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Set reachable goals for your decluttering
If you’re buried in clutter, a goal to declutter even one room can take a long time to reach. Small daily or weekly goals can be a lot more reachable and give you motivation to keep going. They can be of the “spend x minutes” type, or the “toss n items” type. For example:
Declutter for 15 minutes every day
Declutter for 2 hours each week
Toss 7 items every day
Get rid of 50 items this week
Donate 100 items by the end of the month
For ongoing goals, you can set up a wall chart to track your progress – even give yourself a colored star every day you meet your goal, and a gold star at the end of the week.
Making best use of your calendar
- Keep one main central calendar for the whole family, where everyone can see it and write on it. Each person can have their own personal calendar too, of course, but EVERYTHING should go on the central calendar as soon as someone knows about it.
- Only time-dependent activities and tasks should go on your calendar. If it’s something that could be done on any day, put it on a to-do or action list, not on the calendar. Why not? Because a mixture of time-critical and non-time-critical tasks on a calendar day obscures the tasks which HAVE TO be done that day.
- At the end of the week, look back on your calendar and what you did during the week, and consider any activities or tasks which may have arisen which haven’t yet been written down. Record them now!
- Look ahead to the calendar entries for next week. What do you need to do beforehand to prepare? Those need to get written down too!
Recommended Resources
DIY Planner: printable planner and calendar pages in multiple sizes and layouts. PDF format files can be read by any computer.
Clutter-Free Forever e-book by Stephanie Roberts
Get Things Out of Your Head
Your brain is not a good place to store things. The more things you try to remember, the more stress builds up.
Have a place to record things: planner, index cards, voice recorder, PDA or computer. Have a way to get things you’ve recorded, into your system: use an inbox of some kind. Use routines or checklists for regular or repeated tasks. Have a daily or weekly routine for gathering up stray papers, getting them into the right inbox, and processing them.
Keep lists: “To buy”, “To mend”, “waiting for” (delegated tasks, orders not yet received, stuff you’re waiting for answers on), “someday” (things you’d like to do and don’t want to forget, but not just yet), and “agendas” (things you need to remember to talk about or do with individual people and at meetings).
Recommended resources
Book: David Allen “Getting Things Done”
I’ve read many, many “organizing” books over decades and this is the one which has made the most difference for me. It is eminently practical, detailed and straightforward. It doesn’t require you to buy any specific tools: you can use anything from a paper notebook, planner, or index cards to a PDA or computer.
Main strengths are in processes to capture, record, plan and organize tasks and projects. Not so strong on how to actually get yourself to DO all those tasks!