Planning Your House Cleaning

When you're seeing piles of unread magazines and boxes of stuff you bought months ago, you know you're house is looking and smelling more like a warehouse than a house. It's time for some house cleaning. But how do you start when you know you have the entire house to de-clog and sort and throw and clean? Here's how.

Make a list of "areas in your life." As much some people say they don't make compartments in their lives, we do. We do it all the time, and each worry we have, or thing to do, maybe said to "belong" to an area of our life. Those areas can be tagged as categories. Family. Home. Office. Projects. Now. School. Someday. These are sample tags. Easiest way to do this is to prepare separate sheets of paper and mark each with categories. Start with context tags, like 'home' and 'office.' Now write things you're worried about. Like 'kitchen sink needs to be replaced,' and 'project update for the past quarter to be submitted.' Now look at all the clutter in your house. Do these 'belong' to the tags you prepared? If not, either you need to make a separate sheet with a tag, or you don't really have room for the clutter in your house.

Segregate using the "Getting things done" style. That context-driven tag names for your concerns is just one way to do things, and is loosely based on a popular management strategy called ' getting things done.' Another way to decide whether you dispose or keep all the stuff in your house (magazines and books and mementoes and boxes and antiques, etc.) is if they fit in time-ordered categories. Like 'now,' 'this month,' and 'someday.' To apply these tags is to decide whether you keep your old high school pictures, sell your old PC, and buy new furniture.

Go minimalist. With the list and time-tags explained, it's time to see a minimalist plan in action. When you look at the operating system of Apple, you get to see only what's been decided you need. The Apple tech people made their system so you are presented with a visual architecture that doesn't overwhelm, so you can decide what to do easily, since the options there are what's been found out to be what people want to do. This minimalist thinking explains why Apple products are so easy to use. You don't want a bloated system and program you need time to learn just to use. Similarly, you don't really need all the clutter in your house to do your work, spend time at home, and get things done.

There you go. Base your plan on these items and you can pull off your house cleaning without wasting time, money, and muscle.