Photo by Hugh Kretschmer
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Breaking the Spell
By David Dudley, January & February 2007
Five key tips for the clutter-besieged
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Try an experiment
Can't bring yourself to part with your beloved collection of vintage bank statements? "Think about it as if you were a scientist," advises psychologist Randy Frost. Make a hypothesis about how sad you'd feel if you got rid of these artifacts. Then throw them away and compare your resulting distress with that hypothesis. Frost says that typically your reaction will be far less severe than you'd feared. Once you know that, it might be a little easier to let the next treasured object go.
Create a record
Photograph or videotape belongings before you give them away. "It's the memories that are important, not the objects," says professional organizer Jeanne Smith. A single digital CD can hold a warehouseful of family knickknacks, along with the client's recorded reminiscences about each one of them, and copies can be made and distributed to the children and grandchildren.
Give and take
Giving your belongings to charities whose work you support is more satisfying than selling them to strangers—and, thanks to the tax deductions, usually more profitable.
Start small
Tackle one room—or one part of one room—at a time. Don't leave the area until it's finished, because you'll get distracted trying to find a home for all the stuff you've just picked up and will end up "churning"—shuffling the same clutter from one part of the house to another.
Find a friend
Clutter support groups, many using the familiar 12-step techniques, can be effective for chronic offenders. One very helpful online support club is led by Marla Cilley, better known as the FlyLady. Via e-mail and a website, FlyLady.net, Cilley goads, coaxes, and exhorts her followers to maintain a system of easy, regular routines that gradually clear households of clutter. Follow the FlyLady program for a month, she says, and her decluttering habits become all but reflexive. "It's behavior modification in a very simple way," Cilley says. "I call it FlyWashing."
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