Hello. I'm Amanda Booth, the owner of Neatly Done Life and this is my verry first blog ever. So, I was not too sure where I should begin. However, I think I will start with talking about my mother's tendency to hoard, why I believe she had that inclination. As well-as what contributes to my tendency towered hoarding with some tips for decluttering and organizing despite maybe being prone to it.
FEELINGS
Yes, I do have tendencies for hoarding which I find you don't necessarily ever stop having the feeling that comes with that but keeping your motivations in mind you can work through these inclinations. Through working with my mother and working on my habits I learned some valuable lessons in motivation and efficiency for decluttering and organizing with less physical effort.
Having this experience in life also helps me relate to others with feelings of:
Frustration in time wasted having to run from one end of the house for this and the other end for that.
Feeling closed in and depressed because there is too much stuff around you. But having trouble letting go of items because you've lived with little income and not knowing if things would improve.
Then there's the feeling of sentiment. You look at an object and you remember where you got it or who gave it to you. The feeling that you had at the time. And maybe it's hard to let go because you feel you don't have enough of those connections with people. You maybe have had your fair share of people who treated you badly or looked down on you. And these belongings remind you of the good times which makes it difficult to let go of the items.
For my mother, who was born during the depression, one of the things that contributed to her habits is that during that time low-income families had to save things and parts of things that they may be able to use latter. To a degree I think this is a good practice. We went as a society from saving everything to making everything cheap and disposable and polluting our Earth. Our home. However, when we've accumulated so much it interferes with our ability to keep our spaces clean and ourselves healthy physically, mentally, and emotionally, then the saving and accumulating of items becomes a bad practice.
HEALTH
Something else that contributed to my mother's hoarding, was she did not feel well. Years before I was born, my mother fell on ice coming out of a store and damaged her back, making it so she had to live with pain for the rest of her life. Even though she was still mobile, not feeling good makes it difficult to do any more than what you absolutely have to do each day. I can relate to this since in recent years I was on a medication that made my feet hurt so much that I would sit on the edge of the bed in the morning for the longest time dreading just to touch the floor with my feet (let alone putting all my weight on them.)
tips TO ORGANIZE WITH LESS EFFORT
So, my first tip in decluttering and organizing with less effort is,
Gather a bunch of items around a comfortable place to sit. Preferable with a surface to sort objects on. (A bed makes a great surface for that.) This technique not only helps if you have mobility issues, but it also should help make the work go faster since everything is at your fingertips.
Have boxes or other containers close at hand to put the items strait into.
One for pieces you are keeping. Then you can carry it around the house to put them away as you go.
Another for articles you are letting go.
And one for the maybe pile.
(Of course, a garbage bag for trash, also.)
THE MAYBE PILE
There are always belongings we don't necessarily love, but we maybe were given it by a family member or it's something we think we need. However, as we continue going through our things, we realize just how many items our relative gave us over the years or that we have others of the same pieces that we like better. So, as we continue sorting our objects, we can reason we don't need all of them and will be ready to let go of more.
SUMMERY
There are a lot more reasons why people have difficulty in sorting through their belongings than what we have covered in this blog. But, no matter what the reason, to help with time and mobility issues we can utilize the space around us to sort and organize our items into containers to transport them to where they belong whether it is elsewhere in the home or out of the home all together.
In the next blog let's talk about what we may be able to do to brake threw some of the emotional barriers that hinder us in getting organized.
Comentarios