By Michelle Passoff,
Author and Podcast Host
Decluttering 55+ with Michelle Passoff
More and more, we seem to be living in a virtual world – enjoying family dinners over zoom; conducting business over the internet with co-workers we’ve never met in person, teleconferencing with doctors from the comfort of our living rooms. Even so, we cannot overlook the physical world in which we live and how decluttering there complements, if not enables, organizing our online lives, especially all of our important assets.
Imagine that whenever you want to retrieve something from your closet or drawers to get packed for a weekend getaway, you didn’t have to scramble for it. Instead, what if what you needed was at your fingertips without a frantic search because you know exactly where to find it? What if getting out of town was a breeze instead of a headache?
What if you are looking for an important letter that required a response on a deadline and you didn’t have to break out in a sweat and conduct a long time-consuming search through mounds of paperwork to find it? What if you could go directly to the physical document, pick up the phone or jot off a response online, and just get things done? Imagine how much easier life would be without clutter in the way?
And, forget about the camping equipment you know is in the garage somewhere. Or, is it? If it’s too big of an ordeal to go searching, is it easier to just go buy new equipment?
Well, if you are eager for less stress in a day, there is no better time than now to get started on your decluttering mission right at home. The merits of doing so will save you time, money and aggravation in the simplest and most significant of ways. Where do you start, you ask?
Before you even start on your at-home clutter cleaning mission, make up your mind that you will go 100 percent with your project. Certainly, you can break your project down room by room, and you don’t have to do everything all on the same day. In fact, it may take you months to complete the mission of clutter cleaning your house top to bottom. However, surrender yourself to the notion that you are not just organizing, you are transforming, and you are in for the long haul.
Next, pick a place to start. You can start with the easiest or the most difficult area. You choose.
Then, schedule time. Two to four-hour clutter-cleaning sessions at least once a week are recommended so that you make relatively significant progress each time you work on your physical clutter. Throw out the garbage and put like-kind things together and you will be well on your way. Once you are finished in one area and one room, go on to the next until you are 100 per cent. Grab a copy of LIGHTEN UP! Free Yourself From Clutter for a detailed how-to on this clutter-cleaning process.
Be aware of how things in your life change in this process of decluttering. It may sound like an exaggeration that cleaning your physical clutter can impact other things that occur in your life, but suspend any disbelief and stay observant! The theory that empty space gets filled applies here and implies that things will come into the empty space you create and what comes in is not always physical.
When your papers, clothes and ‘other stuff’ are in order and in alignment with who you are, you will savor the importance of making sure that all of your essential documents are easily accessible to you and your loved ones – including your wills, trust, powers of attorney, healthcare surrogate and even the directives for your pets. If anything happens to you, your family won’t have to burrow through a mess in person or online to make sense of what matters.
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