Once you’ve decluttered, you’ll probably see that you have more time to spend on the things you love and want to do in life.
Setting up new habits and routines is a great way to become more productive, saving both time and money. Establishing these routines can be vital to keeping the gains you’ve made when you make the move to simplicity. It can also keep you from feeling overwhelmed when you establish schedules and habits.
Follow through on just a few of these options, and it’ll be much easier to maintain your clutter-free home.
Forming Clutter-Free Habits
There are a few ways to increase your clutter-free habits painlessly. Try some of the options below and see how maintenance can become more streamlined, allowing you to choose how to spend your time.
Habits
Replace Old Bad Habits
While it might seem overwhelming, usually, adding a new good habit can be thought of as replacing a bad one, though it is not always an exact replacement. This can be a win-win, though, because we not only get rid of a bad habit but also build a good one.
Hook Your New Habits to Established Habits
Think of how well we do with brushing our teeth. What a great habit! Most of us at least associate this with getting ready in the morning and going to bed.
Build up your clutter-free lifestyle by associating a new practice along with an already established pattern. For instance, if you always forget to take your vitamins, try to remember to take them right before you brush your teeth. This is a great way to add an excellent new habit to your life if you’ve tried setting reminders, and that didn’t work.
Don’t Try to Do It All At Once
Try to work on building the routines over time. Trying to do them all can be a hard way to fail at many things. Establish one new habit at a time and try to allow for around 30 days to ensure the new practice has ‘stuck.’
If you keep up with this over time, you will have many great, new habits!
Do Go for the Quick Wins
Change your mindset about how you do things. Do you normally set all your bills aside to be handled later? Does the laundry area become a big massive pile?
If you can get something done in a small amount of time, then do it quickly. This will get rid of a lot of the things that accumulate and end up stressing us out. Think about it, do you really want to walk by the dirty dishes piling up in the sink until you absolutely run out of dishes or would you rather just hand wash your dinnerware when you’re done with it or load the dishwasher after each meal?
Just doing this can have an amazing impact on your home. Start to identify the deferred tasks and consider what stress has mounted over the time as it sits there. Work out what tasks may be wrapped up quickly and just start to do them!
Identify Your Weakness
If you have trouble coming up with where and how you could enhance your clutter-free habits, log your time for a week or two to see where your biggest killers are.
Association vs. Alerts
Think about the different methods that help with the establishment of a new routine. One way to start a new habit is to associate it with something you already do. Another is to set a reminder at a specific time that alerts you to perform the action. Depending on the habit, one of these ways may work better.
Gamify Clutter-Free with Mobile Apps
There are habit tracker apps that allow you to set reminders to alert you. It gets rewarding to have streaks of completions with no breaks! Recent studies say that once you’ve done something for over around 30 days in a row, you’ve established a new habit.
Get the Kids Involved
To keep clutter-free with kids, be sure to include them in the process. Since you’re deep dive into decluttering, they’re probably experiencing the joy of having less without thinking much about it.
Keep them on board by giving them tangible duties to work in keeping the house in shape. Editable lists work great for kids, so you may keep them updated with appropriate age tasks. Just don’t change their responsibilities so often they can’t get used to the routine.
Teens can help come up with their responsibilities. For little ones, think about using pictures or clip art so they can understand them.
Just think of what you’re doing for your child when you help them establish these minimalist habits in their youth. If you’re anything like me, you realize how much time and energy your home clutter has robbed from us as we allowed it to creep up on us slowly and devour our life.
Clutter-Free Habit Routine Ideas
Wondering what sort of simple habits can help induce the smooth running life and clutter-free home? Some of the ones we’ve used in our household are in the list below. Consider your critical needs when you see how your house operates, and leverage a natural, ongoing routine from there.
Ongoing Maintenance
- Wash and put away the dirty dishes after a meal.
- Clear flat surfaces. These are the locations that would typically have been hot spots in the past.
- Put things in their place when you’re done with them.
- Pick up anything left out or on the floor at the end of the night
- Add items to the shopping list if you need them within a month or two.
- Many incoming packages can really add to the overwhelm, so take advantage of retailers offering to consolidate shipments into one package. It might seem like just getting a worse deal on shipping but can help with reducing clutter in your home and also be something to help your environmental impact.
- Keep your eyes open at all times for things to discard or donate. Dedicate a spot in the garage or basement for these items.
- Stop accepting swag, freebies, hand me downs, and samples.
- Simplify your hairdo so you can work less on your hair in the morning.
- Stop purchasing more than what you need for a month or two at a time. This can be a hard habit to break with the excellent prices from the warehouse stores, but if you take an observant eye to your bathroom or pantry, you’ll likely see that it’s busting at the seams due to these purchases in bulk.
- Simplify your towel colors so that you can wash all the towels together and use any cloth in any bathroom.
- Simplify your wardrobe so you can easily get dressed. Consider going so far as to develop a ‘uniform’ of sorts that you feel good in.
Daily
- Spend 15 minutes tidying up the living area before bed.
- Layout your clothes before bedtime.
- Clear off the kitchen counters.
- Clear off the bathroom counters.
- Notice any hot spots forming, and do something about it before it becomes a mess. A hot spot is indicative of too much stuff without a home. Make a home for it or get rid of it.
- Breakaway from habits like smoking that steal time and health.
- Set up an automated process for downloading your photos to your Dropbox, cloud provider, or PC.
- Exercise.
- Facial, skincare, or other beauty and health routines.
- Study.
- Stress and mental health, meditation, tapping, relaxing, or napping routines.
Weekly
- Use the library or online book services
- Potluck dinners
- Set up days that you specifically clean particular rooms or do specific tasks
- Order groceries to be delivered. Check your shopping list, and add what’s necessary.
- Set up game nights
- Have a movie night where you stream a movie and order pizza
- Consolidate the trash from the bathrooms into the main garbage (right before the trash day is good!)
- Haul off your accumulated donations or discards to remove the likelihood items will be reintroduced into the household.
Monthly
- Organize your electronic files so they don’t become overwhelming.
Annually
- Commit to gift-free (or charity gifting) birthdays.
- Simplify holiday gifting
- Implement one-on-one Christmas gifting. (Goes something like this, then add all names to separate papers in a hat, and each person draws one person to gift. This usually works better for older kids and adults. Having each person write a few of their interests, wishes, or needs on the sheet of paper can be helpful.)
- Implement new simplified giving for youngsters can mean choosing to give a certain number of items like 1 book, 1 large item, 2 pieces of clothing, and a game.
Be sure to include your family in the new routines. Once your life is decluttered, you’ll experience the joy it brings. Working with your family to establish these routines can keep the house in the shape you worked so hard for. It can also be beneficial to help your children develop good habits for when they have their own households.
You can find many online daily planners, printables, cards, or mobile apps to establish these new routines.
