imperfect decluttering

[rmc28]

In the days between Christmas and New Year I spent some time looking at my daily and weekly schedule to try to find when it's realistic for me to do any tidying/decluttering. I settled on 1 hour each on Saturday and Sunday, probably best done as 3x 15min with 5 min breaks. I also went looking at various cleaning/decluttering sites linked via this one tumblr post For those with home related New Year's Resolutions and picked out from there Dana K. White / A Slob Comes Clean's 5 step decluttering process as the one most likely to actually work for me.

Now it's Saturday, so I should set a timer and try out this 5-step process, but I have covid and am isolating from my household so I can't do it "the right way" (i.e. tackle the most visible mess first, take things to their proper homes elsewhere in the house). On the other hand, I have no symptoms and am basically well in myself, and I'm stuck in one room. Might as well have a go at trying out this 5 step process on the place where I am right now, even if I have to do it imperfectly.

If you have something you wanted to tackle today, whether it's a shiny new system or an old favourite, whether you are set up perfectly or forced to improvise a bit, maybe now is the time to try? Let me know how you get on in comments, and I'll post my own progress there, so I actually do it!

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[rmc28]

Round 2: finished Project Bedside Table, pulled a few more random things off shelves as I was rehoming things onto them, now have a bunch of "things that need to be not in here", including a handy sturdy bag. So I think (very much imperfectly) I'm just going to keep putting things in there that are for rehoming around the house, and when I get free of this room I can take 10 minutes to do that at some point. (And if not, I will get back here on a Saturday or Sunday coming up when it is Decluttering Time and do it then.)

I would not have said I had lots of rubbish in my room but it is surprising just how much I'm finding now I'm looking for it. Some actual obvious rubbish and some things in the category "honestly, never going to use this, never going to be of use to anyone else, the ethical thing is to take responsibility for landfilling it myself now".

So last round: bag up the stuff for rehoming and then systematically start working around my bed for any more rubbish, and if I finish that space, start hunting through the bedside shelves on the other side ...

[rmc28]

Round 3: pretty much as planned; again I found more rubbish than I realised. Special note to the very nice gift pack of fancy toiletries, which was for some reason under my bed. The toiletries are now with my other "nice stuff" and the packaging is broken down for recycling. Plus a couple of things pulled out of the other bedside shelves which were "huh, probably I was going to fix this ... yeah that's not going to happen".

End result: the area around my bed is way less cluttered, I have got rid of most things that were on my bedside table and changed it around so it shouldn't collect the same level of clutter again. I have one carrier bag of binnable rubbish and probably two more of recycling to take out. Plus one bag by the bed of things that needs to go elsewhere in the house, but for now at least it's all in one bag rather than heaped up different places, and I do know where each thing in there should end up.

There's definitely a bit of being ok with imperfect answers for now: e.g. I collected together a bunch of notebooks to the same place in here. That's probably not the "forever home" for those notebooks, but it's still an improvement over having them in half-a-dozen places in this room, and it's where I'll think of if I want a notebook, so it'll do. For now.

I'll be interested to see how much further around the room I can get with another hour of this tomorrow.