Why Touch Everything?
One of the foundational steps to effective and efficient decluttering and organizing is touching everything and making a decision on whether it stays in your home or leaves your home.
Two quick asides: 1)Touching everything is not helpful for hoarders. 2) You may choose to discard things without touching them. For example, you may know that you haven't looked at that box of clothes for several years and you are okay to let it go.
Time and time again I do an in-home consultation and clients tell me that they have “just been through” that drawer/closet/cabinet/room. When pressed for a time frame it is usually over 6 months that have passed since they have actually been through the space. A lot happens in 6 months. A lot happens in 6 hours in some homes, amiright? Despite having “just gone through” an area we still go through each and every item.
I recommend going through your spaces every 6 months so even if you “just” went through something 6 months ago, it’s now time to go through it again. Win-win! For another resource, see Little Red Stool Organizing on Instagram and Facebook for the Monday post series “Revisit.”
Most people just rifle through their belongings. The dictionary defines rifling as “searching through something in a hurried way in order to find or steal something.” This is the way we want to declutter and organize. We want it to be fast so we try to hurry. However, there is no need to rush. Not only does being in a hurry bring more stress to the table but it isn’t thorough. Besides, you have been rifling as delcuttering in the past and have noticed that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it isn’t thorough. When you are rifling, digging through the stuff to find the things, you are missing almost everything else.
A few weeks ago I was working with a client in his hobby room. His hobbies are computer and electronic tinkering. I know only a tiny amount about what is what in this arena. It would have been easy for me to let him make a quick look in each bin and say, “that all belongs with this kind of thing.” However, knowing that most spaces aren’t this straight forward, I emptied each bin (one at a time of course) and had him put like with like (and trash in the trash). Surprisingly to my client, there were a lot of items in incorrect bins and even more trash.
Without touching everything this client would not have known he could let go of all of these things.
Just rifling through a drawer to pull out things to toss is just not effective. Every once in a while I watch a client rifle through a drawer and say something like “I want to keep everything else in that drawer.” Then I take everything out, categorize like with like, and ask them to make decisions on each item. More times than not, there at several obvious-to-them and quick-to-toss items that they just missed for the shear amount of little items in the drawer. Without making a decision on each item you aren’t fully decluttering the space. Since the goal for most people is to keep what they love and find useful, it’s the decision that is important.
Take the time to touch each item and make a decision on whether you are keeping it or not. Once the decision is made you can more effectively organize what you have left.