60 minute challenge

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have tried your hand at decluttering in the past (with good or bad results), you will most certainly have considered to get going at some point in the past, or you may even be tinkering with the idea of getting at least one corner of your home done.

Maybe even before the end of the year? The main question to ask yourself is this: “Why put it off any longer?”

The answers to this question could be anything from “I don’t even know where to start”, “I can’t find the time” or “I’m much too attached to the things I own”. None of those are insurmountable, but I can see that it can be daunting to get started, find the time or deal with internal doubts. Each of these reasons is valid, but can be overcome with proper assistance. While I’d be happy to help with either or all of the above, in this instance I’m extending a 60 minute challenge to you!

What is this about and how does it work? Simple: you have 1 hour to find 60 items you can do without. Anything counts, a pair of socks or a night gown, a book or a flyer, a tin of paint or a gab of frozen mystery meat from the freezer. The only point of importance is that you reach the number 60 within the hour. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?

Preparations

• Select a couple of large and small containers or bags and place them in a convenient spot
• Set a timer to 60 minutes – use your phone or a kitchen timer or your alarm clock
• Turn off all distractions and make sure you are not interrupted for the complete hour – that means turning your phone to airplane mode!

The Challenge

Once you have started the timer, go ahead and look around. There is no need to cover every room or choosing very different items, it’s the number that counts, nothing else. You may want to keep track of the number, or you could just keep going for an hour and count at the end.

Go! Start picking up stuff and make quick decisions: there isn’t all that much time.

One hour later…

Once your alarm goes off, take stock. You may or may not have reached 60 items. Or you may have hit the number 60 very quickly and gone overboard. No matter, because either way, you’ll have experienced the pressure and given yourself leave to take quick decisions. As mentioned earlier, making decisions is often the reason why decluttering fails: once you have let go of worrying too much over your decisions, things fall into place very quickly, if you let them.

Also, you have taken 60 minutes to focus on decluttering things that you were not certain need to stay in your home. Clearly, this helps you find the time, make the time!

Furthermore, the exercise may have helped you understand that not everything you were having trouble letting go is really difficult because you are emotionally attached to it: sometimes it’s just the habit of seeing it in its place, or that you kept second-guessing your decisions over and over again.

Now what?

The next and most important step is to ensure that the items you have selected leave you home as soon as possible. Take them to a charity shop, take them to the dumpster, organise a garage sale or sell them. Obviously, some of those options cannot be achieved on that day itself. If you really have to store things for a while, make sure to do so out of sight, but not out of mind.

Warning: if you have stored these items away for more than a week or so without taking any further action, maybe it’s time to simply ditch them! I dare you!

Variations

• Rather than leaving everything to chance, you could set up certain limitations:
• Stick to one location (e.g., just the living room, just the loft)
• Stick to one type of item (e.g., only clothes, only kitchen items,  only paper/cardboard, etc.)
• Stick to a particular size of item (e.g., smaller than a shoebox, bigger than a book, etc.)
• If you are looking at kids’ stuff, you may want to turn this into a game (“in order to get that new hot toy, we need to make space for it”). Of course, you don’t have to stick to 60 items, but it is useful to stick to a timeframe: maybe try 30 minutes, 30 items or similar?

Give it a go: it’s amazing how much you can learn from this exercise. You may even end up doing this repeatedly, or even regularly.

If you have enjoyed reading this, you may find these other articles interesting:

• The 40 bags in 40 days challenge
• Starting small
  
• The decluttering skillset: the will to change