Every home you enter has a clutter problem, whether you can see it or not. Here are some tips on how to declutter a room in 10 minutes a day!

The homes that do not seem cluttered are where the occupants generally keep things from becoming messy or cluttered. You might feel like you don’t have time to do that. I totally get it. But, once you get started and take just 10 minutes a day to keep everything clean, you’ll start to notice a difference!

I like to do a deep clean in Spring and Fall to ensure my apartment is manageable through other seasons.

How to Declutter a Room in Just 10 Minutes a Day:

Pick One Room to Start Decluttering

Instead of viewing decluttering as a whole home project, break it up into smaller tasks and look at it as a room-by-room project. A smaller, broken-down project is far easier to manage, so I suggest starting small. Start with your home’s common living areas since seeing them clean and decluttered will give you the morale boost you’ll need for other locations.

Find Your Worst Spots

Take a quick walk through your home right now and find your clutter magnets that seem to be the places where things gather the most. These are the areas you should work on decluttering first since an overly-filled, cluttered area will often spill into the rest of your home. Most homes will have at least two of these spots. 

Choose the Worst Offender

Start with that one spot in your home that seems to be the biggest clutter-prone area. The easiest course of action here is to start with the worst and move to the lesser cluttered areas. By starting with the worst of the worst, you’re helping to keep the spillover I mentioned from happening. 

Set a Timer to Declutter a Room

One reason decluttering a room in just ten minutes a day seems to be so hard is that often we will go in, start working and lose track of time. Several hours later, we emerge only to find we’ve lost half the day and are now running behind on the other things we needed to get done. By keeping your work sections to just ten minutes each, you teach yourself to focus only on what absolutely needs to be done.

Go Easy on Yourself

Because you are only working on decluttering a room ten minutes a day, I urge you to go easy on yourself. And, to be honest, you are not likely to see real, noticeable progress for a few days. This will make it quite easy to look at your spot and think you got nothing done. 

If you give yourself grace and remind yourself that slow is smooth but smooth is fast, you will get through your decluttering much easier.

Pick Your Battles

When you start your first decluttering session, choose one small area within your larger area to work on. For instance, if you are decluttering a bookshelf, choose to work on one shelf instead of doing the entire thing in ten minutes. If you are skipping around, it will be far harder to see results. When this happens, it sometimes makes you get discouraged and quit. I am so guilty of this.

Categorize What You Find

Like with regular decluttering, everything you pull out of a cluttered room should be categorized into one of four categories; keep, toss, donate, sell. As you remove these items, decide where they fit, and then do something with them. If you choose to donate or sell, do not make the mistake of allowing them to sit around your home. Put donations straight into your car so they are easier to drop off and list sellable items immediately, so they do not get forgotten or overlooked.

Be Mindful What You Keep

It can be easy to want to keep everything you pull out of the closet; however, that is how your space became cluttered in the first place. Instead, question yourself before you allow yourself to keep something, ask yourself if you truly need it. If you have a use for it (or if it’s super sentimental), keep it.

Give Everything a Home

After you’ve chosen to keep an item, please give it a new home immediately. Do not simply throw it back into a box and leave it be. By moving that item, you train your brain to think about the new spot first. Trust me, it works! 

Declutter As You Go

Finally, the only way to truly declutter a room is to declutter things as you go. This does not mean you need to stop and declutter all your kitchen cabinets when you notice one thing out of place. But, when you notice something in the wrong cabinet, you take fifteen seconds to put it back in its home. Sounds easy, right? As this becomes a habit, you will find that your home stays decluttered on its own, and it makes deep cleaning a whole lot easier. 

Want more decluttering ideas? Check out this article by HGTV!