7 Common Decluttering Mistakes To Avoid For A Clutter-Free Home

clean decluttered home, decluttering mistakes

This post is all about decluttering mistakes to avoid for a clutter-free home! Enjoy 🙂

While decluttering does have its fair share of challenges depending on the size of your project, you can achieve your goal!

The decluttering mistakes you want to avoid are the things that hinder your ability to effectively get your decluttering project completed efficiently and strategically. This includes buying more junk, procrastinating, and attempting to declutter without a solid game plan!

Keep reading to learn how you can avoid these decluttering mistakes!

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Table of Contents

1. Don’t Try To Declutter Everything At Once

One of the biggest decluttering mistakes that can occur is thinking you can get everything done at once! Not only is this not possible depending on the size of your decluttering project, but it’s just not practical on any level.

I know it seems very enticing and exciting to get everything finished at once and be done with it.

Who wouldn’t?

But how many have the time and mental stamina to declutter their whole house in a day or even a weekend let alone even one room for some people?

It’s just not realistic.

So instead we simply need to break up our decluttering tasks into smaller pieces. With any large project, this helps our mind to be more productive and prevents us from getting overwhelmed.

2. Leave Your Attachments At The Door

100% one of the main reasons that hinder your ability to get rid of your stuff has to be your attachments to your possessions.

This can come from owning something for a long time, something you enjoyed using but is now old and outdated, or simply something you love but for whatever reason, you don’t need anymore. For whatever reason, our attachments to our clutter are one of the main factors that will hold us back from achieving any type of clutter in life.

We need to learn to let go and realize that our possessions don’t define us and that most of the things we have we can just replace with something newer and often better. This is by far much easier said than done, but it’s a big decluttering mistake to keep holding attachments for items we don’t even use and that sit around the house untouched collecting dust!

One way to combat attachments in your decluttering process is to create a “maybe” pile. This will allow you to revisit certain items that you may still want but need to give a second or third thought to.

This way if you feel fairly attached to a certain item, you don’t have to decide to keep or remove it right away. This will allow you to make multiple decisions on an item which should allow you to consider if it is worth keeping.

3. Don’t Be Hard On Yourself

When decluttering you want to avoid being too hard on yourself. Yes, this seems pretty obvious but it’s easy to look around and see a giant mess in front of you and want to just quit.

The solution here is to celebrate the little wins and not worry about how much decluttering is left.

Remember baby steps.

We can’t declutter the entire house at once, we need to walk before we can crawl. Forgetting to do this can cause you to overstress on the task at hand which will slow you down from reaching your goal.

How To Make Your Decluttering Process Easier To Prevent Burnout

One tip to ease the stress of decluttering and prevent overstressing is to separate tasks into smaller and smaller categories.

What do I mean by this…?

I mean that not only should you declutter one room at a time, but also make an effort to declutter different sections of each room at a time.

For example, if we are decluttering an office, depending on how big the room is, there will be multiple areas in the room we can focus on. The first and most notable would have to be the desk area.

We will plan to focus our attention on decluttering the desk and workspace of our office first, then we can tackle other sections like a bookshelf, filing area, important papers, etc…

This leads to my next point…

4. Forgetting To Set Decluttering Goals

clean organized kitchen, decluttering goals

Another huge decluttering mistake would be to forget to set decluttering goals. This is a fatal mistake when it comes to decluttering because everything is a mess already, we don’t need our process of removing a mess to, well, be a mess…

So as mentioned above we want to break down our tasks into one room at a time and then one section of each room at a time.

This will allow us to declutter with a plan and thus will speed up our decluttering process because we aren’t wasting mental effort figuring out where to start and we aren’t wasting physical effort going around aimlessly decluttering things around the house at random.

Practically pick a day out of the week to tackle a specific room. And even if that’s too much, just pick one section of a room to do each day of the week.

That way after a week is done you can move on to the next room or section.

As time goes on you will slowly but surely make progress on your decluttering goals. And just remember, without a proper plan in place and without setting goals, your productivity will be scattered and you won’t get the results you want.

5. Ignoring Your Decluttering Duties Altogether

The only thing worse than decluttering without a plan would be not decluttering at all!

This has to be one of the biggest decluttering mistakes!!!

Even though you may feel overwhelmed with the task at hand, busy with your kids and working on other household chores, try your best to stay true to your decluttering goals and don’t make this decluttering mistake!

You don’t want to declutter for a week and then do nothing for a month.

Just try to stay consistent and make achievable goals. If you can only work on decluttering one day out of the week, do that instead of decluttering for three days straight and then doing nothing for the next two months.

If you work small and stay consistent, you’ll be more productive in the long run. And depending on the size of your decluttering project, it will take a long time.

Just remember you’re in it for the long game and you’ll succeed!

6. Don’t Forget To Just Start Somewhere

This also ties into my last point and is more of a decluttering mistake related to procrastination and fear, rather than being busy and not able to keep up with your decluttering.

This is all about putting off your decluttering and never even starting. You NEED to avoid this for obvious reasons. By putting this task off you run the risk of adding more clutter to your home and postponing your new lifestyle with a fully decluttered and minimal living space.

When we first learn about decluttering and its benefits we feel super excited in the beginning, but once we see the road ahead, it will feel daunting if you have tons of stuff.

Don’t worry, just remember to make a plan and start. Just start somewhere and you’ll make progress in no time!

7. Try To Keep Spending To A Minimum

This should go without saying if you’re new to decluttering, but it may be harder than you think. Go here for some helpful tips on living a minimalist lifestyle even if you enjoy shopping.

This is easier said than done but try your best not to add more junk if you’re trying to get rid of stuff!

Leave the yard sales alone and don’t make decluttering harder for yourself!!

Needless shopping can be your decluttering downfall and can be one of the biggest decluttering mistakes if you don’t watch your spending.

Just be mindful to keep your purchases to a minimum and do your best to keep up with your decluttering, that way you’re not creating a new mess for yourself.

Key Takeaways

Keep it simple, declutter at your own pace. Don’t try to do it all at once!
Your attachent and feelings towards items can hold you back. Give yourself multiple rounds of decisions before getting rid of an item.
Allow yourself to make mistakes and understand that delcuttering will take time.
Make a plan and set some decluttering goals!
Don’t procrastinate and put off your decluttering duties.
Start small and don’t worry about being perfect.
Save your money and don’t buy more unecessary junk.