Tips and hacks that make decluttering easier

9honey Living’s The Wash Up: Your 30-day spring cleaning guide is a month-long series aimed at making your annual house clean easier with hacks and expert advice.
Decluttering is a passion for some but for most people it can be frustrating, time-consuming and overwhelming.
It doesn’t have to be that way though, with plenty of tips and tricks to help you get started on your organisation journey.
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From starting small, to developing good habits and finding out what you do and don’t use in the house, we’ve gathered plenty of helpful hints and hacks to begin decluttering your home.
For those items you’re unsure about letting go of, label them or pop them in a box or bag.
Then mark a deadline on the item, box or bag using tape and a permanent marker, and if you haven’t used it by that date, it’s time to let go because you clearly don’t need it or want to use it.
A deadline of six months or a year should be sufficient to reveal how much you need that thing in your home.
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When you start decluttering, have a bag or box each for donating, rubbish and keeping.
As you clear out your space organise items into one of the three categories. This makes it easier to sort through things and start the re-organisation process.
You can also use this concept on a regular basis by keeping a donation box in your wardrobe or garage. Just make sure you eventually take it to a second-hand store, otherwise it becomes clutter again.
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Tackle one room, cupboard, drawer or shelf at a time to make the process less overwhelming and easier to manage.
Write a list of the areas you need to clean out and break the list down into manageable chunks.
You could aim to do tackle one drawer a day or one room a week.
A big reason clutter builds up is because of dysfunctional organisation systems.
By designating a place for each object or category you’ll know exactly where it should go, and you’ll find it’s much more functional.
That way you can put it away right then and there instead of spending time trying to figure out what to do with it.
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Decluttering isn’t a fun task for everyone, so why not turn it into a game? And if a few people in the house are involved, you could even make it a competition.
Set a timer for 15 minutes and try to declutter as much as you can in that period. You can try other time limits too if you want to make it more or less challenging.
If it’s a competition, give everyone a bag and see who can fill the most with stuff they don’t need anymore.
If it’s clothes you can’t bring yourself to let go of, try this advice from decluttering expert Peter Walsh.
“My belief is you should only have three types of clothes in your closet: clothes you love, clothes that fit you now, and clothes that when you wear them people say, ‘Wow, you look really great in this outfit’,” the Space Invaders host explained.
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Marie Kondo might not be as focused on keeping her home tidy these days, but she still believes in the concept of sparking joy.
To practice this while decluttering she suggests holding an item and asking yourself whether it sparks joy.
If thinking about the piece gives you positive vibes then keep it, but if you don’t like it chuck it out or donate it.
Another way to help you work out which clothes to let go of is to find out what clothes you frequently wear.
To start, have all your coat hangers in the wardrobe with the hook facing the one way. As you wear and return an item, place back it in the wardrobe with the hanger facing the opposite way.
In just a few months you will see which clothes you’re using by looking at which coat hangers face the opposite direction. The other clothes can be donated.
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A professional organiser from the US has a trick for deciding whether to toss out something you want to keep just because you think you might need it some day.
Emily, who goes by @spacesbyemily on TikTok, said her $20 rule will help speed up the decision making process.
“If it costs less than $20 to rebuy, and you currently don’t use it, and haven’t in a while, get rid of it,” she said in a TikTok video.
The rule works because if you do need the item one day it won’t cost you much to replace it but if you never use it you’ll have saved precious storage space.
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A big organising mistake is to go out and buy a whole heap of containers before you’ve decluttered.
That’s because you don’t know what you need yet and can end up creating more clutter and wasting money.
And often enough you’ll find you already have plenty of containers at home.
Look around to see what sort of storage systems are sitting empty and put them in the one spot for easy access when you need them.
“I encourage my clients to put all of those unused bins and baskets in one space, creating a little ‘Container Store’ in their own home,” Melissa Gugni, a professional organiser, told Family Handyman.
“There’s no shame in having a collection. Even the best of us have chosen an organising solution that works great until it doesn’t.”
How many times have you come across something during the decluttering process that you either forgot or didn’t know you had?
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus from The Minimalists recommend seeing this as a sign to let go of that item.
This takes away the emotion that often stops us from getting rid of things because you obviously didn’t like the item that much or never used it if you can’t remember owning it.
READ MORE: $10 Ikea hack expert swears by for staying organised between seasons
A mum-of-four from the US has found a way to get on top of clutter and cleaning by using the one-hour method.
Britt Scaffedi, who shares tips for this technique on TikTok, dedicates one hour a day to cleaning and clearing clutter.
Depending on where things in your home are at this could mean spending an hour decluttering a section of a room each day until it’s back under control.
It could also mean cleaning one room for an hour each day, or cleaning whatever you need to or can in that time frame.
Once you’ve decluttered a space commit to putting things away straight away to maintain your reorganised space long term. It always seems easier to do things later, but you’ll end up with more clutter and more problems.
“The moment you procrastinate and put something off until later, clutter starts to accumulate. So you have to change your mindset because ‘later’ is the best friend of clutter,” decluttering expert Peter Walsh said.
For anyone struggling to get used to the ‘later’ rule, try this tip.
If something is going to take less than one minute to do, happiness expert Gretchen Rubin advises doing it straight away and this applies to clutter.
For example, if putting your dinner plate in the dishwasher will take a few seconds, just pop it in rather than leaving it on the bench to pile up with other kitchen clutter and look messy.
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