Simplifying: Declutter for 15 minutes daily

Feb 15, 2013 by saverchic

Each day, set your timer for 15 minutes and declutter an area of your home.  Although this isn’t a lot of time, you’ll be focused on the task at hand for 15 whole minutes, and it’s surprising how much you’ll accomplish in that amount of time.

Last week I worked on decluttering my kitchen for 15 minutes each day.  I skipped one day of decluttering to spend time with my family, so all together, I decluttered for an hour and a half over the course of the week.  It’s amazing how much progress I made!  This week, my counters are clear, and it’s been so much easier to keep everything clean when I don’t have to work around clutter.

This week, I’m decluttering in my bedroom.  My focus is on cleaning out drawers, so I’m spending 15 minutes each day on one drawer.  I clean it out, decide what to keep, donate, and throw out.  Then I wipe down the inside of the drawer and put the “keep” items back in, in an organized way.  Already, I am saving a lot of time by not having to look for things.

If you spend 15 minutes a day decluttering for six days each week for an entire year, think of the results you’ll see!  If my calculations are correct, that would be like spending 78 hours decluttering your home.  But instead of doing a decluttering marathon for 78 hours straight, it would be 78 hours of focused, productive decluttering.  How awesome is that?!

I came upon the idea of decluttering for 15 minutes a day by reading the FlyLady’s website.  She has a lot of useful information and strategies for getting your home in order.