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Decluttering

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This is how often you should clean your home, according to science. For most of us, the thought of steaming our carpets or cleaning out the crisper section of the refrigerator makes us want to crawl under the covers.

This is how often you should clean your home, according to science

Almost. Since we all can use some extra motivation to get our rubber gloves on, we’ve rounded up the leading expert advice about how often you should clean everything and, more important, why. Turns out, your home is harbouring more bacteria than a public garbage bin. Motivated yet? Take a deep breath and read on to see how frequently you should be cleaning your house. Microwave. Why It's So Hard to Get Rid of Your Clutter. Marie Kondo tells us to ditch joyless items but where are we sending them? Earlier this year, Ikea’s head of sustainability said at a Guardian Sustainable Business event that consumers in the developed world had reached “peak stuff”.

Marie Kondo tells us to ditch joyless items but where are we sending them?

The success of Japanese de-cluttering icon and best-selling author Marie Kondo suggests he’s not the only one who thinks so. The praise and enthusiasm for the KonMari method, which is Kondo’s approach of only keeping items that “spark joy”, signal that attitudes in an increasingly disposable world are shifting. On Instagram and Twitter her devotees post pictures of the clothes and items they’re getting rid of, often with glowing endorsements of her method’s effects on wellbeing. However, its popularity also raises important sustainability questions. The Challenge of Getting Rid of Stuff. 12 Days of Clutter - Day 1- Kitchen.

Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying by Marie Kondo – digested read. Life truly only really begins when you have put your house in order.

Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying by Marie Kondo – digested read

That’s why I have devoted my life to tidying. See that T-shirt on the floor. Pick it up you, lazy scumbag. Where was I? Joy. The Illustrated Guide to the KonMari Method. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: Here in the states, minimalism isn’t exactly a point of pride (we like stuff, and lots of it), so it’s especially remarkable that Japanese tidying expert Marie Kondo’s brutally strict approach to de-cluttering took off here.

The Illustrated Guide to the KonMari Method

The no-excuses elimination method, has spawned legions of Konverts who devote vast amounts of time to kondo-ing their lives top to bottom. The best-selling book that started it all is easy to digest (and infectious…you will literally start itching to toss stuff), though its central thesis is kind of hard to stomach at first: Unless you truly, deeply love an item, it has no business in your home. This means the first purging session can be rough, but the euphoria that comes with unloading a single bag of unnecessary clutter makes going H.A.M. on the rest of your space easy.

We’ve laid out the basics below—along with an illustrated guide to her folding technique, which we found impossible to figure out based on the text alone. How my year of tidying up changed my life and my family. Pricing. I went 200 days without buying anything new and learned how toxic our need for possessions is. Every year Americans buy 6.5 billion greeting cards, according to the Greeting Cards Association (pdf).

I went 200 days without buying anything new and learned how toxic our need for possessions is

Birthdays, graduations, anniversaries: the average American purchases 34 cards a year; the average Brit buys 46 a year. Cards are exchanged through the year, but nothing comes close to the winter holidays—and particularly Christmas. In the US, 1.6 billion Christmas cards are sold every year. In the UK, it’s 900 million, which doesn’t account for photo cards that people may send as season’s greetings, or handmade ones. It’s a large market that caters to a widely held desire: to share greetings with friends and family in a personal, yet efficient, and affordable way.

7 Ways to Declutter Like a Goddess with the KonMari Method. I want to share with you a book that has absolutely changed my life.

7 Ways to Declutter Like a Goddess with the KonMari Method

It’s called The Life Changing Magic of Tidying: A Simple, Effective Way To Banish Clutter Forever by Marie Kondo, the creator of the KonMari Method. As the title says, this is a very simple (though not easy) way to get to the root of your clutter problem and help you to resolve it once and for all: If you don’t love it, don’t keep it! Piles of stuff in our homes are one of the greatest stress triggers. Clutter literally increases your cortisol level! When we have a lot of clutter in our homes, it has the affect of distracting us and can even cause chronic restlessness. 4 Ways to Toss Things With No Regrets. The Minimalists. Why tidying up could change your life. I am stuffing a letter between two books when I realise my possessions are in charge of me.

Why tidying up could change your life

It’s a hoarder’s attempt at tidying: hiding stuff inside other stuff. My coffee table groans under books, digital devices, coffee cups, lint rollers, newspapers and one or both of my kittens, Ollie and Sebastian. Bottles of toiletries line the bathroom mirror collecting dust, and upstairs cubbyholes burst with clothes I no longer wear. Let’s not even talk about my inbox, crammed with unread emails. The Stuff is winning. Nicodemus and Millburn launched theminimalists.com in December 2010. How to Program Your Mind to Stop Buying Crap You Don’t Need.

Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century. Dishes in the sink, toys throughout the house, stuff covering every flat surface; this clutter not only makes our homes look bad, it makes us feel bad, too.

Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century

At least that’s what researchers at UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives and Families (CELF) discovered when they explored in real time the relationship between 32 California families and the thousands of objects in their homes. The resulting book, Life at Home in The Twenty-First Century, is a rare look at how middle-class Americans use the space in their homes and interact with the things they accumulate over a lifetime. Our over-worked closets are overflowing with things we rarely touch. Strategies for seeing clutter.

When you’re entrenched in your daily routines and activities, your home and workplace can become generic scenery.

Strategies for seeing clutter

This might be a good thing if it means you’re focused on your responsibilities and what matters most to you. However, if you’re no longer seeing your spaces because you’re numb to their presence, it might be time to pause and take a look at the backdrops to your life. Even though you might not focus on the things in your home and office, they still might be affecting you.

An easy way to test this is to really “see” a room, clear all the clutter from it, organize the things that remain in the room, and then gauge how you feel in the clutter-free room compared with how you feel in other spaces. 365 Less Things — Reducing our stuff one day at a time. 10 Creative Ways to Declutter Your Home. Time. Now that school is back in session, vacations have been taken and we’ve transitioned from flexible days to scheduled ones, it seems appropriate to share it with you all.

time

Enjoy! Perhaps the question I receive the most here on the blog is “how do you do it?” I’m completely flattered by the question and hope to give you some very practical and inspiring tips, but first I must make a little disclaimer: I am not super-woman. Clean Your Messy House in 6 Months. Peter Walsh's 10 Tips to De-Clutter Your Home. Top 20 Organizing and Decluttering Tips. Decluttering tips. » How to Declutter an Entire Room in One Go. Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter. My family is moving to another house this coming weekend, and to prepare for the move, we’re going through the entire house and getting rid of stuff we don’t need. The new house has much less storage, which I’ve decided is a blessing: it means we have to cut things down to the essentials. » 18 Five-Minute Decluttering Tips to Start Conquering Your Mess. “Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” - Albert Einstein I’ve written a lot about simplicity and decluttering (I can’t help it — I’m passionate about it!)

And I’ve noticed that a lot of readers share my ideal of having an uncluttered home or workplace, but don’t know where to start. When your home is filled with clutter, trying to tackle a mountain of stuff can be quite overwhelming. So here’s my advice: start with just five minutes. Baby steps are important. Then take another five minutes tomorrow. For those who are overwhelmed by their clutter, here are some great ways to get started, five minutes at a time. Designate a spot for incoming papers. Every-day Solutions to Staying Organized.