Sometimes you have to do something first to believe you can do it.

I’m sure you have had those moments when something really gets to you and you cannot but take care of it and make it go away: too many dirty dishes may lead to a industrial scale dishwash-o-rama, or that time when your kids’ toys really have to go away and you spend hours to organise and tuck away in order to get back to normal.

When it comes to electronic decluttering of your files, and especially your mail box, the often touted obvious solution is to set up automatic filters and have some things taken care of without your interference.

Similar ideas surround concepts like backups (run automatically on the server or in the cloud), formulas in spreadsheets rather than manual calculations, automatic selection of colour schemes to ensure brand recognition, etc.

On the surface, we believe there are good reasons for keeping our stuff: it might have financial worth, you may have inherited it from your favourite great-aunty, you consider it to be beautiful, you are using it, it will come back in fashion and then it will save you lots of money, that kind of thing.

The funny thing is: we seem to be prone to bring up practical reasons for keeping something when really we are emotionally attached to it.

For some of us, our homes are nothing more than a place to come back to and sleep in, while for others, our homes are a place of safety and a shell from the rigours of the world around us.

Whichever way, most of us have one thing in common: the space we live in is made into ‘our own’ by some level of decoration.

Are you a crafty person? If so, you’ll most likely have a selection of all kinds of things, ranging from a dozen kinds of paper of all sizes, pencils & pens & crayons, tins full of glitter, a lot of leftover fabrics, a store of clay to every single craftworks implement known to mankind.

The trouble is: there is so much of it that every single type of thing sits in front and on top of another.

An important part of growing up is being taught life skills by your parents. Some of those skills involve active telling how to do things, explaining how stuff works, or showing how to do things properly.

Some of the life skills, however, kids pick up without being actively told: they see what their parents do, and how they go about doing it. And that part of learning is subconscious on both parts, parents and their children alike.

Let’s assume you are in the right mindset to declutter a part of your life or a section of your home.

You have started going through a selection of things – maybe a shelf with memorabilia, a box with photos, or even one huge shelf along the side wall of your garage. You may even have gotten to grips with taking all those small decisions involved with sorting what you want to keep from what no longer serves you.

There are several categories of things that I tend to come across in the homes of most people I work with.

Pretty much all of my clients have these things: clothes, paperwork, and books. And most of those clients tend to have at least one of these three categories that have grown out of proportion and have turned into a problem.

The relationship we build to the things we surround ourselves with bears more than a fleeting resemblance with our human relationships: we go in slowly, get acquainted with a presence, then take that presence for granted and normal.

And ultimately there comes a time when we could scarcely imagine a life without that person – or those things – that we have welcomed into our life. But sometimes that relationship has to end.