If clutter is a decision you keep putting off, here are 14 simple micro habits that can help you kill clutter where it lives, at its doorstep.
Fridge clearance
Before even drafting a grocery list or opening the food delivery app, practice this admittedly unsexy tip of forcing yourself to eat a fridge clearance meal.
Dedicate the full day before your shop to creating unique meals solely from the odds and ends, partially used condiments, and frozen bits already in your kitchen.
This old tip will have you rotating through your pantry and fridge staples while avoiding waste and guaranteeing empty shelves before your next grocery haul lands on the counter. You’ll stop wasting groceries by buying fresh vegetables when you have two partially eaten bell peppers shoved to the back of your crisper drawer.
Two-minute mailbox sift
The second your mail hits the kitchen counter when you walk into your home, you have created another junk pile.
Stop right next to the recycling bin when you walk in the door. Tear open any mail that needs immediate attention, shred junk mail, and toss flyers without ever letting junk paper touch any counter tops.
This way, you can get rid of 80% of household paper mess before it even gets inside your home.
Box-free entry
Packages come in gigantic cardboard boxes that take up valuable storage space. What’s more, cardboard boxes often bring outdoor dirt and sneaky little pests along for the ride.
Try placing a box cutter next to your back door or in the garage, so you’re ready to unbox groceries or Amazon deliveries right before you enter your house. Flatten the boxes where they belong, outside. Then bring the groceries/items inside, completely free of their packaging.
Not only does this prevent packaging waste from building up in your kitchen, but you won’t have to deal with stacks of empty cardboard boxes every week.
“One-in, two-out” clothes policy
Just swapping out one old item for a new one means your closet stays stuffed to the brim, never actually shrinking.
To truly shrink your closet, you’ve got to put a “two-out” policy into effect whenever something new comes in. If you buy a new pair of jeans, you need to immediately decide which two pairs you will donate to Goodwill or turn into cleaning rags.
This sacrifice will cause friction on your buying habits and force you to consider if that new item is truly worth parting with two others.
The nightly flat surface sweep
Countertops, coffee tables, and bathroom vanities love to collect miscellaneous clutter. Every night, take five minutes to walk through your living spaces and de-clutter all horizontal surfaces.
Keys go on a hook, stray coffee cups go in the sink, stray chargers get tossed in a drawer.
Beginning your day with clear counters and tables trains your eye to see your home’s default state as uncluttered, making you less inclined to leave random items out in the morning.
Gift re-homing
Gifts you never liked or want that sit on your shelves or in your drawers taunting you are just using up space that could be better used by things you love.
The non-sexy solution? Keep a large, opaque cardboard box in the back of one of your closets designated for immediately re-homing gifts. As soon as you realize you won’t get any use out of an item, drop it in the box. No shame, no guilt.
When the box is full, take it to a donation center immediately.
Cut kitchen gadgets
If you’ve ever struggled to fit too many items on your counter tops because they’re constantly being occupied by ridiculous single-use electrical contraptions, then you know what I’m talking about.
Having multiples of these, be it waffle irons, popcorn poppers or quesadilla makers, is unacceptable in a minimalist household. If it can’t double (or triple, quadruple…) as something else, and does only one task that could easily be substituted by a chef’s knife or a pot or pan, it doesn’t belong in your kitchen.
When you lean on your trusty cooking gear, you can keep your counters free of clutter.
Go paperless
Each time you buy a new appliance, electronic device, or piece of IKEA furniture it arrives with an unnecessarily bulky, multi-language instruction manual.
Rather than stuffing it into an overcrowded kitchen junk drawer that won’t close, you first Google-search for the PDF.
After downloading the file to your Home Manuals cloud folder, you recycle the printed copy right away. Manufacturers never delete these files from their website, so printing them out is entirely unnecessary and wastes your physical space.
Donate extra linens
No home is immune to having an embarrassing overstock of dingy old towels, torn sheets and dusty blankets you’ll never use that languish at the bottom of your linen closet.
The secret to maintaining this space is limiting yourself to having no more than three sets of sheets on hand for each member of your family and each bed in your home.
Old towels, especially those that have become stiff and worn, can be donated to your local animal shelter. And animal shelters always need clean towels and sheets to use as bedding.
Hardware declutter
There are few excuses good enough to keep a jar full of random screws, plastic wall anchors, miscellaneous Allen keys from DIY furniture projects years ago, and extra shelf pins that didn’t get nailed in all the way.
Letting your kitchen or workspace stay clutter-free means accepting that you will probably never dig through a dusty can for the perfect size screw two years down the road when you’re elbow deep in a new project.
Get rid of these random bits and pieces right away, keeping only a well-organized toolbox with matching, appropriate items. If you find yourself needing some specialized hardware someday, spending five bucks at Home Depot is worth it compared to living with a junk drawer full of screws.
Retire old t-shirts
Old promo shirts, worn out concert shirts, and sweat stained workout shirts are often very sentimental items for us. We let them sit in our dresser drawers and take up space we could use for shirts that actually fit.
Here’s the rule. As soon as a shirt is too stained, thin, or raggedy to be seen in public, it gets cut up. You grab a pair of scissors and cut it into usable squares for rags. Put them in a bucket in your sink for cleaning rags.
By doing this, you can get free, reusable towels to wipe down your counters with. Stop wasting money on paper towels and keep your closet nice and tidy.
Skip travel minis
If there’s one place where clutter loves to breed in your home, it’s your bathroom. This is because hotel rooms contain small bottles of shampoo, lotion, sewing kits, and toiletries guests can’t bear to leave behind.
But those sample-size bottles will likely never see use at home, just gathering dust on the counter until they expire and leak.
The ideal practice here is not taking any samples home at all, unless you know you’ll use them while traveling. If you do bring them home, deposit them directly into a donation bin for your nearest homeless shelter.
No orphan containers
Your cabinets full of tupperware can quickly devolve into a nightmare heap of mis-matched lids and containers with dried food stains.
To maintain sanity in this vicinity, you need to enforce a strict no orphan containers rule. As soon as a container loses its mate or one half of a plastic container breaks in the dishwasher, the rogue container immediately gets tossed.
Hoarding single kitchen containers and dreaming that their mates will magically resurface, is pure folly that robs your cabinets of precious space.
Decompressing at your home office desk (in five minutes or less)
At the end of each workday, before shutting down your laptop, there is one final task to complete: a quick decompression.
Empty your coffee mug, organize any stray sticky notes, return your pens to their holder, and clear your keyboard.
By resetting your workspace each evening, you avoid starting the next day surrounded by clutter. And this simple five-minute habit helps keep both your mind and your home office desk feeling refreshed.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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