How to Stay Clutter-Free: 10 Top Tips For Keeping a Decluttered Home

1. Purge often

You may think that you have gone around your whole home and you have decluttered and you're done. That is not how decluttering works. You need to keep decluttering on a regular basis so that you can maximize the amount of impact you are having. 

When you first started decluttering, you're probably a lot more generous with the items that you can keep than you would have done by the end of your decluttering experience. Once you get into the habit of decluttering, you'll be able to reassess items much more quickly and much more fairly.

When you go back to items after a period of time, you will be able to tell whether or not the item is useful to you and whether or not you need to keep it.

2. Have a home for everything

This means that you need to think about where you're using that item and where you can house that item so that you can easily get it out and easily put it away.

This will make it much easier to keep things tidy because you're more likely to put something away if you know exactly where it needs to go.

3. Keep a junk drawer

This may sound a bit controversial, but there is power in having a junk drawer. This could be your miscellaneous items that you're not quite sure where to place in your home. If you have them in the junk drawer you'll start to find out when and how often you use the item and where else you could perhaps place it. 

4. Don't let clutter into your home

This could be about your mail, parcels, delivery, catalogs, brochures, little pamphlets, those items that kind of get pushed into your door and you kind of leave by the door... If you can, get into a habit of putting them into the recycling straight away. 

If you're somebody that has receipts but you don't actually need them for tax or budgeting purposes, then don't take the receipts in the first place. Don't accept the receipts at the till in the first place unless you absolutely need to.

This is going to stop any clutter in your bag or purse and then that clutter then enters your home when you clear out your purse. So stop it from entering your home in the first place.

5. Go paper free

Check whether your paper bills can be accessed online, then opt out of receiving paper bills. Most online accounts will allow you to download and keep a digital copy of your bill so that you don't have to keep a paper copy. This is going to reduce the amount of paper coming into your home.

6. Complete 1-minute jobs straight away

You may have little jobs where it's just picking something up as you go upstairs or putting a cable that's unplugged straight into the drawer.

For any of those jobs that would take less than a minute to complete, get in the habit of doing them straight away. This is going to make it so much easier and quicker to keep your place tidy because you're in the habit of putting things away straight away.

7. Remove decluttered items immediately from your home

If you've decluttered your home and sorted things to donate and sell, you need to get into the habit of getting those donated items straight out of the house and to where you're donating to.

Anything that you're going to sell needs to be listed straight away. Give it a week of shelf life on the selling site. If it doesn't sell, you need to donate as well.

8. Only buy what you need

Think carefully before you are making any purchases. Make sure you think about whether or not it's something that you generally need in your home, that it is going to be serving a purpose and is worth the investment.

9. Only buy replacement items you love

Don't buy duplicate items that you don't really enjoy if you didn't love them in the first place. Get into the habit of using up an item and then deciding if you're going to repurchase it if the item has broken. Is it worth replacing? 

10. Have a one in, one out policy

This can work in two ways. It could be that when you buy an item, you bring it to your home. If it's clothing, then you have to declutter a similar item out of your home.

Or it could be that you only replace an item that has worn out so you know that you've already got an item that you're going to be decluttering, and then you bring that one new item in.

You get into the regular habit of having the same number of things in your home because you know that if you bring something in, you're going to declutter something else.

How to stay clutter-free

There are ten golden rules that will help you to have a clutter-free home and help you to stay clutter-free for a longer period of time. Hopefully, it’s been helpful for you. Learning how to stay clutter-free can teach you that living with less will give you more time to enjoy the things you love most.