How to Keep Clutter at Bay for Good

Congratulations, if you’ve been following the organisations and decluttering tips in this series you will now have cleaned up the clutter! Now let’s keep clutter at bay and organization and order in place. If you need to revisit previous posts in the series you can find them here:

Keep clutter at bay with the following maintenance tips.

• Only purchase what you need. This means cutting back on recreational shopping. When you buy things needlessly, those items and possessions have to go somewhere. This leads to clutter creeping back into your life. When you only buy what you need, your finances are affected positively as well.
• Give away, donate, throw out toys for upcoming holidays and birthdays.
• Handle all of your physical and virtual mail one time. Sort your snail mail, and discard the junk straight to the bin instead of just putting it down on your desk to deal with later.
• Create a place for everything important.
• Do you really need 40 pairs of shoes or 25 baseball caps? Probably not.
• Stop buying on impulse. When waiting in the checkout line, ignore all of the inexpensive, high impulse items placed there to get your attention.
• Scan receipts, warranties, letters and other documents and throw out all those piles of paper. Save the scanned data on a folder in your computer.
• Put things away immediately.
• Keep a donation box, add to it regularly, and drop it off at the charity shop once a week.
• Download a decluttering application. There are some excellent organization and decluttering apps available for free for your smart phone.
• If something comes in, something has to go out. This single tip can work wonders and in keeping your home clutter free once you get it there.
• Perform once a month clutter busting sessions.
• Make everyone in your family responsible for his or her personal space. You simply don’t have enough time or energy to run around behind your family cleaning up the clutter they are causing.

Do you have any tips that you use to keep clutter at bay? Let us know in the comments below.

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Till Next Time

Mike Gardner is The Time Doctor