I Asked AI to Declutter My Kitchen, and I Actually Took Its Advice

I’ve probably spent years of my life organizing my home, but there are still plenty of hotspots that regularly need some decluttering. Those spots tend to exist mostly in my family’s most-used room of the house: the kitchen. Between the constant activity and the fact that all seven of us use the space all the time, things quickly get pretty messy. 

As summer winds down and I stare down the start of the school year, there’s one kitchen drawer that stores our school lunch boxes and essentials that’s become an organizational sore spot. Rather than simply shuffling everything around and making it look neat for now, I decided to see what fresh decluttering advice AI could offer me — so I uploaded a photo to ChatGPT and asked it what I should do. Here’s what happened next.

Alongside the photo of my messy kitchen drawer, I asked ChatGPT for step-by-step instructions on how to declutter it, and I surely got them — with a great deal of added commentary. Pared down, the instructions from ChatGPT consisted of a summary of contents, followed by directions to empty the drawer, decide what items should be put elsewhere, choose what to keep and what to donate or toss, stand items in the drawer vertically instead of stacking them, and give each category of items a home.

The advice was so parallel to the steps I recommend when I offer decluttering advice to others that it made me wonder if ChatGPT was maybe pulling from my own archive of articles online! (It’s totally possible.) But, of course, I know that it is classic, unsurprising advice that plenty of experts have sworn by for decades. 

I emptied the drawer, categorized items, wiped out the interior, decided what to keep and what to put away elsewhere, and put the rest of the contents back. One of ChatGPT’s organizing suggestions was to file my kids’ metal PlanetBox lunch boxes vertically; I was so excited to try it, but they wouldn’t quite fit in the drawer that way. (Next time, I’ll include the dimensions of the drawer in my prompt and ask for alternative organizing suggestions.) Still, I appreciated this particular detailed suggestion based on the actual items I had, which makes this program stand out from standard online decluttering advice.

Even if the AI large language model’s detail was a bit heavy-handed, following the general steps outlined by ChatGPT took me from a chaotic drawer to one that’s not only fully functional, but also nice to look at.

Surprisingly, the biggest help wasn’t the actual steps ChatGPT fed me; it was the fact that my brain seemed to interpret the instructions as someone telling me what to do. It almost felt like body doubling, in that I had the sensation of being accountable to someone — and the motivation that (for me, at least) goes along with that. 

So while I didn’t learn any particularly revolutionary new decluttering or organizing strategies from ChatGPT, calling on AI to help me declutter my kitchen was still a game-changing technique. Not only did I come away with a transformed drawer, but I also gained a simple go-to that moves the decluttering needle from a nagging thought to a completed project in no time. This is so powerful because even with all the best strategies in the world, the motivation is often the hardest part.