The very hardest part of clearing things out of your home isn’t the actual brawn of walking them out the door. Nope, there’s another muscle that needs exercising to prepare for this fight: Your brain. The tough part of decluttering is truly the mental aspect of deciding what should stay, and ultimately, how to get over the hurdle of liberating those once-worthy objects from our ownership. You have to be merciless.

The hardest part about decluttering has to be the “getting started.” Without a real nudge to dive in and actually do it, you might never feel the urge to, say, tidy up a few over-stuffed baskets or cluttered drawers. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. The thing is, today’s “room sweep” micro-mission is a timed exercise. All you have to do is focus your energy on one area—today, the entryway—and deal with it for just 20 minutes.

New technology is forever changing the way we live with media at home, but I bet you’re still hanging onto some relics of the past. Instead of ignoring them—hidden away behind the doors of a TV console or the depths of a storage closet—today, we’ll try and cut down on those collections. If you have a cherished collection—say, a perfectly curated assemblage of vinyl records or books—today’s mission will go quickly.

It’s the final week of our month-long decluttering plan (you can catch up here if you want to join in), and hopefully your home is feeling lighter, leaner and more in-control than ever. That’s why now is the perfect time to set up a system that I believe is the secret to keeping future clutter from getting out of hand.

I don’t know about you, but my bathroom is usually the first casualty to clutter. I think it’s because it’s the last room I spend time in on my most hurried, out of control days. In a rush to get out the door, I leave my bathroom in a mess of tissues, makeup and hair products that, yeah, don’t get picked up as quickly as they should when I get home. So my bathroom has always been in a perpetually messy state that lends itself to attracting more clutter.

Decluttering is an exercise in introspection. You need to think about the way you feel about your things (aka the entire KonMari philosophy) and also about when and how you use them. Who wants to hang on to things they don’t need? It’s that question—will I really use this?—that is at the heart of my favorite closet decluttering exercise: The reverse hanger trick. The idea is that you turn all the hangers in your closet around so that they hang backwards on the rod.

For the aesthetes among us, the journey of organizing doesn’t begin and end with an approved checklist of what to get rid of. It’s more than a mindful or tactile task; if you’re a lover of design, organizing a home is organically something visual. That notion is mostly ignored in the modern decluttering book canon — for example, there are zero photographs in “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” — and we’re not the only ones who noticed.

Tuesday, March 20, marks the first official day of Spring! Depending on where you are in the country, it might still feel very much like Winter outside, but the equinox is, indeed, upon us, which means warmer weather can’t be too far behind (…right?). In the meantime, you can use that fresh start on the calendar to get going on some of your goals for the new season.

There is endless advice in the world about how best to declutter your home—some of it is helpful, a bit of it is masterful, and much of it is inconsistent. “Keep only the things that spark joy” they tell you… but, I mean, you need to keep your screwdriver and vacuum, no matter how boring or frustrating their utility may be. Point is, the “rules” don’t always work.

Decluttering a space is a gargantuan task, no matter how small the space itself might seem. That’s because the real challenge isn’t how much stuff you have, or how messily it might be lumped around. The really tough part of decluttering is when you pick up a single object in your hand, knowing you have no good reason to keep it, but finding it impossible to let the thing go.

There’s a hard way and an easy way to deal with a big mess of clutter. The hard way is trying to commit to tackling it all at once, mentally planning for a weekend project you know will never come, as you once again sit and dawdle and tell yourself it’ll be easier when the weather’s better, or when things aren’t as crazy in your life. The easy way is to chip away at the mess, little by little until it’s in a good place.

Kitchen clutter is like a gas: It’ll expand to fit the space allowed. If you have a small kitchen, you probably feel like there’s never enough space for your stuff. Well guess what? Big kitchen people have that same problem, too. No matter how many cabinets you have, or whether your countertop is better measured in inches or acres, your kitchen can probably use a little slimdown. So that’s what we’re going to do today. Do a 20-minute decluttering sweep of your kitchen.

Emotional attachment to an inanimate object is one hell of a drug. It makes sentimental clutter especially difficult to say goodbye to. And for me, a writer who makes a living helping people with their homekeeping, it’s a very difficult thing to help you with. So I’m not going to tell you to get rid of anything at all. At least not yet. First, let’s open up the closets, drag out the boxes, and let’s find your sentimental stuff. What counts as sentimental stuff?

Keeping your home clean around the clock isn’t the work of wizardly magic. It’s just an exercise in focus. You have to commit to give every single thing at home a place where it belongs, even if that place is kind of a zoo. That’s why, if you want to keep your home clutter-free, you don’t need a junk drawer… you need several. Let’s face it, not every object you own is easily categorized.

As a renter, building your own built-in bookshelves is out of the question (unless you butter up your landlord, I guess). But you can get kind of close. Here are a handful of storage solutions that, like liquids and cats, will fill any space. And the best part about modular, design-your-own pieces is that they can be reconfigured to work in your next apartment (and every apartment after that!). Boxy modules snap together with small clips, and can be placed on the floor or on top of a stand.