habit to go through your stockpiles and see what is old or not needed. 

Some items you can go through include mail letters, makeup, clothing, children's toys, cleaning products, towels, and sponges. The same can be said for cleaning out your refrigerator; immediately toss out any spoiled foods or ingredients. 

Tip: If you have something you don't need or want anymore, and it is in fairly good condition, you may decide to donate it to a charity or shelter that will appreciate and use it.

8. Optimize Traffic Areas

Think about your home- are there any places that come to mind where they are consistently cluttered and unorganized? Then there is a high chance that they are high-traffic areas. Traffic areas are areas of the home where your family frequents the most. Aside from the bedrooms, these are usually places like the living room and kitchen, entry hallway, or bathrooms. Since these areas are used the most, things tend to get moved around or misplaced often. 

When doing a deep organization of your home, these are the spaces that are usually the most important to tackle first because they get unorderly very quickly. Finding a good, solid system for each of these areas is crucial if you want to maintain them with minimal stress. The best way to optimize these areas is to observe the habits of your family, take into consideration your lifestyle, and create a solution that fits best.

Tip: Since these spaces involve your family, feel free to include them in the upkeep and make it a collective zone of care and responsibility. 

9. Start A Journal

While organizing and cleaning your physical environment is important, decluttering and caring for your mind can be just as imperative. Having a clear mind is key to living a more peaceful, organized, and productive life.

Start a journal or notebook where you can put your ideas down on paper. Whenever you feel overwhelmed or burdened with a million things, simply writing them down can help clear up that headspace, allowing you to focus on one thing at a time without worrying that you'll forget anything.

10. Practice Letting Go

Clutter grows because we aren't selective about the things that give us value. If you wish to decrease the clutter in your space and mind, then you will greatly benefit from the practice of letting go.

Take some time to pause, reflect, and evaluate. See where there are areas that aren't serving you best, and see how you can curate them to enhance your life. Imagine that you are creating lines in the sand between what you allow into your space and what it is you want to keep out. Clutter, for example, has no space in our lives. 

Be willing to part with items that don't bring joy and value to you or your family, and let go of negative thoughts or ideas that take up residence in your head. Decluttering goes beyond what's in the physical world around us and includes the space in our minds that is reserved for greater things.

In conclusion, decluttering and organizing both your environment and mind are important to living a more fulfilling life. Whether you are a novice or an expert, knowing when to step in and make changes will improve your quality of living and enhance the world around you for years to come. Just remember to start where you are, evaluate and reflect often, and never be afraid to ask for help from others along your journey of organization.

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