Unclutter Your Life in One Week

How do you unclut­ter your life? Here’s a step by step, day by day guide. I love game plans, and this is one of the best game plans I’ve found on unclut­ter­ing so far.

This is from The Sim­ple Dol­lar:

Mon­day

Mon­day is the best day of the week to begin estab­lish­ing new rou­tines. It’s also a good day to tackle the “firsts” – the ele­ments of clut­ter you face first through­out your day.

For exam­ple, many of us face a clut­tered closet in the morn­ing when we wake up, so a good first step is to get your clothes in order. If you have more clothes than you can ade­quately fit in your dresser and closet, you need to elim­i­nate some.

At work, the first thing we often see is our desk or work­space. Fig­ure out a place for all of the stuff that you see – and don’t be sur­prised if the space for many of those things is the trash can.

Tues­day

Tues­day is the most stress­ful day of the week, so it’s the best time to tackle the areas of your life that cause you the most stress and require the most work to keep up.

At home, Erin encour­ages declut­ter­ing the bath­room (with the goal of being able to eas­ily find all of the things you need but toss­ing the things you don’t actu­ally use that tend to fill up your bath­room closet) and also stream­lin­ing your house­hold chores. I find in my own life that when I have a house­hold chore rou­tine, things are more likely to work well.

At work, one should take a look at fil­ing all of their papers so that the doc­u­ments one needs can eas­ily be found and the less-important things are out of the way. At my pre­vi­ous job, I found that hav­ing a fil­ing cab­i­net split into two pieces worked for me – a sin­gle drawer for stuff I actu­ally used some­times and the rest for stuff I needed to retain but would rarely look at. 99% of the time, I’d just look in that one drawer and find what I needed.

Wednes­day

Wednes­day is “hump day” and a per­fect day to focus on com­mu­ni­ca­tions and processes in our day.

At home, take a look at your kitchen and your bed­room. For us, at least, the kitchen alone can be a major project for de-cluttering. One big tac­tic that works is sim­ply reduc­ing your kitchen imple­ments, replac­ing fif­teen low-quality sin­gle use items with one high qual­ity item that sim­ply does the job. You don’t need a butcher’s block, you just need one really good chef’s knife, a bread knife, and a par­ing knife. You don’t need tons of casseroles and Pyrex, you just need a few high-quality French ovens. A more stream­lined shop­ping plan helps, too.

At work, re-evaluate your com­mute and your com­mu­ni­ca­tion processes. How do you get to work? Does your trip fill you with unnec­es­sary dis­trac­tions and angst? Look for the least stress­ful way to get to work. When you’re there, look at how you com­mu­ni­cate with oth­ers. Does it hap­pen in an orderly fash­ion with appro­pri­ate emo­tions? I find that “com­mu­ni­ca­tion ses­sions” work well for me, where I spend a period of time each day just han­dling com­mu­niques, then I turn off those com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels to allow myself to focus on other areas.

Thurs­day

On Thurs­day, the focus should be on orga­niz­ing your liv­ing spaces at home and focus­ing on your work­flow and processes at work.

At home, look at the places you spend your time dur­ing the day. For us, that means our fam­ily room, and the obvi­ous place to look there is our enter­tain­ment cen­ter, which is often a mess thanks to kids pulling out DVDs and play­ing with var­i­ous items. Another spot to look is our book col­lec­tion in the laun­dry room, which could sorely use some time.

At work, exam­ine how you work on projects. Do you have dif­fi­culty com­plet­ing them? Do you have too many projects? Start using the “five whys” and dig into the rea­sons for this. Quite often, there are some sim­ple things block­ing you from a much bet­ter workflow.

Fri­day

Friday’s focus is solely on unclut­ter­ing your sched­ule. Most of us have sched­ules that are so full to the brim with activ­i­ties that we scarcely have time for impor­tant things in our lives. How many of you read the pre­vi­ous activ­i­ties and thought, “That sounds awe­some, but I don’t have time for it!”

The best way to do this is to sim­ply pri­or­i­tize the things you’re doing. Fig­ure out what ele­ments are truly of low pri­or­ity and either treat them as such or find ways to com­pletely elim­i­nate them. Then, look at the higher pri­or­ity things and look for ways to com­press them – per­haps, instead of watch­ing a show live on Tues­days, you can record it and watch it commercial-free on Wednes­days. Per­haps instead of unwind­ing after work, you can spend a brief bit of time truly relax­ing and then get on with the things you need to do.

The Week­end
The biggest ben­e­fit of unclut­terinig is that it truly frees your week­end. If you have estab­lished rou­tines for han­dling every­thing through­out the week – and you’ve unclut­tered your time enough to allow for it – your week­ends go from being “catch up” time to being big blocks of free time with which you can do what­ever you want.