The 0% Method: A Radical Way to Declutter Your Life

Use this 5-step model to create simpler spaces in a day or less.

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The 0% Decluttering Method is the easiest, most effective, and fastest strategy for a simpler life I’ve ever discovered. It works for physical and digital spaces and shows immediate effects — usually in a day or less.

Here’s the idea: Instead of decluttering a few things here and there, you pack everything away until you arrive at 0% clutter. Then, you gradually reintroduce the items you need the most. Therefore, you override some of the most common issues while decluttering — decision fatigue and loss aversion.

So, before we get into the nitty-gritty, we need to understand the problems with traditional decluttering.

The 3 Problems With Traditional Decluttering

Traditional decluttering follows a simple guideline: gradually declutter your possessions until you arrive at a certain fraction — usually 20%.

The reason for this is the 80/20 rule. This says that you only use 20% of your possessions 80% of the time and vice versa. So we go from 100% possessions to 90% to 80% to 70%, etc. And it’s a clever idea. But in practice, this is incredibly hard. Why? Because we don’t have the guts and energy to…