Curb Clutter With These Five Transformational C’s

1. Consolidate

Gather all of one type of item together if possible. If it is overwhelming or not possible to get all of your books, clothes, or any other group of belongings together in one place, begin by making an inventory of each place in the home where this particular type of object lives and determine how much of the collection it makes sense to consolidate. Choose one category of items to begin with. For each group of items that you will be decluttering and organizing, you will apply steps 2-5, beginning with #2 Categorizing.

Pro Tip: How to decide where to start: Choose a category of belongings which seems the easiest or will bring you and/or others in your household the most joy.

2. Categorize (one group at a time)

Categorizing, also known as sorting is step one for any successful organizing or decluttering project. At first this may not feel satisfying. I recently worked with a client in her garage. About an hour into the session, she observed rather forlornly “It feels like we are just moving things from one spot to another.” And she was right! We were in the sorting/categorizing phase of the process. An hour later, she exclaimed, “I really feel like we are getting somewhere now!

3. Create Criteria

As you are sorting and categorizing, personal criteria for what feels important to keep will begin to emerge if you approach the process with mindfulness.

Let me offer an example. One client had tons and tons of paper. He was a lover of information and had the intention of processing much of this paper for a number of reasons that were important to him. His life and his time was changing, as he and his wife were expecting their first child.  As many of the papers were in the room that was to be the baby’s room, something had to give!

4. Curate

Curation is perhaps the most exciting step of this entire process! You get to play pretend and identify the things that you treasure the most. Pretend that you are the curator of your own personal museum of treasures. And in fact you are! As the wise curator, you will sometimes have to make tough decisions about which items should be given prominence in your collection. Just as all art is not precious, it is likely that some of the objects that you have collected may be, well, less than treasures. 🙂

Your job during this phase is to identify the collection of objects in each category that make your heart sing. Depending on which group of items you are assessing, your criteria for what makes the cut will be different. The amount of space that you have to store this collection may also be a factor in how much you choose to keep and whether you will choose to display your collection or store it in a tucked-away space.

Definition of curating; choosing the best objects to hold onto, allowing the best ones to represent the collection, and letting the rest go.

5. Cull

Culling, also known as editing or decluttering, is the next phase of the process. This is where you actually get to free up the energy that has been tied up in things that were unexamined and unloved. Once you have established your criteria and curated your belongings, culling becomes easier.

Of the objects that remain that are NOT treasures, you get to determine whether or not they currently have a place in your life. Even objects that may have once felt very special to you may now feel as if they have given you all they have to offer for one reason or another. Perhaps you have gone through a transition or are preparing for one. In our household, when something has outlived its usefulness, my husband Scott and I often say, “Well that _____ certainly doesn’t owe us anything!” If this is the case, you can thank the items for their service and send them on their way. 🙂

In conclusion

The magical thing about using the 5 C’s to declutter your life is that they can be used over and over again! And you will become better and better at the process as you build your decluttering muscles.

Give it a go! What have you got to lose?