Hyperfocus of the Week: Decluttering

Well this could be a boring one folks. Honestly much of my week was spent frantically weeding out things to “reduce my inventory”. The cool thing is—if not terribly interesting—it seems to be working and I don’t miss a bit of it. 

The idea is (according to the YouTubers I’ve been keeping on in the background) that there is a point where things want to stay clean. It is all about how much stuff is in the space and how easy it is to manage. I’ve noticed that my master bedroom now takes very minimal work to stay tidy, and the main living areas are quick to pick up these days. 

One of the huge projects of the week was going through paperwork. Again—boring—but the results are that I now have two file boxes instead of two file cabinets. Thankfully there is a shred event coming up so I don’t have to spend this week hyper focusing on only putting three sheets at a time through our half-burnt out paper shredder. 

The laundry room has been smugly repelling me for months now. The baskets of socks, piles of crumpled sheets stuffed in bins, and the collection of half used boxes of detergent elbowing each other from the top of the dryer are just too much for me to handle, but I went in with contractor bags and a big mug of coffee and tackled the whole mess. While I did keep a small inventory of crafting socks for Violet, everything else was weeded down to the minimum. 

I did get some fun in, between rounds of stuff chucking. Wednesday I turned some whorls for my resin drop spindle project; Friday I worked at the winery—we were pretty slow starting off so I got to help re-vamp our retail area and hang awards on the walls; and Saturday and Sunday the 4H kids prepped and hosted our annual Coffee Hour Takeover fundraiser at the Methodist Church that hosts our club. The kids are old enough to do most of the work, so it was a fairly laid back affair. 

So to recap: A few lessons I’ve learned from my YouTubes. 

1. Ask if your space is requiring too much of you. On your worst day can it stay clean and organized?

2. When it comes to hobbies and such ask “Do I want to do this more than the other things fighting for my time?” I had some clear yes and no’s, but the maybes are still sticking around until I see what my summer schedule looks like. 

3. Yes I paid money for it, but that doesn’t mean I have to keep it. Sometimes it is better to get rid of things and stop feeling guilty about not using it/not getting around to it yet/ pushing it to the bottom of the to-do list. 

4. Once I started this journey and saw how much time and energy I am freeing up for everyone in the house, it is hard to stop. My bar has moved dramatically. 

5. A lighter mental load means I have more energy to be creative. That might mean writing, or creating art, or just staring at the ceiling and not thinking about the endless to-do list.