Head over Heart: Practical Alternatives to Staying Stuck in Your Clutter

Many of us recognize the negative impact of clutter on our comfort, convenience, and relationships, but feel powerless to begin the overwhelming effort that decluttering entails. Decluttering happens piece by piece, but we can’t get it done when our stuff provokes conflicting emotions. Sometimes the reasonable voice (“I’ll never need this again”) gets drowned out by the panicked impulse to keep everything or defer every decision for another day. At the January 2018 meeting of the Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup Group, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, suggested ways to set aside the emotional responses that stand in the way of the work of decluttering in favor of practical techniques that allow us to move forward. She talked about cultivating detachment and objectivity by creating algorithms—rules to filter our stuff to fit our spaces and our present lives. She offered examples of criteria you can apply to your own collections, or that will guide you as you define your own practical rules.