5 No-Nonsense Decluttering Tips For Hoarders

5 No-Nonsense Decluttering Tips for Hoarders:

If your looking for some quick, helpful, and practical tips to quickly declutter your home or living space, then you’re in the right place.

The point of this post is to inform you and give you a shotgun no no-nonsense method to get a home or living space clean fast and efficiently.

Here are the 5 No-Nonsense Decluttering Tips for Hoarders:

Just Start & Grab A Trash Bag
Listen to Music or Put Videos on in the Background
Don’t Worry About the Items That Can’t Be Decluttered Immediately
Put Items Into Boxes and go Through Them One By One
Be Relentless and Really Consider Which Items You Actually Use

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Table of Contents

5 No-Nonsense Decluttering Tips for Hoarders

1. Just Start & Grab A Trash Bag

Look, when it comes to decluttering and you’re faced with a giant mess, sometimes you just need to stop looking and planning and just take action!

The more you stand idle and think about where things should go and how you should go about decluttering, the more time is wasted.

Not to mention the mental overwhelm when you continue to see how troubling this decluttering will be and the time it will take.

It may be painful to “just start”, however, this will make you feel more confident once the ball gets rolling.

Once the ball is rolling, you’ll start to build some momentum and get more done!

So how should you just get started?

Let’s say you’re decluttering one room at a time, and you’re decluttering your living room.

It’s a mess and there’s a combination of trash, unwanted junk, and things just generally out of place…

Start with a trash bag and just grab any trash or unwanted items and immediately throw it away, this way you can begin to declutter in layers, instead of being too overwhelmed by the entire room of clutter.

Decluttering in layers helps to:

Remove overwhelm & headache
Simplify your decluttering task
Give you a plan of action rather than decluttering at random

And what do we mean by decluttering in layers you may ask?

Decluttering in layers is a decluttering strategy used to declutter one aspect of clutter at a time.

Let me explain…

In a cluttered room with laundry, trash, unwanted items, and things out of place, the strategy of decluttering in layers would have you go one by one with each category of clutter:

First: Organize all of your clothes and either throw them in the wash or fold them and put them away.

Next: Gather up all of the trash and go around the room collecting anything you can find. Once you’re done collecting the trash, you can keep your trash bag close by because you’ll need it to gather the unwanted items that you can quickly discard.

I hope you see the main strategy here as simple as it is! 🙂

Simplifying the decluttering process and removing any overwhelm is the name of the game!

How to be ruthless when decluttering clothes

In order to properly declutter in layers, we need to understand how to be ruthless when decluttering clothes!

The majority of us have way too many clothes than we know what to do with in our closet whether we want to admit it or not.

Decluttering your clothes and creating a minimalist wardrobe can be life-changing!

There are tons of benefits of decluttering clothes and we’ll go over that in the next section, however, we first need to know how to be ruthless when decluttering clothes.

How to be ruthless when decluttering clothes:

First: Separate your favorite clothes in a pile and set them aside.

Next: Create “donate”, “keep”, and “maybe” categories. With these categories, you’ll be able to effectively separate your clothes little by little. We use a “maybe” pile in order to give ourselves multiple decisions on clothes you may need more time to think about.

Once you’ve taken these initial steps, determine your new minimalist wardrobe size. This could be around 30-40 items as an example.

With this size in mind, brainstorm a potential minimalist wardrobe color palette.

Now that you know your goal, you’ll know how ruthless you need to be when going through your closet.

Final Solution: No matter how much you loved a particular piece of clothing, if it no longer fits, is broken, out of style, etc… just get rid of it! Try your best to take emotion out of it and stick to your minimalist wardrobe plan (minimalist wardrobe color palette, minimalist wardrobe size, etc.).

Benefits of decluttering clothes

Here are some of the main benefits of decluttering clothes:

Less time and headache getting dressed in the morning
Reduced decision fatigue
Cleaner closet
Minimalist wardrobe only filled with clothing pieces you love

2. Listen to Music or Put Videos On in the Background

This is one of the best ways you can not only increase your productivity but also declutter effectively!

If you haven’t given this a try, you’re really missing out!

Here are common ways that people use this strategy:

Watching tv while folding laundry
Listening to podcasts/audiobooks while washing dishes or cleaning the kitchen
Listen to music while cleaning your room

Now this may seem pretty elementary and something that you may already do, but hear me out…

If you take a close look at these tasks, there are all seemingly unpleasant. And what you can clearly see paired with this unpleasant task is a pleasant form of media or something that brings enjoyment.

After doing brief research, I thought I could find a theory detailing what this might be called, however, I couldn’t really find the right terminology to hammer it down.

Anyhow, this practice is a common productivity strategy that combines the pleasant with the unpleasant to reduce the unpleasant nature of a specific task.

And this is where decluttering comes in…

Especially when decluttering large amounts of junk!

Here are some of my favorite ways to distract myself while I declutter:

Listen to music out loud or with earbuds
Put my favorite show or movie on in the background
Play youtube videos
Play videos with decluttering tips to follow along

If you haven’t given this type of approach to decluttering, I recommend giving it a try and see if it reduces the stress and annoyance that decluttering can bring!

3. Don’t Worry About the Items That Can’t be Decluttered Immediately

You really need to keep this important decluttering tip in mind!

If you’ve given decluttering a go in your home fairly recently or in the past, then you already know the different types of junk you’ll come across.

Big, small, tiny, medium-sized, etc…

My main point here is that when we come across those large items we can’t instantly trash, relocate or break apart, we need to understand that this decluttering thing isn’t gonna happen overnight, even tho we may want it to!

There’s No need to get a headache when thinking about those oversized items or items you know you want to sell instead of trash.

Main Objective: Get rid of what we can now and we will make a plan and handle the more difficult items later!

4. Put Items Into Boxes and go Through Them One By One

Another way to reduce the overwhelm and headache of decluttering would be to organize all of the clutter to remove the visual nightmare.

Again the reason we want to organize these items this way is to break down what we’re doing into smaller pieces.

This makes it manageable in our minds and thus less daunting.

We also don’t want to just be throwing random items into boxes for the sake of removing the visual clutter, we want to organize the clutter in a way that makes sense to you.

For instance, if you have tons of pictures and frames along with toys and loose electronics thrown around the room you’re trying to declutter, we want the boxes to separate these items so that we can tackle them one by one!

5. Be Relentless and Really Consider Which Items You Actually Use

Here’s where you really need to get down to business and stop playing around!

I know a lot of the things we have are sentimental and hold special value to us, but we need to really think deeply about the things that we use and that provide meaning in our lives.

I’m not saying trash important pictures or jewelry handed down from your great-grandparents…

No noo, definitely not!

I’m saying to really be honest with yourself and determine the stuff worth keeping and the stuff that can possibly be passed on to other family members or organized in one place.

Main Point: It’s tough, we have many things that we hold on to from the past and that hold sentimental value to us. However, with some things, we need to make sure that we aren’t holding on to things that we don’t need. So try your best to be ruthless and get rid of anything that you don’t need or use.

Keep in Mind: Give yourself multiple rounds and save some items for later instead of making just one decision. This way you can make multiple choices and decide what will be best with the items.

Now that we have gone over 5 No-Nonsense Decluttering Tips for Hoarders, you’re ready for your decluttering journey and hop on your extreme decluttering project!