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3 Outside-The-Box Decluttering Tips You Should Try [Episode 43]

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Some of the things that had the biggest impact on my decluttering journey were also the least expected. Here are 3 outside-the-box decluttering tips I recommend that everyone tries!

In This Episode:

  • why less storage is actually a good thing for most people
  • the danger of “someday” living and how this applies to decluttering
  • the #1 resource in my decluttering toolkit

Featured In This Episode:

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Note: this is not an exact transcript and has been edited for clarity.

Episode 43: 3 Outside-the-Box Decluttering Tips You Should Try

Hey, everybody, it’s Jen here. Welcome to the Simply and Fiercely Show.

Today, I want to share with you three outside-the-box decluttering tips.

What I mean by outside the box is that these are things that you don’t hear talked about very often, or they might even seem like they contradict a lot of mainstream decluttering advice.

But these are things that really helped me when I was on my own decluttering journey.

For those of you who are new, here I am a former shopaholic who struggled with clutter for over a decade. I found the decluttering process very challenging.

I am not a naturally organized person. I’m very sentimental and I found it really hard to let go.

It took me many years. I would say it took three or four years from the point where I was like, hey, I think decluttering is something that will help me until I reached that point where I finally started to make some significant progress.

During that period, I felt like I spent a lot of time going around in circles, feeling very frustrated. Feeling like I would make a little bit of progress, but then I would fall into old habits, and go shopping again.  I felt like I wasn’t really getting anywhere.

And I know from conversations with clients and many listeners and readers that a lot of other people feel that way as well. They feel like they’re working hard, but they’re not making any significant or noteworthy progress with their decluttering.

That’s why I wanted to record this episode.

These are some of the things that helped me get to a point where, at one time, I decluttered over 80% of my belongings.

From my peak shopaholic period to the point where I downsized down to about 140 square feet. Everything I owned during that period fit into my tiny hatchback.

I have since upsized a little bit. My two kids, my husband, and I currently live in a small apartment of about 660 square feet. So, I’m not ultra-minimalist, at least I don’t think so.

I have a lot more stuff than I used to in the past. But I feel like these tips can help anyone at any stage of their journey.

Whether you want to make an extreme change and really want to downsize your life or you just want to reduce a bit of clutter.

Let’s dive in.

Tip number 1 – Reduce the amount of storage you have

Tip number one is something that flies in the face of what most people think they want, and you might feel some resistance to this, but stick with me.

My number one outside-the-box decluttering tip is to reduce the storage you have available in your home.

The reason for that is, it’s like Parkinson’s law.

If you haven’t heard of it, is this idea that when you have a task to do, the task will expand either to the time that you have available or beyond what’s necessary just because you have that extra time

For example, let’s say you are a writer and I asked you to write 300 words on a topic and told you that you have all day to do it.

For many people, if I told you that you have all day, you might spend extra time researching or doing extra edits. You might dawdle a little bit, and take a few too many coffee breaks.

It’s human nature.

I do quite a lot of writing. For this podcast, I also have a blog. I know firsthand how Parkinson’s law applies with time.

It’s like when you’re in school and you’re trying to get an essay done really quickly overnight because you waited until the last minute. It’s the same thing.

Things will kind of compress when you set hard boundaries for yourself.

I definitely feel that the same thing happens with stuff.

If you have a giant walk-in closet, it is easy to say, “Oh, I’ll just keep a few extra things. What harm is one more item? What does it matter if I keep a few pairs of jeans that I only wear sometimes? It’s not doing anybody any harm because I have enough space.”

And, obviously, that’s true. If you feel completely happy with your closet or your home or whatever space feels cluttered to you, then keep whatever you want. I am not here to tell you what to keep.

But if you feel like your clutter is becoming a problem, if you’re not happy with your space, a mental trick to try is to downsize your space before you’re ready.

So, if you have a walk-in closet, I’m not saying you need to tear it down, but you can do things like have one shelf that you say, “Okay, this is where I’m going to keep my jeans.” Or one box or something. Or you set aside five hangers.

How you do it doesn’t matter, but reducing the storage before you’re ready will force your hand.

For example, you might have 10 pairs of jeans, but there are only three pairs of jeans you wear all the time.

If you’re anything like me, you tend to have things that are your favorite, that are comfortable and you feel the best in, so you wear them all the time.

But you’re keeping those other pairs just in case because why not?

If you shrunk your storage to a spot where you can only comfortably keep five pairs of jeans. If you kept all 10, you could theoretically shove them in there, but it becomes a bit of a pain.

If every time you’re trying to look for a pair of jeans and they all spill out everywhere, it gets annoying.

This tip helps because if you downsize your storage space and now it is inconvenient every time you go through your jeans, that is going to create a pain point that will inspire you to declutter. You have motivation because you want to get rid of that pain point.

That is one of my favorite ways to trick your brain into decluttering something.

People ask me, “How many jeans should I keep? How many towels should I keep? How many whatever?” There’s no one right answer to that. But when you set boundaries like this, you are intentionally designing your space.

For simplicity, we’re just going to think about the closet, but obviously this applies to anything. If you have a walk-in closet or just a regular closet, you look at your closet and you say, “This is all the space I have.”

Let’s imagine you had no clothes, and you were designing your dream wardrobe from scratch, what space in that closet would be ideal?

If you were working backwards, where would you put jeans in your closet?

It might sound like I’m overthinking it, but trust me, this really works.

What you’re deciding is, when I think about how many pairs of jeans I wear, when I think about my lifestyle, I’m saying “This one shelf is all I need for jeans.”

When you set that boundary, again, you don’t have to physically tear apart your home to reduce your storage, you’re just setting boundaries.

I will say that sometimes actually removing things can be helpful though.

If you’re somebody who has lots of storage containers or baskets now you don’t have anywhere to put all your stuff so that forces your hand. You don’t want that stuff everywhere, so now you have to make hard decisions.

I know it’s not for everyone.

Obviously, if you live in a really small space, you might be like, “What are you talking about?” But as I said, I do live in a small space myself and I have tried this hack, and it really does work.

It is uncomfortable and your brain will be like, “Nope. I do not want to do that.” But if you really want to get rid of things, it will force your hand to take action.

Tip number 2 – Do more fun stuff

My second outside-the-box decluttering tip is, to do more fun stuff.

Get out there and enjoy your life.

I wrote a blog post about how my number one decluttering hack is to get out there and enjoy your life. You can check it out here A Powerful Decluttering Hack No One Talks About.

I’ll explain how that works.

If you’ve been reading blogs or books or following decluttering accounts on social media, you’ve probably heard of this concept that the point of decluttering is not to own less stuff it’s to create space in your life for what matters.

You want more time to spend with your loved ones. You want more time to take care of yourself. Having less stuff in many ways creates that time.

We also want to be able to relax in our home. We want to feel less stressed.

There are so many things that we want from decluttering, and in theory, those things that we want are the things that really matter to us.

But the problem is that I know for myself, and again, from working with many of my clients, it’s so easy to fall into what I call a someday mindset.

Which goes along the lines of, I’m going to declutter my entire home. It might take me a few years, but I’m going to put my head down and I’m going to declutter my entire home and work really hard.

Then when I’m finished, at some imaginary point in the future where everything’s perfect, I’m going to be happy and relaxed, and I can start doing what matters.

You may have heard things where people do that with money. “I’ll be so happy once I get that raise.”

But then they get that raise and then people’s lifestyles inflate, or life just happens and you normalize it, and then it becomes this chase where you’re like, “When I earn more money then I’ll be happy.

And then when I earn even more money I’ll be happy.”

That’s what I call the someday mindset.

The thing with someday mindset stuff is that it feels very far off in the future and sometimes it’s hard to motivate ourselves.

If I tell you, “If you just work really hard, in five years you’re going to get a raise, and then you can take a vacation to The Bahamas,” you’re like, “Great. That sounds really nice,” but it’s so far away that it’s hard to motivate you.

Bringing this back to decluttering and why I think this is the number one decluttering tip.

I believe that you need to enjoy the process or you’re going to lose your motivation and you’re going to stop.

When you think about having fun, it’s like, do a bit of a decluttering, then show yourself, look, now I have time to do a bit more of what matters.

Even if logically you’re like, “No, I don’t have that much time. I still have work. I still have 10,000 other projects,” you need to train your brain to think there are benefits to this. It’s not just some light at the end of the tunnel.

I think that’s really important when you’re working on any type of goal, whether it’s decluttering or not. You have to enjoy the process. It’s a bit of give and take.

If you declutter a bit, then you have a bit of fun, you reward yourself for your decluttering, then you will go back and do some more and then reward yourself some more.

It becomes this really positive experience.

It reminds me of when I was in high school and I was on the cross-country team. I used to do this four-mile run all the time and at the halfway point, there was a gas station that sold these ice cream tacos. It was like an ice cream cone but shaped like a taco.

They were my favorite thing.

It was fantastic because it was the exact halfway point on my run when I would start feeling really tired. I would put my head down and sprint excitedly because then I got to take a break and have my ice cream taco.

It’s like that when you’re decluttering.

You want to be doing more of what matters, more of what brings you joy to maintain your motivation.

But and this is really important, that’s only a small part of it.

If we look at the big picture about why you have clutter in the first place, I genuinely believe, that sometimes the reason our lives are so cluttered is because we have sucked all the joy out.

A lot of people are working long hours. Maybe they’re caring for young children, caring for loved ones. They’ve got no time for themselves. They set no time away for hobbies. They’ve given up on a lot of their dreams. They’re just in survival mode.

And I say that because I’ve felt it myself.

When I was going through that, I found myself, or even now, I notice whenever I go through these periods where life is especially hard and I’m not making time for myself, I shop more often. My material things start to feel more important to me.

I like to think about it as almost being like a booby prize.

It’s like, oh, you can’t have the life that you really want, so here, have some new jeans. Get some shiny new shoes. I’m not saying that’s the case for everyone, but for me, this was significant with my decluttering.

My life became so cluttered because I became really disconnected from what matters. I started to feel like a lot of the joyous things that I wanted from life were just impossible.

I had a mortgage that I was struggling to pay for. I was working 60 hours a week. I was in an unhappy relationship. The only hobby I had at the time was shopping and clothes, and what I wore at the time became so important. And I think it’s because it was filling this void in my life.

So my theory, which I have tested on myself, is that when you start to make more time for what makes you happy, it shifts your perspective.

If you used to have a dream of writing a novel, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have time, I’m realistic, I know you’re not going to sit down and have time to write a novel this weekend. But if you sit down and take yourself on a coffee date one morning and spend a little time doing creative writing for the fun of it.

Reconnect with those things that really make you feel alive. Then go back to your home, look at where you’ve really been struggling with clutter, and see if it’s easier to let go.

In my experience, it will be easier because your perspective has shifted.

It’s like when you have a life changing moment, not to be morbid, but if someone passes away or someone gets ill, or a child’s born, any of these kinds of things where it’s like, wow, holy crap, I realized that life is so much bigger than me.

Then if you were stressing out about how many towels you need, and now you’d be like, who cares how many towels I need? I’m so excited. Look at my new baby. Or I’m so happy because my friend just got declared that she didn’t have cancer or something.

You have these moments where you’re reminded, of what is life all about.

My point, when I say do more fun stuff, is to try to intentionally create those moments.

It doesn’t have to be on such a big scale, but just to remind yourself that life is for living.

Life is about love, relationships, and joy.

When you remind yourself of that, it shifts inside. The things that you were so tormented about getting rid of, you just look at it and you’re like, oh, okay, that doesn’t seem so important anymore.

I know it’s a little outside the box but give it a try.

Spend more time doing things that make you feel alive or really light you up and the stuff you feel attached to may very well seem less important.

Tip number 3 – Spend time journaling and self-reflection

The third outside-the-box decluttering tip I want to share with you today is to spend time journaling and on self-reflection.

I have a group program called Clear Your Clutter which opens twice a year where I teach my method for decluttering.

It is very rooted in a lot of what you hear on the podcast.

One of those things that’s so important for me is journaling and self-reflection. I think that clutter is often a symptom instead of a problem.

If you’re a regular listener to the podcast, you would’ve heard me tell this story before, but I grew up with a lot of deep insecurity.

I am a Chinese American. Well, I grew up in America, I live in Australia now, but grew up in America as a young child, mixed race. There weren’t a lot of people that looked like me.

I remember being so painfully insecure wishing that I had blonde hair and a less round nose, just wanting to look like the girls I went to school with. That insecurity stuck with me most of my life.

I dealt with a lot of almost debilitating insecurity until I hit my early 30s. I can see now that it was that deep insecurity that led to a lot of my clutter problems. I was so obsessed with things like clothes and shoes, and when I was younger, I would beat myself up and think, oh, you’re really vain and materialistic.

But I see now that it was a coping mechanism.

I didn’t like myself very much, and I thought that if I wore the right clothes, bought the right shoes, etc., I could fit in. I would feel more acceptable, more beautiful, etc.

The reason I’m pointing that out is because it was really hard for me to declutter and also really hard to break my shopping addiction.

I was a shopping addict for 14 or 15 years. I call it an addiction.

Maybe it wasn’t a full-on addiction the whole time, but it got to the point where I was shopping five, six, seven days a week and it really consumed my mind.

But what I know now is it was self-preservation. It was a coping mechanism because I never learned to deal with my insecurity or how to overcome it. When I started to realize it, it was a big part of the decluttering process.

This sounds a little cheesy, I suppose, but it’s really true. It was learning to love myself, which went hand in hand with decluttering.

I had to learn how to feel comfortable wearing outfits that I didn’t necessarily feel were super distracting. I used to be one of those people. I put so much thought into what I was going to wear and how I crafted every outfit.

It’s embarrassing now because I’m not like this at all anymore, but I hated to repeat outfits because I felt like my clothes were what people saw and then they wouldn’t see me.

It was time that I spent journaling, self-reflecting, and really thinking about why I shopped. I started paying attention to my emotions and my fears and really digging around that kind of work, that helped me to see how my clothes were almost like a suit of armor.

I felt like they protected me from the world.

Because of that, the act of decluttering couldn’t happen until I started to make peace with myself.

That’s just one example of how journaling and self-reflection helped me.

Another thing I would like to point out is that one of the reasons decluttering is so hard is that we get into our own heads.

A lot of time, we can’t even sometimes communicate why it’s hard to let go or why we feel attached to a certain item.

Something inside you just can’t let go, or you feel fear about decluttering.

In my experience, when you get things out of your head and onto paper, it’s almost like you become a third person looking over your shoulder.

You read it and you can see it without judgment or shame. You can just see that there’s a pattern.  For example, when you’re feeling bad about yourself, you’re shopping more.

And so, as I said, that self-reflection, really understanding the roots of your clutter is everything. That’s how you break the clutter cycle.

When I was dealing with all of this, if somebody had come in and decluttered for me and took everything out of my house it would’ve felt really good for a little bit. But if I never dealt with the root problem, I would be right back where I started in no time.

In my experience, there are usually many reasons why people struggle with clutter.

We have stories that we tell ourselves. We have things from the past. We have thoughts, beliefs, etc. All of these different things impact our relationship with clutter.

We have to get really clear on what those things are so that we can take the time to unravel them. That’s why I think that journaling and self-reflection is a key to decluttering.

If you’re not a journaling person, that’s fine. Even just taking the time to just ask yourself hard questions about your clutter can help.

For example, things like, what am I afraid of? What do I think is going to happen?

Or I think a really good one is often, how do I think I’m going to feel if I let this go?

All of these different kinds of questions are going to help you declutter.

About the Clear Your Clutter program

My program, Clear Your Clutter is currently closed for enrollment, but if you are curious, you can check it out and get on the waitlist.

But this deep self-reflection is a lot of the type of work that we do there.

Those are my three outside-the-box decluttering tips.

I know they’re a little bit different from what you usually hear, but what I love is that not only are they great for decluttering, but they’re also wonderful for improving your quality of life as well.

I encourage you to give them a try.

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