The Christian Homemaking Podcast: Simply Convivial with Mystie Winckler

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How to keep a well-stocked pantry. May 06, 2020

Show notes

I had a dream. And in this dream my pantry always had everything I needed. I never ran out of ingredients to make dinner. I would go to the pantry, pull out what I needed to make dinner that day and it’d be there—no surprises. I had achieved well-stocked pantry perfection.

But it turns out that making this dream a reality was much harder than I thought it would be. Still, it’s worth the effort to keep a well-stocked pantry. So, let’s talk about how to do just that.

So, you go to make spaghetti and there’s no tomato sauce. You go to make soup and there’s no chicken broth. You think you’ll make tuna noodle casserole and then there’s no tuna or no noodles, or neither. This is frustrating. And it illustrates one of the troubles of menu planning.

Menu planning isn’t just coming up with ideas of what’s for dinner. It’s managing this whole magic of having the idea of what’s for dinner, having the ingredients for that dinner on hand, starting dinner at the right time, on the right day, and of course, keeping it all frugal and within budget. There’s a lot that goes into keeping a menu plan. It takes practice. And with practice comes skill. But we need to practice—not just making a list and following that list, the menu planning proper—we also have to manage that pantry ingredient, grocery shopping side of things that makes the meal planning possible.

It’s really this whole separate piece that if we aren’t aware of it, managing it, keeping track of it, then that menu plan that we’ve worked on doesn’t work. And we’re thrown back to plan B, or takeout, or frozen fish sticks (if those are in the freezer).

So, what does it take to keep a well-stocked pantry? What is in a well-stocked pantry? What should be in your pantry? What should be in my pantry? How do we know that? And then, how do we keep our pantry well-stocked while feeding people three times a day?

There are four important steps to keeping and using a well-stocked pantry.

Know what your family actually eats and keep a master list of those items you actually use.
Determine how much your family consumes of each pantry staple in a week or month.
Check your pantry stock before grocery shopping – every time.
Keep what’s in your pantry rotated so you use the oldest items first.

The Pantry Stock Problem

I know when I was newly married and stocking our pantry for the first time I felt at a loss. There’s so much food at the grocery store. There are so many options. How do I even know what to buy?

Sometimes we solve that conundrum by making a menu plan first and then buying the food that we need for those meals that we’ve planned for and that works. But it actually takes a lot longer to make that menu plan, to grocery shop for that menu plan, to follow the recipes, and to just make it all work.

We can cut down on the time and energy that it takes to make our meals if we become pantry cooks. If we keep a regular stock on hand and then base our meals off of those things that we just always keep on hand. It’s actually in limiting our choices that things take less effort, energy, attention, time. Not only that, but when we function within limits, our creativity is called into play. It’s needed. And so choosing dinners based out of a pantry system is not only more efficient, it’s also more creative.

But the question still comes down to what is in the pantry? And it’s certainly something that takes experience to build up, experimentation to figure out, and iteration and flexibility in continuing it. One of the things that I tried to do the first time I was stocking a pantry was look up that Martha Stewart list of what belongs in your pantry. I didn’t know what should be in our pantry but I figured someone else knows what I should buy, and so I took Martha Stewart’s list and stocked our pantry with the things she said that we should have.

And you know what? A lot of that I didn’t really use. I had to be creative and use what I purchased, but I quickly realized that a lot of what Martha Stewart considered pantry basics I did not and I was not going to use and I was not going to restock.

We all need to go through that process of figuring out what belongs in our own well-stocked pantry. There is no single definition, single master pantry list that we can all use as a standard, and as long as we follow this list then we have a well-stocked pantry. No, a well-stocked pantry simply means that our pantry has on hand multiples of the items that we consistently use in our cooking.

There’s going to be a lot of overlap from what’s in your pantry and what’s in my pantry, but the identical lists, the master lists made by some expert, or my list used by you, or your listed used by me, is not going to work.

We each need to go through that process of figuring out what we actually use regularly and keeping those things on hand A well-stocked pantry is not a full pantry. A well-stocked pantry is a pantry that has plenty of what you actually use. If your pantry is full of items that you don’t use, that you aren’t sure why you bought, that you aren’t sure what they’re going to go into, maybe you bought multiple something because it was on sale, or because this one recipe that you made for a special occasion called for it, so you bought several, now you don’t know what else to do with it.

A pantry full of items that we aren’t sure about, that we aren’t used to using, that we are likely not going to use, is not a well-stocked pantry, even if it’s stocked. It’s not well-stocked. So we can brainstorm the typical, usual dinners that our family likes to eat, the lunches, the breakfasts, the snacks—all the food.

What are the usual things that we make? And a lot of times there’s overlap and common ingredients. We need flour. We need eggs. There’s going to be a lot of similarities in the basics of anyone’s master list, but they’re going to vary for sure. Not only that but the amount of those basics that you need is something you have to figure out for your family, that I have to figure out for my family, and that can definitely change as our families grow in number and grow in size and change in eating habits.

Those master amounts that we figure out, that work for us, overtime end up not working. A well-stocked pantry master list is not a once-and-done project. And this is another thing that threw me off for sure. I did this early on, made the master list—these are the items that I’m going to keep on hand in my pantry. I never want to run out of these. I want to always have them on hand and all of the dinners that I make are going to rely on these ingredients only, so that I know I can go to my dinner rotation list and pick any one of them and I’ll have the ingredients on hand because these are just the things that I buy.

What is organization? It starts with your attitude. Apr 29, 2020

Show notes

We need to stop striving for having ducks in a row and admit that ducklings actually waddle where they will, leaving sloppy footprints as they go. We need to stop believing the marketers who tell us we're only 5 containers and 1 label maker away from achieving the state of organization.

Index Card Organization System Apr 22, 2020

Show notes

An index card organization system predates blogs and word processors. It’s a thing, and it works because it uses a simple principle.

Back in our first year or two of marriage, a good friend and I talked at least weekly about all things homemaking. We were figuring out our new role, and we wanted to do well in it.

So, of course, we read the books.

One of the books was straight off my mom’s shelf: Sidetracked Home Executives.

I could relate to these ladies. They had ideas, they had things they wanted to do, and both the housework and the state of the house (because the work wasn’t being done) was getting in their way.

They came up with a creative solution to break up the housework into manageable chunks and make sure they did it regularly without expecting themselves to recognize that it needed to be done or deciding each day what needed to be done.

Yes, that’s right. They came up with a housework routine. Now, that alone is not creative or unusual, although there are points at which they seem to think it’s revolutionary.

When you suffer from decision fatigue and a tendency toward procrastination or distract ability, however, a routine certainly can be revolutionary.

What was creative in their approach was how they tracked their routine. It was an index card organization system.

Pam Young and Peggy Jones were organizing their chores with index cards before homeschoolers were doing it with their memory work.

In a day with apps and pretty planners galore, is an index card organization system out of date or still useful? Could this book so clearly from the ’80s still be relevant?

If you want to accomplish your housework regularly without having the excuse to check your phone, you might consider their index card organization system.

However, whether you use index cards, a list, an app, or any other implementation, you certainly can and should use the principle behind this method: Loop scheduling.

The index card organization system developed and popularized by Sidetracked Home Executives is, at heart, a loop schedule for housework, just like Sarah Mackenzie’s housework routine – only Sarah uses a plain list instead of a box of index cards.

Indeed, index cards can be rather fiddly. They can easily get mixed up, lost, or ruined. However, there are also advantages to running a loop schedule housework routine on index cards:

1) You can decorate the cards.
2) You can take notes on the cards.
3) You can easily reassign the cards.
4) You can easily delegate the cards.

The index cards are not really the point, though, nor what makes the system work.

What makes an index card organization system work is that it relies on three strategies:

1) It eliminates decision fatigue.
2) It holds the information you need and makes it easy to find and grab.
3) It keeps track of what’s next for you.

You can accomplish the same outcome with an app like Home Routines or even ToDoist, you can get the same benefits by keeping the same information in checklist form, and you can simply add your recurring chores onto your weekly dashboard.

But what won’t give you this same peace of mind and effectiveness is simply printing someone else’s master cleaning list. We are tempted to shortcut the decision making process not by writing down and figuring out (through trial and error) what will work for us, but by finding someone who will tell us what to do.

Even this index card organization system will do that if you buy the book. They’ll tell you which chores to write on cards and what frequency to arrange them in.

We search for the “ready to go” plan not because we want to avoid decision fatigue, but because we think that our past inconsistency and failure disqualifies us from making our own workable plan.

If this other lady – whether in a book, real life, or on the internet – has a plan that works for her, then I know it works, right? If it works, I don’t have to take responsibility. I can just adopt her plan and get her results – right? I haven’t removed decision fatigue at that point; I have removed personal engagement with the problem.

Unfortunately, too often we don’t want to go through the process of getting organized, changing both our mindset and our methods, we just want a quick fix solution.

Most likely, someone else’s plan will not work for you in a cut-and-paste sort of a way. It might be a great shortcut to developing your own workable system – even one with index cards – but you will have to mix with brains and practice before it actually works for you.

Ready to make a housekeeping routine, a housework loop schedule, or even an index card organization system that works for you?

The most effective to do list template Apr 15, 2020

Show notes

The daily card is a term that we use from Work the Plan for your daily to do list. So, you might have a planner and the question is whether or not you use the planner correctly; if we actually use what’s written in the planner to direct our days? And the daily card can be just a card, just a post-it, an index card, or it can be a section in the planner. But the point of it is to keep a very truncated, limited, small set of tasks for that day alone.

So, you make a list of the top priorities for that day. And you re-do that every day. You might make it the night before, or you might make it the morning of, but you’re not making a daily card for every day of the week during your Weekly Review. Every day you’re renewing your task list and adjusting because sometimes the needs and the priorities of where our attention needs to go for the day do really adjust on a day-by-day basis, and I think now more than ever, we recognize that.

How do you decide what your daily three are? Can it be in all different kinds of formats? Are the tasks typically habitual things? How do you keep wishful thinking off the daily card? People often say, “Mine turn into a daily brain dump so I struggle with knowing which three.”

Knowing what to put on the card—that is the hardest part for everybody. And so, what we have to remember is the reason why we do a daily card every single day is for the practice so that we keep iterating, we keep learning, we learn from the previous day, and implement that the next day.

So, the more and more we practice, the better and better we get at knowing what needs to go on the list. If you’ve made a daily card before and you find at the end of the day that really what you put on your list was wishful thinking and not what actually was important to do today that’s something to think about. That’s what you adjust moving forward. And what I found when I recognized that as well, was that I make a better daily list when I do it the night before rather than the morning of (and that’s not a universal thing.) It really depends on person to person. But, for myself, when I stop at the end of the day and I look at the list that I made for that day and see what did and didn’t happen, I make a more realistic plan for the next day when I’m tired and wishing I had accomplished what was on my list. And also recognizing the wishful thinking or how things changed that day that made the priority shift. Or recognizing, ‘Okay, I put that on my list and I didn’t do it, I’m procrastinating that. It needs to keep going on the list and I’m going to put it on there.’

In the morning, I feel more like, ‘Oh, fresh start, everything’s possible!’ I tend to be more energetic and optimistic in the morning and my to do list will reflect that. So, I make a more realistic to do list if I do it the night before. Your mileage may vary, but the point really, is to try it out. Try different times, try different formats, try different ways to write out your list, and learn.

So, think of each daily list as an experiment and you can apply what you’ve learned to the next day’s card.

At Simply Convivial we do not believe in one-size-fits-all solutions, plans, or check lists. I’m all about teaching you the principles and the skills that you need to figure out what’s going to work for you in your particular situation with your particular needs. If that’s what you need then make sure to subscribe and check out some of my other videos, including my series on Getting Your Life Organized in One Week. Check those out here.

Always remember that your attitude is the most important part of your organization project. So, repent, rejoice, repeat. See you next time.

How to keep your to-do list short Apr 08, 2020

Show notes

We all know the feeling. There’s just too much to do. Do you ever feel like the more you have to do the less you actually get done? That’s a real thing. There’s a reason for that. And it’s decision fatigue. The first step that you have to do to prevent decision fatigue and then to get started is decide what to actually do next. It seems simple but it can be hard. The more options there are, the more that’s rattling around in your head, the more thought and energy it takes to come to a conclusion and just get started.

Let me show you how to streamline the decision-making process so you can do what needs to be done no matter how long or short your to do list is. Let’s dig in.

So, let’s figure out how to make our to do lists short and simple, so we can actually get them done each day.

Step one is that you actually need two to do lists.

One is your master list. A running list of all the things that need to happen; big or small, routine or not. Everything that needs to happen needs to be written down and kept. But that’s not your to do list that you actually work from day to day. Think of it like the safe-keeping place so that you’re not keeping track of everything in your head—you’re keeping things safe and written down where you can refer to it as needed, jog your memory, where you’re not afraid you’re going to lose something or forget something.

Then, you need the actionable daily to do list. You can choose from that master list what goes on today’s list, but the list that you’re making for today is short. It’s prioritized. It’s a list of what’s most important today. Sometimes that’s going to be something that’s not even on your master list. Days are like that. Keeping a daily to do list allows you that flexibility you need to adjust to real life as it unrolls.

Your daily to do list then is a prioritized list. It is not even all the things that you will do. It is your top three things for the day, the three things that, if you do those it’s going to be better tomorrow. The three things that are going to make a difference. It’s easy to get distracted of the little things that pile up but then we end up never getting to those important things that aren’t necessarily urgent.

This short daily to do list is where we make sure that we do not lose sight of what’s important in our days. Now, we need to keep this to do list short because we don’t have unlimited time, we don’t have unlimited energy either. So, we have to choose. We have to make tough choices and then we need to write them down so that we can stick with those choices.

And we make this list every day because every day our time is a little bit different—the time we have available, the kind of energy that we have available—and so we can look at what we actually have by looking at our calendar, looking at our commitments, and we can choose what’s most important.

Sometimes, appointments might take up all day and so we don’t want to write a list that assumes we’ll be able to get a lot of home projects done. Or maybe even any of our routines done. Our daily to do list is made in light of the reality of today.

It takes practice and experience to know how to pick a viable, realistic top three. It’s not something that anyone can tell you what you should pick. It’s something that you have to think about, figure out, try, experiment, iterate, and continually learn from your own experience by evaluating how it went, making observations, and moving forward in light of what you learn. In this way, with this daily practice of learning how we work, learning what our real responsibilities are, recognizing what we tend to procrastinate on, and seeing what’s really important.

In this practice, over time, we make better and better choices. And, because those are self-determined choices that we know are realistic and necessary, we also grow in our self-motivation and momentum and follow through in actually doing them. And that’s really what we’re after.

So, you need to identify your priorities. That’s hard to do but you’ll get better at it with practice. So, practice every day and write three to do’s down on a daily index card.

You will, of course, do more in a day than the three things written down on your index card, but if you start with what’s most important, you’ll feel better about how you’ve used your time and you’ll probably even get more done in the long run because you’re focused and clear. You’ll see you’re spending your time well.

We tend to waste more time in distraction and indecision when we aren’t working from a clear list. So, give it a shot. Try it out. And let me know in the comments below how it’s working for you.

At Simply Convivial we do not believe in one-size-fits all plans. I’m all about teaching you the principles and the skills that you need to figure out what’s going to work for you in your particular situation with your particular needs.

Always remember that your attitude is the most important part of your organization project. So, repent, rejoice, repeat.

Make a simple, daily to-do list Apr 02, 2020

Show notes

Have you ever been frustrated trying to use a planner? Have you ever worried that you spend more time writing in your planner and decorating your planner than actually doing what that pretty plan tells you to do? Let me share my quick planner hack that streamlines the process and keeps me focused on the most important things to do each day. Let’s dig in.

I know, planners are pretty. They’re fun. But a lot of the ones that we can buy pre-printed, packaged, ready to go are actually over kill. They contain sections and questions and areas that maybe (maybe!) work for the person who designed it and implemented it, and maybe they work for some people, but just because a tactic or a format works for one person does not mean that it’s the thing that will work for anyone and everyone.
Instead of searching for and continually trying for that planner that will magically, suddenly make us into planners—not just make a plan but then do the plan—we need to find planning strategies that are simple, streamlined, and personalized. And that’s the planner hack I have for you today.

Try to figure out what you need to make a consistent daily plan that actually works. We have to think about what the point of it all really is. Why have a planner in the first place? Why write things down? And you’ve probably thought about that already, maybe in the spirit of ‘Do I have to?’ or ‘What’s the point because I seem to just be wasting my time?’ And the reality is that a lot of planning is wasting time, but that’s because of the kind of plan that we make and not that all planning is always a waste of time.

When we make plans that are based on wishful thinking that’s a waste of time. We need to plan for right now, our current reality, our current responsibilities, and then our plan will be effective. I think that a good question we can ask is, what’s the least amount of effort that I have to do to create an effective plan, a plan that I will use and follow through on? And my answer to that question is all you need is a post-it note!

Using a post-it note to make our daily plans helps us remember that not only our time, but even our energy and our attention, our abilities, are limited. We can’t do everything that we might be keeping on some other to do list. We have to pick the things that are most important. And then we write down the things that are most important on a small piece of paper that we can keep in front of our face. Then we are more likely to follow through on tasks because they’re not vague, nebulous “I coulda, shoulda, some day do this thing.” We have specified and written down and thought about what it is we actually have to do.

So, on your post-it note every day, at the beginning of the day or maybe at the end of the day (the day before) write down your top three things. That’s a hard thing to do. It’s a skill that we have to practice. And we will get better and better the more we practice it at choosing what those top three things really are.
But the exercise of having to choose, having to narrow it down and pick three, is all a part of what makes it actually work because the best planning is mostly a thinking exercise. It’s not that in writing something down it’s more likely to happen. In reality, it is having thought about it and putting our priorities and what we need to be paying attention to top-of-mind and visible in front of our faces that makes it actually able to happen.

Our minds are for thinking and we need to give ourselves the time and the prompts to actually think about what’s most important just today. And the daily card (or post-it note) is an exercise that helps us do just that. Because we are limited—we’re limited in time, we’re limited in resources, we’re limited in energy—our to do list also needs to be limited.

And the tiny size of a post-it note is a visible reminder of that. Writing what needs to happen out by hand every day helps us focus on our priorities. It allows us to adjust the plan as needed as life unfolds. And it puts our responsibilities right in front of our face. The great thing about a post-it note is that it’s sticky. I can put this on the top of the computer monitor. I can put this on the front cover of my planner so that it’s right there. I can put it on the back of my phone and have it right with me in my pocket.

A post-it note is super flexible and can help us keep our priorities visible. And that’s really key because a planner (no matter what kind of planner) will not work unless you look at it!
So, I challenge you to try out this quick, simple, cheap option for your own daily to do list. Try it for at least a week. Give it a fair shot. Practice and see what happens.

Over at Simply Convivial I’ve put together a Daily Card Quick Start Guide that will help you get going with this small, simple habit. It will teach you how to make and use this card (or post-it note) every day and give you a checklist so that you can hold yourself accountable to actually trying this out for yourself. And, where you can always write down your observations about what you learn about this method (and also yourself) so that you can figure out a plan that works for you. Visit SimplyConvivial.com to find that today.

At Simply Convivial we do not believe in one-size-fits-all solutions, plans, or checklists. I’m all about teaching you the principles and the skills that you need to figure out what’s going to work for you in your particular situation with your particular needs. If that’s what you need then make sure to subscribe and check out some of my other videos. But always remember, that your attitude is the most important part of your organization project. So, repent, rejoice, repeat.

Decluttering once a week is all it takes. Mar 24, 2020

Show notes

Transformation Tuesday is our answer to the complicated, overbearing cleaning and organizing checklists out there.

You don’t need to clean by someone else’s schedule.

Instead, see what needs to be done in your own home, and spend 10 minutes improving the order and organization there.

Transformation Tuesday is one of my little homemaking mottos that helps me tackle housecleaning in small bites and tame my attitude at the same time. Cleaning and decluttering should just be a small piece of your weekly cleaning routine.

When we wonder how to organize our life, we usually think about containers, labels, and homes that magically stay clean without further effort. But someone who is organized is someone willing to continue taking the effort of homekeeping, to maintain the work consistently.

Transformation Tuesday is a catchy reminder to spend 10 minutes once a week cleaning or reorganizing a small area that will positively affect at least your peace of mind and maybe even your personal productivity.

No one can tell you what that area ought to be. Each week you pick the thing that’s bothering you, that’s holding you up, that’s the biggest (small) problem area. Each week you take just ten minutes and make an improvement in order and tidiness in that small spot.

This accomplishes more than just the small amount of order. It also, gradually, changes our perspective and attitude about organization itself.

When organizing an area is no longer a huge, overwhelming, whole-closet or whole-house project, but just a ten minute focus, we overcome our mental and emotional hurdles to becoming more organized.

We aren’t going for night and day or for whole-new-self change. We’re just going for 10 minutes of better. We succeed at that. We appreciate the difference it made. We are less devastated when the work is inevitably undone by normal, everyday entropy. After all, it was only ten minutes. We can do that again.

And when you do, take a before and after picture! Share on Instagram with the #simplyconvivial hashtag and tag me. We’re forming an open, honest, real-life community of homemakers who spur one another on to cheerful attitudes and good work at home.

Make decluttering a habit Mar 19, 2020

Show notes

I wanted to talk about decluttering as a habit because there’s this rumor floating out there on decluttering (from experts and gurus) who say that “decluttering can be done once and for all.” That it’s a project you finish and check off and be done with (which is really what we all want to hear, isn’t it?).

We really want it to be something that we can achieve: “Achievement unlocked! We are now decluttered and forever and all time, moving forward. Now we have the right habits, the right house, the right organization. We won’t have to do that again!” That’s just not the way it really is in real life. Not our kind of real life anyway. Not family life. Not home life where you have a lot of people in one house actually living a full life—which means a lot of stuff—and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that.

I think there’s a lot of hope and happiness pinned even on minimalism (on eliminating as much as stuff as possible) as if I manage to do [that], get [that achievement unlocked] then I will be happy. Then I will be a good housekeeper. Then I will love my house. Then my family won’t drive me crazy. Then the lights shine brightly and angels sing, “la” and we have achieved our housekeeping, homemaking goal! Decluttered once and for all, now we can move forward and do this thing right.

And that appeals to our desire to achieve our ambition. It appeals to just wanting to be done. To figure things out and do things right. But the reality is that stuff comes into our house still and it’s just something we have to keep up with. It’s just one more thing—like dishes and the laundry and meals—that has to be continually addressed. We should declutter in order to use our space wisely, but our life changes, our needs change, sometimes our house situation changes, the ages of our children and their stages change, and we need to adjust. We will continually go through that process of figuring out, “Well, I saved this because I thought I would need it.

These are just questions in wisdom and stewardship that we need to be continually asking and assessing and working through because life and our situations change and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not because we’re doing it wrong, it’s not because if we had this thing figured out we wouldn’t have to anymore.

When the stuff is used as the measure stick it’s just wrong. It’s not going to work. It’s not true. It’s not accurate. And it focuses us on the wrong things. So, the stuff is just stuff that we do have to manage and steward. There isn’t a universal one-size fits all plan for how much stuff you ought to have, what you ought to keep, what you ought to get rid of.

So, decluttering will be put in its proper place if we think of it as a habit and not as the holy grail, the step that we need to complete in order to take the next steps of perfect homemaking.

And so, if instead of thinking of it as a project that we’re going to finish, we think of it as a habit we’re going to build, it breaks it down, we take smaller steps, we work it into our routines and our awareness in the smaller chunks of time and energy, and in the end we actually make more progress because we’re continually applying ourselves to it, we aren’t frustrated because it’s not complete yet because we’re not expecting it to be complete, and we aren’t waiting to make other steps and other changes until it’s over and complete.

How to clear clutter - step-by-step guide Mar 10, 2020

Show notes

So, we talk a lot about needing to declutter, but part of what holds us back from just diving in and making some progress in decluttering is that even though we say that we are doing this project we don’t really understand how to do it. We don’t understand what the project really is, what it entails, what we set out to accomplish. It remains this, kind of, vague, nebulous project that we can’t define. And that means we can’t see progress made. And when we don’t know what we’re going to do next, we end up not doing anything at all. So, in order to declutter our homes, we need to understand the process of decluttering and it’s really very simple. It’s a little bit scary, but what you need to remember is to start with an amount of space that you can actually tackle in the amount of time that you have. What I like to do is choose a spot that I can actually declutter in 10 minutes or less, because even when I think I have half an hour I often don’t. But 10 minutes I can probably manage that, or at least, if some interruption comes a 10 minute declutter session is easier to come back to and finish up, whereas longer projects not so much.

The first step of decluttering is actually removing everything from the space—that’s scary, that’s a big deal, I know, but it’s really the most effective, efficient way to declutter. But that’s why it’s so important to start with a very small space. So, a single drawer (or even a section of a drawer), a single shelf in a closet (and not the whole closet), one container at a time decluttering; not entire rooms or even entire closets—a small space. Empty it out entirely onto a table, or some other space—just move it out.

Then the next thing I like to do is to just throw away the garbage that came out in that process. Ideally, it doesn’t even make it onto the table (or whatever other space I’m emptying things out on), but as I’m pulling it out it just goes into the trash. And still, if there is some junk on the counter (or wherever this pile has ended up), I go through and throw away the trash because that’s the fastest, easiest, most obvious step to take first. And the more visible progress you can make quickly the more momentum that you get. You’re seeing that success and you’re seeing progress right away and that helps you keep the momentum and the energy moving forward to get the job done.

So, we don’t start with the hardest part (although emptying the entire space might have been hard, mentally or emotionally) but then we do something easy—we just throw away the garbage. And, it’s amazing sometimes how much difference that makes right there.

Next, we’re looking at all this stuff that’s out to see. Now, none of it’s where it belongs because none of it belongs on the bed or the counter or the table or wherever we’ve put it, and we see things that belong somewhere else. So they have homes, we know what they are, we know where they belong and it’s not here and it’s not in that drawer that we just emptied. So, we go put those things away. This is where distraction is tempting. This is where we might get an idea, see something else that needs to be done, get interrupted by a child, or something, so we have to be very careful and try to do this very quickly.

How to declutter in bite-sized steps Mar 04, 2020

Show notes

So, what even is decluttering and why is it something that we keep trying to do and keep feeling like we never make any progress doing? Yeah, that’s right—you are not the only one. Decluttering is getting rid of clutter. So, before we can understand declutter, we have to think about what clutter really is. Sometimes we just use it as a generic insult to stuff we don’t necessarily want or want to deal with. But clutter is referring to those things that are not where they belong, or they are some place where they don’t belong. And so, when we’re looking in a closet, in a cupboard, in a drawer, in a whole room, and we say, “It’s cluttered,” what we mean is that it’s full of stuff that does not belong there.

So, the process of decluttering, then, means going through the space and removing what does not belong. Organizing the space then is putting the things away well, strategically, smartly, in the place they do belong. But decluttering comes before organizing. And you really can’t organize a space that has not been decluttered because if the space has stuff that doesn’t belong there, it can’t be organized there. It needs to be removed so that the things that do belong can then be ordered and tidied well; so, decluttering means getting rid of the things that do not belong.

We keep coming back to this project of decluttering because it’s a part of the process of actually stewarding or managing our resources well. Things tend toward disorder, things fall apart, new things come in, and the way that we use a space or the way that we need to use a space changes. So, the fact that you need to declutter doesn’t even mean necessarily that something is wrong, or you’ve failed in some way, it just means that the task before you is clear—declutter the space.

Of course, when we look around our home there are so many spaces that need to be decluttered (I mean, we are not even going to talk about kid bedrooms)! But we just need to be satisfied taking small steps forward, making a little bit of progress in a small amount of space; steadily, strategically, and consistently. And that’s what we’re going to do in this series where we are focusing on decluttering. We aren’t just going to talk about decluttering and we aren’t only going to pep talk decluttering (although we are going to do that as well), we are going to find ways to build decluttering as a habit in our life because our spaces are always going to need decluttering.
Things are always going to wind up where they don’t belong because that’s just the way family life works. Not to mention the way that we need to use the space changes—something did belong in a particular spot at one point but no longer does because that’s now not the point of the space.

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