Do you have a goal to declutter and organize your home this year? If so, this episode is for you. Decluttering can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. 

In this episode, I share my proven 5-step system for making progress without the stress. Whether you’re focusing on a single room or your entire house, this straightforward method will help you get organized and stay motivated every step of the way. This system has worked for me and so many others, and I know it can work for you too. Get ready to feel lighter, more organized, and fully in control of your space.

What You’ll Learn:

• The first step to starting any decluttering project successfully
• Why planning your time is just as important as tackling the clutter
• How to keep momentum and avoid common pitfalls along the way

Mentioned in the episode:

• The Maximized Minimalist Podcast: https://www.katyjoywells.com/podcast-3141
• Episode 256: The Daily Reset to Ditch Clutter with Katy Wells
• Episode 188: Declutter Your Home & Mind: Expert Tips from Katy Wells

Listen to the episode here!

Or watch the episode here!

I’d be honored and grateful if you would head over to iTunes to leave a review and let other female entrepreneurs know what you learned! While you’re there, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss an episode.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Do you have a goal to declutter your home or maybe parts of your home here in 2025? If so, you do not want to miss this training. I'm going to be sharing with you a five step process that you can set up to help you guide your journey of decluttering your entire home.

[00:00:22] Well, hey there, welcome back to Work Life Harmony. If you have a goal this year of decluttering or kind of like really organizing your home, I'm hearing this from so many people, this episode is for you. I'm going to break down a step by step process, very tactical here, that you can do to make this project happen.

[00:01:04] less overwhelming. Now, before we jump in, I want to share some feedback that came from Christine here inside of the Top Program and it warmed my heart and she shared this. Over the past year, I've been a sponge and I've tried to soak up just about Every offer presented trainings, plan, appalooza, top bootcamp, YouTube videos, the podcast hashtag all the things.

[00:01:27] Just in the first few weeks of 2025, I've been more productive than I was in 24 in its entire. I just signed up for the top program to continue my journey, and I'm looking forward to building on my success. I wanna thank you for sharing that. It warms my heart, and if you are loving everything here on the show, it would make such a difference to me if you would take.

[00:01:49] 30 seconds and leave a five star review. All right, are you ready to jump in? Now, a few years ago, I had to basically de clutter my entire home. We were doing a large remodel and we had to pack up every single room in our house except for one and get it all put into pods. So essentially, it was as if we were prepping to move.

[00:02:15] And if you've ever had a large move you know it takes a lot and you literally need to sort through everything. Everything right? Closets, cabinets all of that. So I want to talk you through the process. I have, I used and I continue to coach and support others in this as well. Now, before we dive in, I really want you to understand anytime you're tackling a large decluttering project, meaning you're going through the belongings in your home, in your space, your workspace, et cetera, there's really two aspects to this.

[00:02:47] All right. There's the practical, structured, pragmatic approach to physically getting this done. And that's what I'm going to be sharing here today. But friends, it's important to recognize there's also a lot of mental stuff at play here. It can feel overwhelming. If you're someone that has a hard time letting go of things, right?

[00:03:08] This is going to be challenging. If you are someone that maybe, you know, has acquired More clutter than you desire. There's a lot more at play here. Now I'm not going to be tackling the mental side of this today. If you need support in that area, my recommended resource, the expert I personally use is Katie Wells.

[00:03:29] And I would encourage you to tune into her podcast called the maximized minimalist. She is my go to resource. I've even got a link for you here in the show notes where you can join one of her upcoming events. So, again, I'm not going to be tackling that today, but I just want to give you a step by step structured approach that I've seen work for so many women in my program.

[00:03:53] All right, I'm going to break it down into five steps for you. All right. So, step one. is before you even start going through this process of decluttering and reorganizing, is I really want you to take an honest look at what you have going on in your life right now and decide for yourself how much time realistically can you spend on this each week.

[00:04:20] All right, and I start here because I need you to do this before you jump into the project because if you don't take this assessment of how much time you can honestly spend on it and you just jump in, you may be feeling like you're not making any progress and it can be hard to get momentum. So for example, you may look at the realities of your life and realize, okay, with everything you have going on right now, realistically, maybe you could spend three hours a week.

[00:04:53] You're looking at your calendar and realizing your weeks are pretty full. But hey, maybe you could knock out three hours on any given weekend, right? And you may be someone that, you know, chooses to break it up into small 30 minute chunks of time. You may be someone that likes to just sit down and spend, you know, a couple hours all at once.

[00:05:11] And when we get to step three, we'll talk about that a little bit more. All right, so step one is deciding how much time do you desire to spend on it each week and actually write that down. This is the amount of time that I'm going to spend each week. Now, the second step is kind of your prep work. All right, and here's what you're gonna do.

[00:05:33] I want you to grab either a piece of paper maybe an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet, Or if you are a student of mine and you love using Trello pull this up and create a new Trello board for yourself. And what you're going to do is you're going to walk through the space. Like let's say you're doing your entire home.

[00:05:52] You're going to walk through your home room by room, and you're going to write down every space that decluttered. Now, let me explain this in more detail here. If I were to walk into my office right now, it would look like, you know, I'm looking around my office, it's just a big open room with a desk on it.

[00:06:12] So we might be tempted to just write down, declutter the office. But, I want you to dig into, do you have drawers, cabinets, shelves? Alright, so when I look at my office, I would actually break this down into one, two, three spaces of decluttering in here. I would write down, I have like a standalone bookshelf where all of my books are stored.

[00:06:38] So I would write down, you know, office bookshelf. Then I would write down office desk. I have lots of drawers here in my desk. Then I would write down office cabinets. Alright, notice I am tackling each, like, physical space in my office. Now, if I were to walk into a bedroom, let's say I was walking into our guest room, I would notice in there I have bookshelves, so I would write down guest room bookshelves, and I would also write down guest room cabinets.

[00:07:10] Closet. All right. Notice, I'm not just saying the guest room. Closets and cabinets are where things are the trickiest, right? Because you could walk into a bedroom and look around and go, Hey, I've got a, you know, a dresser, a nightstand, a bed. Like there's nothing to declutter here. But where does all that stuff get stored, right?

[00:07:28] It's typically behind a closed door of some sort, whether it's a cabinet or a door. And so I like treating each one of those separate. Now when it comes to the kitchen this is a little trickier because if you're like, you know, we have a kitchen right now that has a lot of cabinets. I would not write down every single cabinet, but I would do it in categories.

[00:07:49] So, for example, I might write down kitchen, pots and pans cabinet. Kitchen, all of our you know, plates, bowls, cups, you know, that, that section of the kitchen cabinets. Then I might write down kitchen Tupperware and baking supplies, right? However you have yours organized. So the way our cabinets are laid out, I would actually divide that up into four different spaces, chunks of cabinets that I would be decluttering.

[00:08:18] And then the pantry would get its own element there. So you, you get what I'm after here. This, this is going to be your prep work of actually writing down all the spaces in your home that need to be decluttered and essentially reorganized. Okay. Now, we're going to move on to step three. So we've identified how much time we want to spend on this each week.

[00:08:39] And then we've made the list of every space in our home that needs to be decluttered. and reorganized. Now what you're going to do, and this is where the actual system starts coming into place. So our prep work is step one and two. Now what you're going to do is every single week, as you sit down to plan your week, all right, yes, I'm assuming here that you are doing some sort of weekly planning.

[00:09:06] That's at the heart of everything that I teach. I want you to look at your calendar, look at the realities of everything you're juggling this week. And then you're going to create the appointment. Actually plug in. If you're using a Google Calendar, you're going to create the event on your calendar, the specific date and time, and how long you're going to be doing it, and you're going to write down which space you're going to be tackling during that window.

[00:09:37] All right. And if you decided back on step one, let's say you decided I'm going to spend three hours over the each week doing this. I would now decide for myself, would I rather do this in, you know, 30 minute chunks taking breaks in between? Or am I someone that works better just going, I'm going to go all in and do this.

[00:09:58] I know for myself. I would and I was kind of what I did when we were decluttering or prepping to move and packing everything up. I work better in longer chunks of time with that. So I created two 90 minute appointments on my calendar each week. And I would write down, okay, Saturday, you know, maybe from nine to 1030 in the morning, my goal was to tackle, you know, the guest room closet and the guest room bookshelves.

[00:10:26] And I would create that appointment for myself. listing out specifically which rooms or spaces I was going to declutter during that time. Now, if you are coordinating this with other people you live with, if this is a family affair or you and your significant other, you want to do this planning part together, right?

[00:10:49] So just recently we went through this process with kind of transitioning a room in our house that had been my daughter's playroom into now like a family shared craft room slash music room space. Well, I was going to need to get involvement from my daughter in particular when we were going through this stuff to figure out what we're keeping, what we're not.

[00:11:08] 90 minute chunks of time. 30 minutes was going to be best. So we would discuss together ahead of time. What time of day? I needed her in there and would tell her we are doing this together for 30 minutes. All right, but get that appointment down. Now, why ahead of time am I having you decide what space?

[00:11:28] Well, here's what's going to happen if you don't. Suddenly it's Saturday morning. You're like, okay, I said I was going to do some decluttering here for 90 minutes. And then you say, okay, where do I start? Well, here's what's going to happen. You're going to probably end up wasting 10, 15 Maybe even more minutes of time, wandering around going, What do I feel like doing?

[00:11:53] This is why we decide ahead of time. We need to reduce the amount of decisions prior to the decluttering, because you're going to need all your decision making energy for that. Right? Because you're going to be making choices about your belongings. So this is why I like to reduce. any of the decisions outside of the decluttering process.

[00:12:14] All right. So that's step three is actually creating the appointment. So we've done step one, how much time each week, step two, you've made that list. Now, step three, each week, you're going to create the appointment with yourself and write down which space you're going to be tackling. Now let's move into the execution here, which is step four.

[00:12:34] You want to make sure prior to This process of going through all of the stuff that you have three bins, however you want this to be. It could be boxes, it could be bags, whatever. But you want to have three things ready on hand. A place to put the things you're going to donate. For me, that usually is in a trash bag.

[00:12:55] It could be a box. Then you want to have a place for trash. So always bring a trash bag with you. So stuff that needs to go straight into the trash will go there. When we were doing, you know, cleaning out the old playroom, I mean, the amount of random half broken crayons and things like that just needed to be thrown away.

[00:13:13] And then you want to have where you're going to put the things that you are going to keep to then put back in, in an organized fashion, right? So have a. A place to put stuff for donation, trash, and keep. So that's step four is to make sure you have those three things clearly labeled. 

[00:13:30] Now, the final step is this scheduling time each month for a donation and or potential trip to the dump. Right? I know for me, it was unrealistic to know, okay, every single weekend I'll make a trip to where I'm donating things. So instead we had a designated spot. in our home, where as I was working through my spaces each weekend, I would put the boxes and or bags that were going to be donated into a corner in one room in the house.

[00:14:01] And then once a month we would load up the car and go make the donation trip. And that involved the entire family. I was like, I need help with all of this. So that was kind of that final step was now, how do we get the stuff? out of the house that we need to either donate or take to the dump. And I encourage people to do that on a monthly rhythm.

[00:14:21] So again, I'm going to recap here with these, this kind of five step processes. And guys, you can do this to tackle your whole house or even just one room in your house, right? I did this five step process when we were just doing this one room transformation. So step one, how much time do you want to spend each week?

[00:14:38] Or can you spend each week on this? Step two, listing out every single space that needs to be, you know, gone through, tackled, decluttered, reorganized. Step three, creating the appointments each week. Now notice I'm not saying create your appointments for a month out. Just one week at a time. Go plug in the appointment on your calendar for when you're doing it and what space you're going to be tackling.

[00:15:04] Then, step four is have your three, you know, bins and or bags ready to roll. What are you donating? What's going in the trash? What are you keeping? And then step five, schedule that time each month for your donation and or deliveries. Now here's what's really fun by, you know, that step two where we're listing out every single space is each week you get to go back to that list and cross off the stuff that you've already done.

[00:15:31] So you're going to be feeling that sense of progress and you'll be able to visually see it as you tackle something, especially if you're looking at doing something that involves your entire house, right? Realize that's could be months of work for you. Now, what I've just mapped out for you guys is a great.

[00:15:48] process that you can use, right? This is a process to help you declutter and reorganize your home. Now keeping it that way involves repeatable systems. There is a difference between a one time process and repeatable systems. Now, if you are looking for repeatable systems for keeping your home decluttered, Maintained and organized again, I'm going to point you right back to my personal favorite resource, which is Katie Wells.

[00:16:19] I've had her here on the podcast before. We will put a link in the show notes to some previous episodes where she teaches something called the daily reset that has been transformational in our home. It is a true system that we use regularly and she also has amazing resources to help you get your kids.

[00:16:37] If you have young kids, I'm living with you. As part of this process as well. So again, we've got some amazing resources for Katie here in the show notes. Definitely go check her out because it's one thing to do that process, right? The one time process, but the magic happens in the repeatable systems that are going to help you.

[00:16:58] Keep it that way. So if you have a friend, loved one, family member that has kind of a house declutter on their roadmap here for 2025, please make sure you share this episode with them to help them get launched. And as always, happy planning.