For those that regularly WFH, family clutter can be quite a distraction, as well as a source of additional stress. It’s hard to feel calm and composed working in a chaotic environment.

Clutter can hinder your ability to find things quickly – papers, a charging cable, or reading glasses, right at the very moment you need them in a hurry.

A background full of family detritus can also undermine the professional image you’re trying to portray during work video calls, and it’s also harder to make a clearly defined distinction between home-life and work-life because ‘stuff’ can blur these boundaries.

Plus: if you’re prone to allergies, cluttered spaces can also be a source of dust accumulation and exacerbate respiratory problems.

Having the time to tackle the clutter however, is another thing altogether.

With really not very long before the children are back at home for half term, we’ve put together a De-Clutter Masterclass enabling you to ‘power through’ this important part of managing your House and Home for the whole family’s benefit.

1. Time

The amount of time you need will depend on the size of your home, the amount of clutter and the number of rooms in disarray.
Knowing availability of time is likely to be your biggest limitation, we’d recommend breaking things into chunks. A room by room plan, or even a section of a room, or just a cupboard - starting where it hurts most, makes most sense.
Don’t start what you can’t finish. Spaces will look worse before they look better, and making sure you’ve allocated enough time to complete the ‘chunk’ you’ve targeted is essential.
Discipline yourself not to sit and coo over photo albums you haven’t looked at for ages (put them aside to look at later)

2. Stand back

Before diving into the minutiae, look around at how much storage space you actually have available. If the goal is for every item to have a place to be stored, then be ready for ruthlessness when it comes to deciding what stays and what goes.
If you think you’ll end up being over sentimental about the champagne cork from NYE 2000, or a pair of booties knitted when your child was 6 months old, you’ll do better enlisting the help of someone to work alongside who can see things more objectively, and can challenge you on your decisions from a more neutral standpoint. This probably isn’t a family member or bestie (who could end up being just as, if not more sentimental than you!).
Toy culls can be particularly tough, and these fall in to the category of ‘other peoples’ stuff’. The negotiation you have with others is different to the negotiation you have with yourself over stay/go decisions. Careful planning and thinking ahead is required in these cases, according to the sensitivity of the clutter owner. Help from a Professional Space Organiser might be your best bet here.

3. Plan ahead

After a successful de-clutter, there needs to be an exit plan for the outgoing items. The worst thing to end up with is a room full of stagnating black bin bags and boxes in exchange for the clutter. Before you start, think about where and how the piles of rubbish will move on from your home.
The answer to this depends on what it is you’re disposing of, and with a wide range of options available these days, it’s definitely possible to minimise the amount of ‘stuff’ that ends up in landfill. To achieve this, make ‘bin it’ the last resort.
Here are a few of many options available:
Council recycling – regular home collection for small items or via recycling centres
Council collection of electrical appliances and large items
Offer collection through Freecycle or an online neighbourhood scheme such as Olio
Take clothes and books to local charity shops – or if you have a lot of books, We Buy Books will collect and offer a small amount of money for your book haul
Magpie will also collect and buy back mobile phones, electronic items, CDs and DVDs
Dress for Success is a brilliant scheme where your donated work clothes will help another woman secure her place in the work world
A Hippobag outside your home can be filled over time before it’s collected. 80% is recycled
Independent local rubbish collection services such as Willows Waste can take the things you’re really stuck with
If you have large quantities of paper for shredding, (too much for your home office shredder to cope with) consider sending this out to a specialist shredding firm who will provide a Certificate of Destruction, which confirms data protection

4. The process

When you’re ready, the process will look like this:

i) Select a room / area / space / cupboard

Only work on one at a time
Do not take on more than you have time to complete in one session
If you choose a room, work methodically around it in one direction
Before you start, gather together: a stepladder, post it notes, bin bags etc

ii) Sort everything into piles – ideally into labelled containers, bags or boxes, so it can be moved around easily later:

Donate it
Recycle it
Arrange collection for it
Keep it
Bin it

Have a strict ‘one touch’ policy, so you’re not tempted to defer decisions, which puts them in a holding pattern. (The only exception to this is if the item belongs to someone else, and you’ve agreed to discuss before deciding.)

iii) ‘Keep it’ items must be allocated a permanent place to be properly stored or displayed – and that may not be where they first came from.

As soon as the permanent storage is empty (and clean) the items go straight in
A Professional Space Organiser will help you plan and optimise the best use of the storage space you have
Make notes of the things you need to make the space work better – this could be more hangers, under-bed storage boxes, files

iv) Look after yourself

To stay motivated, take ‘before’ pictures to remind you how far you have come
Build in regular breaks – it can be physically tiring work, and it’s easy to reach decision overload
As each area is completed, take a moment to enjoy the immediately positive effect the de-cluttered space will have in your home

Of course not everyone has the time or capacity to set aside for this sort of home project, and at the start the amount there is to do might look pretty daunting.

It could be there is an upcoming house move, and with so much else to do and think about, there just isn’t enough bandwidth available to dedicate more time to streamlining the house contents.

Perhaps an elderly parent has had to move to a care home or the property was left behind by someone recently deceased, which could make this a difficult, emotional process to go through.

Among Consider it Done’s many contacts are a number of truly talented Professional De-clutterers and Space Organisers. Over the years these partners have quite literally transformed the homes and lives of our clients.

A Professional Organiser can not only make your space more functional, but also more visually appealing. A professional can use their experience to work efficiently, and accomplish the project much more efficiently, freeing up your time to focus elsewhere.

They know how to work with you to make the difficult stay/go decisions, and provide that objective perspective where it’s needed.

Consider it Done’s clients can also have the benefit of our team to organise collections from the home via the various different options.

Success at work depends on success at home – and nowhere is this more true than in the case of de-cluttering.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on our De-Clutter Masterclass.

DE-CLUTTER MASTERCLASS