There is a quiet joy in watching the raindrops run down on the outside of your window… a time to reflect and let your mind drift off into a calm place. Usually, daydreaming serves no obvious purpose at all, but the sheer fact that you are letting go of all practical concerns and just let your mind wander is a good thing and should be allowed to happen regularly.

On the other hand, there is a type of ‘guided daydreaming’ that can actually be of use when you are on your decluttering journey…

Imagine the scene: you are visiting some little town in the countryside with lots of cute houses and lots of shops. You do a spot of window shopping and something calls upon you to walk into a shop where – invariably – you’ll see some item that you ‘have been searching forever’ or that simply convinces your inner decoration lover that this is an opportunity you cannot pass.

Either way, you’ll be very excited about your acquisition and you cannot wait to get home and place it in the most appropriate place in your house, where you will enjoy it forever.

Grocery shopping can be a bit of a trial sometimes. How often do you have to go and repeat the process? Do you buy in bulk and only go once every other week or do you shop every day at the little shop on the corner of the street?

All these questions influence your decisions and how you proceed makes a difference in how your storage at home will look...

Many of my clients are actually able to do a lot of things on their own, but are hung up on getting started because they simply don’t know WHERE to start. Everything looks equally important to tackle and there does not seem to be a clear path indicating where to start and how to proceed.

Therefore, I thought I’d give you some ideas on that subject.

Life is short, so why settle for something that is less than comfortable? We spend so much time doing things we HAVE to do rather than those we WANT to do, and much of what we have to do is less than enjoyable right there and then, and in the long run.

This brings up the question why we don’t make more of an effort to make all the things we do as enjoyable as possible.

When it comes to helping people with their decluttering and organising needs, we professionals are faced with many different situations when we first walk into someone’s home. Not always things are glaringly obvious, especially in the kind of household where someone prides themselves on keeping a tidy home that is presentable at all times. That doesn’t mean things are always really the way they look!

Many separations and lines in daily life have become blurred with the advent of social media and their total integration in most everybody’s lives.

Some of those are obvious: Can you separate your private life on facebook from work (this is especially true if you are self-employed)? Does your public persona actually reflect who you truly are in reality? How much time do you spend online when you could be engaging with real live people?

Going ‘shopping’ with your friends as an activity is probably not the best idea to keep the clutter at bay, but sometimes venturing out and buying these necessary things cannot be entirely avoided. The consumables we need to run our daily lives need to arrive in our household in some way or fashion, and usually doing this kind of shopping personally is the most straightforward way to get it done with the least amount of fuss.

A large part of keeping your home organised is based on consistency in your daily routine. I’m certainly not saying that you have to turn into a robot doing everything the same way, every day. But to be fair, it’s likely that you are already doing that. I invite you to look closely how you start your day and you’ll probably find that 90% of what you do follows a very specific pattern already.

My Italian colleague Selina Angelini (details below the article) has published a blog post on this subject that I found especially interesting and have decided to translate it for you, dear listeners. She starts out with the following question:

"Do you believe that light can help organise your work time?"