Decluttering Your Closet? Here’s One Thing You Have to Remember

If you’ve ever decluttered your closet before — congratulations! You did it, and now it’s done forever! Right? Right??

Actually, no. Chances are, you’ve lived a few more seasons of life, collected some new clothes, outgrown some old ones, and it’s almost time to declutter that closet again.

The thing to remember is that “decluttering” isn’t a project that you can check off your list forever. It’s one step on a lifelong journey of being more intentional with the things you buy and keep.

And today, we’ll take that step together.

Set a timer and get busy decluttering one closet — any closet — at home.

It can be your clothes closet, or the catchall storage closet. It doesn’t have to be the messiest one, or the one you use the most — just choose any closet that will benefit from a little attention tonight.

Grab a vacuum, a trash bag, your outbox, and a timer and head to the closet. Set the timer for 30 minutes and get to work. Don’t worry about how far you’ll get or even think about whether it will be “finished” today.

Here’s your plan:

1. Straighten things up, like errant hangers and stuff that’s just sort of tossed around in there.
2. Vacuum up dust and dirt around the floor or other surfaces.
3. Go through the things inside and cast things you’re not sure you need to the outbox. Aim for five things. Then if that felt good, five more. Then just… keep going… until your alarm goes off at 30 minutes.
4. If you feel that you’ve left things unfinished when time is up, take a moment to assess what else needs to happen for the closet to be in really good shape, then estimate how much time it will take you to complete that on another day.

Because for today, we’re done! And done is better than perfect. Even if all you did was vacuum some dust bunnies and cast away a couple of old things, I bet your closet is feeling better already.

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