YouTuber Dawn (aka The Minimal Mom) is an expert when it comes to keeping your home clean, fresh, and decluttered. Living with a husband and four children aged 8-13, Dawn knows first-hand what a challenge it can be to keep on top of clutter, and has great advice for anyone who needs help getting rid of extraneous belongings and keeping their home looking and feeling great. “If you have been feeling at all discouraged in your decluttering efforts, know that you’re not alone,” she says. “I’ve heard this from many lately that ‘I had been doing well, I lost my momentum’, or ‘I had done all this work, but now it’s undone’—that’s the worst. So how can you get some big wins, get that momentum back, that energy, and finally get your house simplified once and for all? Because it doesn’t have to take forever, but we do have to figure out how to get there more quickly. Here are Dawn’s top tips for getting rid of clutter quickly and effectively every day, without spending huge amounts of time and effort.
RELATED: 10 Simple Steps to Declutter Your Kitchen Fast.
Mindset Shift
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Dawn says to constantly remind yourself the clutter is not more important than your peace of mind. “We can’t always see that clearly when we’re just looking at the stuff in front of us and we’re holding it up and trying to decide if we should get rid of it or not. This idea that we can’t do it all well. And so something has to give, and really the stuff is the easiest thing because we don’t want to cut out our friends or family, certainly not our health. And so the stuff is actually the easiest stuff to get rid of and to get some of that time and energy back.”
If It’s Not a Clear ‘Yes’, It’s a ‘No’
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Dawn says to trust your initial instincts about what to keep and what to get rid of. “So as we look through this stuff, we are going to say, is it a clear yes? And if so, I’m going to keep it. And if I at all waiver or hesitate, I’m not sure about it, that means it’s a no… If things, especially when you’re in these initial stages, if they are not a clear yes, you’re just going to end up getting rid of it down the road. So basically what you’re doing by embracing this, that if it’s not a clear yes it’s a no, is you’re skipping ahead two layers into your house.”
Tell a Friend
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Telling a friend your plans to declutter makes you far more likely to actually do it, Dawn says.
“There’s something about accountability. If we tell somebody, Hey, I want to get a ton of decluttering done this weekend, then we kind of feel at least a little bit like we should follow through with it… It happens to all of us. Most of us were never taught how to manage this much stuff. And so it’s okay. Your friends and family probably have messes too. They have clutter too. So don’t be embarrassed by it. Just be brave and say, will you help me or will you at least hold me accountable?”
RELATED: 10 Steps to Declutter in One Weekend.
Donate More
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Dawn recommends donating more when possible. The important thing is to get the stuff out of your home. “This can be tough, especially if you’re frugal or could really use the extra money, which most of us could,” she says. “So where’s that line between what we should sell and try and recoup some of our sunk costs or just donate it and move on? So this is going to be different for everyone… It was really only a handful of things that we actually ended up selling and I donated the rest. I mean, really, it had to be barely worthwhile for me to go through it because I had to get the stuff out of my house.”
Create Some Distance
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If you’re having a hard time letting go of some things, put them in a box and out of eyesight for a while. “If you have some stuff that’s just really giving you a hard time, especially maybe sentimental stuff and you just don’t know, go ahead and put it in a box so that you can create a little distance from it,” Dawn says. “Often, once something’s been in a box and it hasn’t been in our house for a while, we haven’t seen it for a while, it actually does make it a little bit easier to get rid of.”