New years always, always, always make me want to pare down. Simplify. Organize all the things. Toss. Reprioritize. Use things purposefully.
And mostly just clear out the clutter.
Over the past year or so, all the stuff has started to really annoy me. Like really annoy me. And I think I finally figured out why. When I was teaching, my desk and classroom were hyper-organized. I could find everything I needed quickly, and all the superfluous stuff either got filed, organized, or pitched. It was a well oiled machine.
But now... now I work from home, and my work space also happens to be our living space. And I don't work as efficiently as I could in a home where the stuff is taking over. Organization equals productivity equals happy mom.
You get the picture. And so this year, we're making a really conscious effort to not let things we don't need into the house as well as purging or repurposing the stuff we already have. Since we just do NOT have the time and energy to make giant changes right now (the newborn and toddler are pretty labor intensive these days!), we're hoping these small changes will help us to get rid of the junk.
Take ten minutes. If you can devote no more time than that, it still means you've spent over an hour that week making progress. Ten minutes a day to go through something - a drawer, the corner of a room, one box.
Take the 10-10-10 challenge. Let's say you have more than ten minutes. (Great! Come over! My to do list is a million miles long, and I'll put you to work! Ha!) Take the 10-10-10 challenge. Find ten things that need putting away in their proper locations, ten things to toss right now, and ten things to donate. Hell, make it a challenge for the kids too and see who can do it the fastest. At the end, that's 30 or 60 or 90 things that have a new home!
Use what you have. So, I'm one of those people that tends to acquire little things. Like, for instance, we have a lot of bottles of teeny tiny shampoo and conditioner (which begs the question, WHY do I keep taking them from hotels?!). So for now, we're using teeny tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner until they're gone. Because buying new doesn't make sense when we have so much sitting here.
Try something in a different way. As I mentioned earlier, Dan's old dresser was just sitting in a room in our house. No one was using it for anything of value, but it's a big piece that takes up a lot of space. So, we might as well use it creatively. We popped the mirror off, moved it to the kitchen, and made it our hutch. It's a gorgeous piece that actually has a purpose other than collecting dust now.
If you don't love it, but don't want to ditch it, box it up. I am, unfortunately, someone who thinks she needs everything. But I have a LOT of things sitting around that I don't use. For example - this past year, we repurposed my husband's old dresser into a hutch for our kitchen. Several of the drawers still had clothes in them including the drawer that was "my drawer" when the dresser lived in Dan's apartment. I quite literally hadn't used or looked at those clothes since 2013, so instead of looking through them, I put them directly into the donate box. If I didn't need them in four years, I certainly didn't need them now. So I've decided I'm going to do the same going forward. If I can't part with it at first sight, it's going into a box, and if I haven't felt the need to pull it out in six months, it's going to the appropriate donation site. It does keep the stuff around for an extra six months, but if it eventually gets it out of the house, it's worth it.
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