17 Effective Ways to Organize Your Home and Declutter Your Life

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Our homes can become so cluttered so easily. Things just pile up between work, family, hobbies and all of life’s little surprises! One day you’re peacefully sipping your morning coffee, the next, you trip over a shoe, clothing, or any other strange item. Sound familiar?

Fortunately, you don’t have to make organizing your home a huge undertaking or a stressful project. You can declutter your space and reclaim your home and peace of mind by following these effective, doable strategies I have listed.

Start With a Small Area

Examining your entire house may lead you to throw in the towel before you’ve even started. So, don’t. Choose an area that you can attack in less than 30 minutes. Perhaps it is one drawer, a bookcase, or the infamous ‘junk drawer.’ If you start small, you can get a quick win under your belt, and you’ll be in motion to do something a little bigger. Baby steps, right?

Create a Donation Box

Having a permanent donation box somewhere in your home is a game changer. Instead of hanging onto things ‘just in case’, you can dump items you don’t need anymore directly into the box. Once it’s full, take it to a local charity. You’re not only decluttering, you’re helping another person. Win-win!

Use the One-In, One-Out Rule

This rule is simple but super effective: For every new item you add to your home, you have to remove something old. Bought a new jacket? Donate one you haven’t worn in ages that you find in your closet. That’s so you don’t let the clutter creep back in after you’ve worked so hard at clearing out.

Maximize Vertical Space

Look up! Your home’s walls are a great place for storage. Store things that would otherwise be on the floor or stuffed in cupboards on shelves, hooks and pegboards. You can hang pots and pans in the kitchen. Tools can go up on a pegboard in the garage. Your countertops and floors will feel a lot less crowded, suddenly. By organizing your vertical space, you can free up counters and surfaces, making your home feel more open and less chaotic.

Set Up a Command Center

Do you know that spot where the mail, keys, and random papers pile up? Make it into a “command center.” You don’t need a lot of space — just a corner with hooks for keys, a spot for mail, and maybe a family schedule calendar. This way, all the daily clutter is in one organized place instead of throughout the house.

Declutter Your Digital Space

When we think about clutter, we tend to focus so much on physical stuff, and forget about digital stuff. If you don’t regularly clean it up, your computer’s desktop, email inbox, and even your phone can get overwhelmed. Start by organizing your files in case there’s anything you do need, then delete what you don’t need and, if you can, unsubscribe to all the annoying email lists you never look at.

Nightly Tidy-Up

Spend just 10 minutes tidying before you go to bed. Clean up strays, fold throw blankets, and clear the kitchen counter. The effort is small, but it will make your mornings a whole lot nicer when you wake up in a neat space. It also prevents clutter from piling up over time.

Label Your Storage

Super organized people on TV have labels — but so do you. They can be a very simple way to be organized in everyday life. Label bins, shelves, and even pantry containers so you know where everything goes. It’s so much faster to put things away, and you won’t run into that awful ‘Where did I put that?’ moment later on.

Clear Out Expired Items

Look in your pantry, fridge and bathroom cabinets. There’s a good chance that you’ve got expired food, medications or old beauty products hiding in the back. Toss them! This way you don’t forget about using that item that expired the other week and decide to keep it a little longer before tossing it in the bin.

Organize by Category

Try organizing by category instead of by room. For example, if you need to tackle all the books in your house, do so in one go. Once you’re done with them, go on to cleaning supplies, then tools. Organizing similar items together means you will be able to determine what you actually need and what is just taking up space.

Give Everything a Home

Everything in your home should have a ‘home,’ a place where it belongs. That’s why if something doesn’t have a designated spot, it ends up in a clutter pile. Specifically, find or create an area for each item (drawer, bin, or shelf). That way, you know where things go when you’re cleaning up.

Rotate Seasonal Items

Year round, we tend to hold onto things we don’t need. Store out of season clothing, holiday decorations and sports equipment in bins that you can rotate out of storage when you need them. Keeping these items out of sight when they aren’t in use will help your closets and rooms feel much more open.

Tackle Paper Clutter

It has a tendency to get paper cluttered before you know it. They all need a system: bills, receipts, school papers. Make sure to set up a filing system for important documents and toss or recycle the rest as soon as they come in the house. And it’s much easier than letting it build up into stacks that are overwhelming.

Declutter One Room at a Time

Decluttering your entire house is an overwhelming idea, so break it down. Focus on one room at a time. Tackle a single room for a day or weekend, and then go on to the next. This helps reduce the task to somewhat manageable, and also gives you a sense of accomplishment throughout the process.

Use Baskets to Corral Items

Baskets are a lifesaver for organizing toys, magazines, shoes, and everything in between. Having similar items together in a basket keeps them in one location and out of sight. Plus, baskets are a great way to keep things accessible while hiding clutter in an easy, stylish way.

Create a “Clutter Catch-All”

Things just pile up, and life gets busy. Put a “clutter catch-all” bin for items you don’t have time to put away. Every week, go through the bin and either put things back where they belong or ask yourself if you even need them. That way, clutter doesn’t pile up all over your home.

Don’t Be Too Sentimental about Things

Hard as it might be to part with, sentimental items can also occupy a lot of space. If you don’t want to hang on to the actual object, you can snap a photo. It means you’ll have something to remember that special moment without the things you don’t need. For your sanity, never hold on to sentimental clutter.