Decluttering your work and home space will help clear your mind and give you clarity to make those important decisions. Professional organiser Victoria Staff explains how
Your home is probably the most expensive thing you will ever invest in. Second to that will be the contents, which includes everything from clothes to kitchenware. Your home is a place of safety and a base of operations, but it often becomes a place of neglect as our lives become increasingly busy with work, school runs, hobbies and social events.
There is a lot of attention in the media on mental health, and your immediate surroundings and home environment will influence this. On top of general day to day life pressures, without even realising it your home can have a huge impact on your stress levels. If you stand in any room of your home and you feel stressed, anxious, frustrated or maybe even slightly depressed, or if you feel like you would rather spend time out of your home than sit and relax in it, then this is a sign that you need to declutter. When I talk about decluttering people assume it’s related to minimalism but it’s far from it. It is simply a case of removing things you do not need in order to make the environment somewhere you can relax, and the space is more useful.
Decluttering your home is not something you will be able to do in a day, so break it down into categories or problem areas, for example, clothes, kitchenwares, books, electrical. Sentimental items are the hardest things to part with because of the emotional attachment, which is why I would always leave this until last. When decluttering each category, I work with my clients to create four piles to divide everything into; keep, sell, donate, bin (only if it cannot be recycled or reused and as the saying goes, one person’s junk is another person’s treasure so always try to recycle).
My advice for decluttering is ‘If it doesn’t make you feel happy, it should go’ which can be applied to most things in life! Stick to this and you’ll find it a lot easier to discard unwanted items. Everything in your home should have a place where it belongs, so storage is key. It doesn’t matter how organised and tidy you are, if you don’t have the correct storage then you will struggle to keep your home tidy.
Once you have decluttered, make sure you keep on top of it, regularly put things away when you are not using them as this makes it much easier to manage as opposed to spending many hours at the weekend tidying. This also means no more looking for your car keys, hunting for your passport or searching for that bit of paper you wrote an important number on. Everything will have its own place and you will have everything to hand.
Lastly, don’t feel the need to go out and buy something to fill the space you have just cleared. Just as you would do for places you want to visit or see, make a bucket list for your home of items you would love to have in it. It may take a bit longer to find the right piece but when you find it you’ll be glad you waited.
For more information, visit the Victoria Staff website or call 07399 950283.
