Mindful Living

When you feel a decluttering binge coming on, you might be tempted to grab a bag or box and start filling it with things to toss or donate. That certainly is one plan of attack, and you may end up with a bulging bag of stuff that you need to get out of your house. Which is great, of course. And if that works for you in the long term, then keep on going!

My husband and I recently replaced our dresser, which spurred an event which I’ll be referring to in the confines of our relationship history as “The Great T-Shirt Eradication of 2018.” You see, between us, we own many, many tees. We could, as a couple, each wear a different shirt every day and maybe make it until Independence Day without doing laundry. At least, that was the case before “The Great T-Shirt Eradication of 2018.

I hate to invoke the “two types of people” trope, but I think it rings especially true here. There are two types of people in the world: Bullet journalers, and bullet journalers who haven’t started yet. I admittedly am in that second camp. I was even drinking the bujo haterade when the trend first came along. Technology offers so many advantages over pen-and-paper recordkeeping.

We all know the benefits of making the bed every morning. Along with tidying up your bedroom in a pinch, this neat ritual helps set an orderly tone for the rest of your day. Clearing off your coffee table every day can be similar. As one Apartment Therapy reader put it: “Clearing off the coffee table is the making-the-bed of the living room!” Take a few minutes to clean up your coffee table each day, and you’ll enjoy a clearer mind and set the tone for a cleaner living room.

As if the stylish and affordable home furnishings weren’t enough of a reason to love IKEA, the store made it their mission to create a streamlined recycling process for their customers. Along with their chic assortment of recycling bins for sale, the Swedish super-retailer offers several convenient ways for customers to recycle their old stuff—think: glass, batteries, furniture, and more—while they’re shopping. Don’t believe us?

Sometimes your stuff gets in the way of, well, life. Whether it’s not being able to find your keys when you’re already running late for work or missing a train because you took too long digging through your purse for your transit card, searching for everyday essentials can have a major impact on your daily routine.

Cleaning and organizing strengths and pitfalls for each type, as well as suggestions for how to tackle homekeeping and embrace your unique personality,

New Year’s perpetually brings on the urge to purge, and with Mercury now out of retrograde and a pack of planets in Queen-of-the-Capsule-Collection, Capricorn, it’s a luminous moment to catch some serious stardust with your Swiffer.

We talk about getting rid of stuff all the time and laud the benefits of getting more and more things out of our homes. Freedom! Negative space! Less to clean and organize! While these are all most definitely positive effects of shedding excess, it’s possible that in our maybe-too-hasty pursuit of an ideal that may or may not be your own, we have some casualties, we lose things forever at our own hand and then feel the pang of missing them.

In general, the process of going through your things and letting go can be difficult, but it becomes even more of a struggle when you’re dealing with grief and trauma in the process. Going through a bad breakup with someone you live with, or dealing with the loss of a loved one, for example, often come with the task of going through things and deciding what to keep (and who gets what) and what to get rid of.

With kids starting a new school year, cooler weather arriving, and leaves beginning to fall from the trees, Autumn is a season of reinvention—and a great time to get started on a new chapter of your life. If there’s a change you’ve been putting off or a goal that you’ve been dragging your feet on, why not throw your mind, body and soul behind it now? Every journey—no matter how long—has to begin with a single step.

The most powerful tool in your decluttering arsenal? It’s your mind. Truly, when you seem to have a problem with “too much,” the biggest obstacle in the way of getting rid of needless things is your own brain. It’s there in the background insisting, maybe, that you’ll wear that ill-fitting dress some day again, or that this old broken lamp is the last thing that connects you to the memory of your grandparents’ condo.

Decluttering a home is never easy. The thought of organizing a packed hallway closet or a stuffed storage room can be exhausting enough to make you put it off for another year. But what if we told you there was an easy, foolproof way to finally get your clutter under control that won’t take more than a few minutes of your day? All you have to do is remove one thing—just one thing—from your home that you no longer need – every day .

I’ve always had sort of a personal gripe with the minimalist movement. It’s a complicated cluster of feelings, but I can boil down my difficulty with minimalism into three words: I like stuff. I like having just the right glass for every drink (some of them thrifted and handed down through generations). I like collecting trinkets that remind me of people I’ve known, places I’ve been and things I’ve done.

My best friend Erin is a 20-something with a teenage dream of a room—her love of pop music, Archie comics and traveling is plastered all over her walls in the best way. Her room is lived-in and cozy—full of patterns and textures and personality—so much so that when you walk in you can tell immediately, without a doubt, who it belongs to. Making her bedroom her own has never been a challenge for Erin, but the one thing she has struggled with is getting it clean and organized.

Sundays are for sleeping in, relaxing with Netflix and only changing out of your pajamas for brunch dates with friends, right? But sometimes—especially when you’ve got a particularly stressful week ahead—your usual chill Sunday can be better spent being productive. Sunday is also a great day to take care of all the things that usually plague you, from cleaning and cooking to getting ahead at work.

I have some things that have been sitting in drawers and closets for years and—while I don’t need or use these things—I am pained to part with them. Some are inherited, some were formerly important, some never made sense, and a lot are scraps: of papers, events, good days, and really amazing trips. They’re little material bits of my life that sit in drawers or the back of closets. And I’ve never figured out how to part with them.