How to Keep The Clutter at Bay Once You have Simplified Your Home

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Many of us struggle to maintain a clutter-free, organized home even after decluttering and simplifying our homes. Because clearing out clutter once a year or once in a lifetime is one thing, but maintaining a neat, clutter-free home by keeping the clutter at bay is a totally different thing.

Any regular home needs regular purging and maintenance. Doesn’t matter how thoroughly you have decluttered your entire home once or twice, there will always be flows of new, random stuff, and clutter always seems to creep back in. Today’s modern and busy life brings unwanted clutter into our homes in various shapes and forms, which have a profound impact on our home environment and our state of mind.

That’s why, you need to adopt some simple habits and make them a part of your daily life to keep the clutter at bay. Doing so will allow you to experience peace, calm, and comfort in your home – where you can relax without being constantly distracted by mess.

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Give every item a place

One of the effective ways you can keep the clutter at bay and maintain an organized, clutter-free home is to give everything you own a place of their own. Whether it’s a nail-cutter, comb, TV remote, clothes, shoes, books, or physical mail, it’s always helpful to have a proper place for these items to be stored. Otherwise, they’ll just end up being clutter, and you’ll be moving them around from here to there while dusting and cleaning, and you won’t be able to find them easily when you need them.

If an item doesn’t have its own place, or you can’t make room for it, either do some decluttering so you can find a home for it, or ask yourself if the item is worth keeping in your home. Finding a home for everything you possess in your house is a key to maintaining a clutter-free, tidy home.

Always put things back in the right place

If you really want to keep the clutter at bay, make it a habit to put things back in their place.

When you’re done using some item, don’t leave your stuff lying around. Whether it’s kid’s toys or books, kitchen tools, your handbag, jewelries, or a pen, just remember to return it to its place when you’re finished with them, and before you move onto something else.

When you come home, put your clothes/coats, handbags, and shoes away immediately. Don’t just dump them somewhere in the living room or dining room to deal with later.

Every item you own needs to serve you a purpose and every item must have a home. At the end of the day, items should be returned where they belong. This is a daily habit you need to incorporate in your life and your kids’ lives, too.

Clear the flat surfaces regularly

One of the incredibly important daily habits for a clutter-free home is clearing the flat surfaces regularly. Clutter always attracts more clutter. Flat surfaces such as kitchen counters, the dining room table or kitchen table, coffee table, and night stands often become an acceptable place to store things. They seem to be magnets for clutter.

Go to any room that is cluttered in your house and carefully look around. I’m sure you can spot at least one object out of its place which has made its way onto a flat surface such as the tabletop or a furniture top or a countertop.

Keeping the flat surfaces clean can be an absolute game-changer for you or anyone. The more frequently you stay on top of clearing off these surfaces, the easier it will be to keep the clutter at bay.

Reset your space daily

Before you unwind for the night or before you go to bed, spend 10-15 minutes to reset your home quickly. Getting in the habit of spending just 10 minutes a day picking up, putting things away, tidying up, and restoring order to your home will go a long way when you’re trying to keep the clutter at bay.

Quickly clean up kitchen table and dishes after your dinner, wash up or load the dishwasher, sweep the kitchen floor and wipe the kitchen counters before switching the lights off for the night. When you get up in the morning next day, you won’t be greeted by the clutter of yesterday.

Have a donation box handy

Keep a donation box handy close to your garage door or somewhere prominent that will remind you every time you walk past it – to help you with decluttering. Whenever you come across something you no longer use, need, or love, simply add it to your donation box, or if it’s something that can’t be donated, toss it away right then.

When your donation box gets full with unwanted or unloved stuff, drop those items off at your nearby donation center and start the process again. Aim to put something in it every day or every week and deal with the excess stuff regularly so you can easily keep the clutter at bay and maintain a clean home.

Make your bed every morning

An organized, tidy environment leads to a calm spirit, and when your bed is neatly made, that calm feeling helps you prepare for the day ahead. Make it a regular habit, and it can have a domino effect that helps inspire other small habits to keep your home tidy. It gives a signal to your brain that the day has started and you’re ready to face whatever comes your way!

Charles Duhigg explained it in his book, The Power of Habit, writing that “making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.” Making your bed allows you to start your day with a sense of accomplishment and initiative. And since it happens at the beginning of the day, you’re more likely to make better decisions for the remainder of the day.

Making your bed doesn’t take more than a few minutes, but it can instantly transform the way your bedroom looks and feels. With your bed neatly made, the whole space looks cleaner, tidier, and more inviting. It even affects your mood positively – making you feel energetic and inspired!

Add this to your reading list: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Tidy up as you go

Decluttering and tidying up isn’t something you do once a year and you’re done. It’s a continuous process, especially if you have little kids or a big family. You can’t stop the process. It’s like mowing the lawn: after a while the grass keeps growing, and you need to trim them again and again.

Make it a habit to tidy up on the go. Whenever you enter or leave a room, take a quick look around to see if anything is out of place. If you find something, don’t leave it there; put it back to its place. Whenever you come across something that’s no longer used or loved or valued, add it to your donation box or get rid of it right away instead of ignoring.

When you’re done using an item, take a moment to put it back in the right place immediately. Clear the kitchen counters as you leave the kitchen. Clean the dining table after each meal. Straighten the pillows, keep the books and TV remotes in their places when you leave the living/family room. Do this for every room in your house.

Deal with your paperwork immediately

Paperwork can pile up fast, and it gets really stressful to deal with paper-clutter if they are left to pile up. So staying on top of it is very important if you want a clutter-free home that is tidy.

The best way to keep paper-clutter from piling up is having a good system in place to deal with it before it has a chance to pile up. Physical mails, letters from the school, billing papers, random notes, school works, art projects – these are just some examples of paper-clutter that build up in our homes.

Instead of dumping it here and there throughout the home, come up with a system to keep it neat, tidy, and organized. Immediately discard the junk marketing mails and menus, and process the rest. Important mails that require action and bills that need to be paid but can’t be handled right away can easily be placed in a To-Do folder or in a separate drawer.

Have a clear purpose for every room

Give every room in your home a purpose so all of your family members know why you’re using a certain room. When every room has a specific purpose to serve, you know which items belong in that room and which items must go from there. This is one of the key habits for maintaining a clutter-free home.

As for example, the purpose of a kitchen is for cooking, eating, entertaining, and possibly homework if it’s an eat-in-kitchen type of place. That means your kid’s toys, clothes, craft materials, DIY tools, TV, paper piles, etc. should not be there.

Same way, the purpose of a study room or a home office is for reading, writing, doing computer works, or other office related works. So you shouldn’t have a big-screen TV, clothes, toys, exercise equipment, unnecessary decoration pieces, cookware etc. in that room.

When you know the purpose of a room, it’s easy to keep the excess out. If an item is not used in a room to serve its specific purpose, it simply doesn’t belong there.

Follow the one in one out rule

This one is my personal favorite! This simple rule states that for every new item that you bring into your home, you need to get rid of one item in the same category or something similar.

If you actually follow this ‘one in one out’ rule, it will make you think at least twice before you buy or bring in any new stuff and add that to your material possessions. It’s a useful rule that you should follow if you’re trying to keep the clutter at bay.

So if you purchase a new pair of shoes, you need to get rid of one pair you already own. If you buy a new purse, donate an old one. When you buy a new kitchen tool, throw away the old one that you have already used for sometime. That way you won’t accumulate more stuff or similar kind of items in your home that are unnecessary.

If something can be done in less than 5 minutes, do it

Clutter doesn’t build up overnight! It is often a result of procrastination or delayed decisions, or small jobs left undone. If you follow this simple rule in your home, you will be able to keep the clutter at bay.

As per this rule, if a task takes less than five minutes to complete, do it now. Many of the tasks that we procrastinate on is actually easy, but our minds make it seem difficult and time consuming.

Remove the clutter from flat surfaces, take the garbage out, run the dish washer, toss the broken toys away, return the remote control, or put away the laundered clothes immediately after folding and make your bed every morning. Also, deal with physical mails immediately when you receive them, either put them in the paper organizer or toss the junk mails in the trashcan. Don’t let them pile up!

Every time you complete a job instead of leaving it unfinished or half-way done, a source of clutter is avoided.

Don’t leave a room empty-handed

When you move around from one room to another, don’t go empty handed. Look around and see if something needs to go with you and be returned to somewhere else. If there is an item that needs to be taken back to the kitchen, and you’re going that way, take it with you.

If your laptop is lying on the living room coffee-table and you usually work in another room, take it back with you when you’re heading there.

Buy less, own less, and create less clutter

One of the simple and effective ways to maintain a clutter-free home is simply owning less stuff! When your home is overflowing with stuff, decluttering and organizing your home becomes harder. To keep your home clutter-free, organized, and functional, letting go of extra stuff that are useless, unnecessary, or unloved is important.

Once you have decluttered, make sure you don’t buy anything that you don’t need or can live without. And never buy an item if you don’t have a designated space to store it. You should not only get rid of the excess that you already own, but also need to be mindful of what finds a way back to your home. If your closet or bookcase is getting full, re-evaluate that space.

Mindless shopping, online or offline, adds clutter to your home easily. Shop intentionally, buy only what you need and value, and accumulate less stuff. Otherwise, it’ll be really difficult for you to maintain a clutter-free, organized home.

A related book with helpful tips you’ll want to check out: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg