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Downsizing: Start your preparation by knocking your ‘Clutter Champions’ off their pedestals

Downsizing to a smaller place is impossible without rigorously ‘downsizing’ your furniture and belongings.

The best—and probably easiest—way to start preparing for your downsizing project is to identify and tackle your ‘clutter champions’.

What Are Clutter Champions?

Clutter champions are the areas and belongings that accumulate over time, serving no real purpose and cluttering your space.

They are the items and areas in your home that:

- Are ignored and unused
- Get hidden away (under the bed, in a garage corner)
- Collect dust or rust

Examples of Clutter Champions

- Overcrowded spaces like a garage with no room for the car
- Unused furniture, such as an inherited armchair
- Books you no longer read or recipe books you never open
- Piles of untouched papers
- Old school or work materials
- Kitchen appliances that don’t match your current habits
- Dressers filled with out-of-fashion clothes
- Wardrobes full of clothes that don’t fit or are rarely worn
- Unused 24-piece cutlery sets from long-ago weddings
- Etc.
- (Can you think of one of your Clutter Champions right away?)

Clutter champions occupy space and weigh us down mentally. They remind us of unfinished tasks and make us feel guilty for not dealing with them.

And, of course, –

Clutter champions don’t deserve a space in your new home!

You must confront your clutter champions and move them out of your home – before you move out.

Action Plan to Defeat Your Clutter Champions

Step 1: Identify Your Clutter Champions

Walk through your home: Open every door and look around each room.

Ask yourself:

- Are there any clutter champions here?
- What’s here that doesn’t serve me anymore?
- What have I not used for ages?
- What makes me feel ashamed or frustrated?

Be thorough: Look under beds, into cupboards, drawers, and bags. Take photos if that helps to get a clearer picture.

Step 2: List Your Clutter Champions

Create a comprehensive list of all your clutter champions.

Your list might look something like this:

- Bookshelves in the guest room
- Storage unit
- Garden tools in the shed
- Boxes with Aunt Angie’s dishes in the attic
- Box with paperwork inherited from Grandpa
- Lucy’s artwork (under the bed in the guest room)

Step 3: Reflect on Your Clutter Champions

Spend some time understanding each item:

- What’s the story behind this item?
- Why did I keep it after it lost its usefulness?
- How do I feel about having it?
- How would I feel if it were gone?
- Am I ready to let it go? Now?

Step 4: Make a Decision

Choose one clutter champion to start with:

‘This is the clutter champion I will clear up first: ……’

Step 5: Take Action

Estimate the time needed: Determine how long it will take to tackle your first clutter champion.

Schedule decluttering sessions: Mark them in your calendar and commit to them.

Do the work: Follow through and create space by letting go of what no longer serves you.

Celebrate the wins: Appreciate and enjoy the space and peace of mind you gained.

By eliminating your clutter champions, you’ll create more physical space and free up mental space.

You will feel more capable and ready to tackle other areas of your home and categories of belongings that need some ‘downsizing’ before you move.

Start tackling your clutter champions today – and transform the beginning of your downsizing project into a positive, empowering experience!

Downsizing – 9 Questions to make the move easier.

Why can it be so hard to get a house ready for downsizing?

There are many reasons – these three are the most relevant for most people:

1. – Downsizing is a major life change.

When we decide to downsize, we are not just changing our physical location.

We are also leaving behind a larger home that holds memories of our past and present lives. The smaller space we move into will initially be unfamiliar – and it will shape our future.

Downsizing is, in essence, a significant life transition.

Continue reading Downsizing – 9 Questions to make the move easier.

Your Daily Life – Simply Organised – Some Inspirations

The purpose of the Simply Organised Newsletter is to make your daily life easier:

The Simply Organised Newsletter is supposed to help you, on an ongoing basis, get things sorted out and organised – so you can gain more time, space, clarity, and energy in your daily life – and more joy.

You can sign up for the Simply Organised Newsletter here.

If you want just some quick inspiration, scroll through these summaries of some of the Simply Organised Newsletter emails: Continue reading Your Daily Life – Simply Organised – Some Inspirations

Your 10-minute Challenges help you get Simply Organised.

The 10-minute Challenge series is part of my weekly Newsletter, ‘Simply Organised.’

I introduced this series after some of my subscribers suggested making the newsletter emails even shorter, less complex, and more practicable.

The purpose of each challenge is to help you organise yourself and your life better.

The challenge could relate to managing your home, your physical paperwork and digital information, your to-do list and calendar, and, of course, to managing your mind/mindset.

The beauty of these 10-minute challenges is their simplicity.

They’re designed to be quick – just 10 minutes! -and easy, allowing you to experiment without investing much time.

You’ll know almost immediately if the suggested exercise is beneficial for you. If it is, incorporate it into your routine. If not, simply move on to the next one.

Continue reading Your 10-minute Challenges help you get Simply Organised.

Your top priorities make it easier to plan and organise your life intentionally.

Living intentionally means that you deliberately decide how you want to live – and what you want to do to create the life you want.

It means that you don’t let life just happen to you and purely react to its circumstances and challenges.

Instead, you actively define what’s important to you and how you want to experience and live your life.

You are well aware of your priorities and proactively make changes that move you toward the life you want to live.

Your priorities give your life direction and guidance.

Planning your life with intention doesn’t have to be an intimidating or overwhelming exercise.

If you regularly check and update your priorities, you are well prepared to act and react confidently when faced with bigger or smaller decisions in everyday life.

Your priorities also direct and guide you when you must manage a significant life challenge:

- A planned transition like entering retirement, becoming an empty nester, downsizing,
- or an unexpected event like divorce, the loss of a job, a critical illness, or the death of a loved one.

How do you choose your priorities – and direct your life in the way you want it to go?

Continue reading Your top priorities make it easier to plan and organise your life intentionally.

Your Paperwork Inbox – The fundation of your paperwork management system

Inboxes are a ‘natural’ basic element of all functioning organisational systems.

In all areas of our lives, we find places and containers that act as inboxes, helping us get things done and organise ourselves efficiently.

(Check Article 1 and Article 2 for a quick recap.)

In this series, we focus our attention and discussion on the inboxes that help us organise critical elements of our daily lives – our time, space, paperwork, projects, and tasks efficiently.

Today, we discuss

The paperwork inbox.

Many organisational inboxes allow us to follow our preferences and choose a physical or a digital version.

Like for example, the inbox for our notes. We can choose a physical notebook to collect and organise our notes or use a digital note app.

It’s different with our paperwork inbox. Usually, we can’t decide to have only one paperwork inbox:

Most of us need to **keep a physical and a digital inbox**:

Continue reading Your Paperwork Inbox – The fundation of your paperwork management system

The 3 rules for a well-functioning inbox

In the first article of this series, I talked about why we need inboxes – if we want to get good at getting things done and organised.

I listed the inboxes that easily come to mind – like our email inbox, our mailbox, and the in-tray in the office.

I also came up with lots of other examples of containers or places that we use as inboxes in various daily life circumstances. And I talked about the purpose and benefits of inboxes.

This is a quick summary:

What are inboxes, and what’s their purpose?

Inboxes are temporary storage areas for things that need to get done/organised in the future.

These storage areas

- offer an easy and quick way to get things out of the way,
- ensure that individual items don’t get lost,
- are supposed to store things temporarily,
- make sorted-away items retrievable,
- offer quick overviews of pending tasks,
- help sort and prioritise items.

Today, I want to discuss what we need to do to make an inbox work. We need to follow just a few rules.

Important requirements of a well-functioning inbox.

Continue reading The 3 rules for a well-functioning inbox

Inboxes are the most fundamental elements of a well-organised life.

What’s an inbox?

It is not possible to get properly organised without the support of inboxes. We can’t avoid clutter from building up if we don’t have inboxes or if our inboxes are not well cared for.

Okay, but what is an inbox?

Inboxes are temporary storage areas for things that need to get done/organised.

Let’s have a look at a few examples:

The email inbox is the inbox that typically comes to mind when we talk about inboxes. It’s the easiest and simplest of all inboxes: We don’t have to install/arrange it – as soon as we create an email account, we automatically get an inbox. We also don’t have to personally arrange the inflow of data and information into our inbox, it gets filled up automatically: Any message that anybody decides to send to our email address will end up in the inbox.

Continue reading Inboxes are the most fundamental elements of a well-organised life.

Living intentionally means that we carefully pay attention to where we put our attention.

Our lives and our experience of life reflect where we spend most of our attention.

The thoughts that we paid the most attention to in the past, the ones we thought most frequently, are the thoughts that have created our current results.

The thoughts we pay most attention to today, those we are thinking most frequently right now, will create our future results.

Our attention is our most powerful resource. And we can intentionally make good use of this resource. We have the power to control where we place our attention.

However, the amount of attention available to us is limited.

At any given moment, we can pay attention to only one thing. Just one.

That’s why it is so important to intentionally decide where we want to put our attention.

The 2-minute rule: If it takes less than 2 minutes, just do it.

The 2-minute rule has been around for a while.

I don’t know who ‘invented’ the 2-minute rule. Maybe it was David Allen who presented it in his book ‘Getting things done’, first published in 2001.

The 2-minute rule is still very popular and most productivity gurus have it in their toolbox.

I like it because it’s so simple and clear, it’s very effective, and it can be applied to things we need to do in all areas of our lives.

The 2-minute rule is a great tool that helps us overcome procrastinating and get small tasks done immediately, whenever they come up.

The 2-minute rule says,

3 little questions help us make use of every day – intentionally

Often, time flies by, one day quickly passes, and then the next, and the next, and suddenly the week is gone.

And if someone asked us what actually happened during the week, what we did or didn’t do, what went well and what didn’t, we struggle to remember.

That’s a pity.

We risk losing valuable memories and experiences. And we miss the opportunity to learn from our daily successes and failures.

A little evening routine can help us live every day more intentionally.

Two powerful decluttering questions

Do you plan to do some decluttering work – and feel stuck?

If you don’t feel motivated to get your stuff sorted out and to let go of any clutter, or if you feel motivated but feel unable to decide what’s actually clutter and what’s not,

I suggest you answer two questions – although it might feel a bit uncomfortable.