It’s Day #30 – the final day of the declutter challenge! Hey, if you’ve done all 29 days so far, awesome job! Day #30 is a good day to look at a maintenance plan to keep the clutter from piling up again. Unless there’s a plan to stop it accumulating, it’ll just re-appear before long and you’ll be back where you started – not fun! So here’s some suggestions :
Declutter Maintenance Plan
Daily – go through mail and throw away/deal with
Daily – get children to clear out school bags & add any school forms to daily post area
Weekly – file any paperwork that is needed for reference (e.g. bank statements, bills)
Weekly – empty out handbag and purse of receipts, business cards, stray notes & pieces of paper
Once every 4 months – do a purge of all files
Once a month : Choose a room/main area to focus on for any decluttering. One drawer/corner a day for the next month. Move to a different room the following month and do the same – pick a drawer/segment of that room per day or per week.
Every time a new piece of paper comes into the home – evaluate whether it’s really needed. If it is, add it to the ‘in-tray’ where the other daily mail & papers are, so that you can go through it and deal with it along with other paperwork that is dealt with daily. Either it needs to be filed, deferred, discarded or actioned (then thrown away or put in an ‘out’ tray to go out again).
Anything that is bought or received as a gift – think about what can be thrown away/given away or sold so that there’s a ‘one in/one out’ policy.
Now I could probably do another 30 days of this (and of course there’s the coat cupboard, garage, shed and attic to deal with too), but one thing at a time hey…
I hope your home is looking (and feeling) a lot calmer, tidier and organised.
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