Before You Declutter Your Home, Understand Your Clutter-Free Style.
Before you start cleaning your house, you need to make some kind of plan. However, before you make a plan , you need to know what kind of organizer you are. Some decluttering methodologies help you create plans that suit a specific space, but others, like Cassandra Aarssen’s Clutterbug philosophy, help you better understand who you are as a cleaner and organizer.
What is Clutterbug’s philosophy when it comes to cleaning and organizing?
Aarssen is a professional organizer and has extensive experience helping disorderly people get their lives in order. Along with another well-known figure in the field, Peter Walsh, she wrote the book Real Life Organization: Clean and Clutter-Free in 15 Minutes a Day and broke down her personal system into four organization styles designed to help you understand how you organize your work. , so you can work with your own style rather than against it.
Overall, Aarsen advocates defining your organizational style by determining whether you are a butterfly, a cricket, a ladybug, or a bee. Once you’ve done this, you should set clear rules about what you want to keep or get rid of, decluttering hidden areas first, using containers to sort anything that doesn’t belong in your space and anything sentimental you have. want to. to figure out later, and work in small sections so you don’t feel overwhelmed.
By first identifying your organization style, you can make the process of cleaning and organizing things easier. What works for someone else may not work for you, so it’s important to declutter individually. Aarsen’s focus on small spaces also helps keep you from becoming overwhelmed by allowing you to move more slowly, and her acknowledgment that some items are sentimental and deserve a little extra time to go through is less jarring and stressful than others. more stern calls from organizers to throw things away.
What are the four Clutterbug styles?
The first step in Arssen’s decluttering method involves a little self-reflection: There are four organizing styles—butterfly, cricket, ladybug, and bee—and most people fall into one of them.
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Ladybugs look beautiful on the outside but struggle with internal clutter, meaning they don’t have surface clutter, but their clutter is hidden in places like junk drawers and closets. If you’re a ladybug, a casual visitor to your home might think it’s clean, but that’s only because they haven’t opened the garage door or taken a good look at the cabinets.
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Bees have a hard time cleaning things up or getting rid of things. There are unfinished projects lying around and useless items scattered around because bees are people who hang on to things in case they will be useful in the future. If you have a bunch of charging cables or screws of different sizes lying around in a drawer somewhere, you’re probably a bee.
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Crickets don’t like clutter at all and are great at organizing everything down to the smallest level. They are meticulous, but since it can become tedious, it is easy to be distracted from organizing altogether. If you dream of having every item organized correctly, but you fail to do so and end up with a big mess, you are a cricket.
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Butterflies are more freedom-loving: they don’t organize much at all, because they prefer to keep everything in sight. They do not understand details and prefer to always know (and see) where everything is. If you walk home after work and throw all your stuff on the table near the door, you’re a butterfly.
To really understand what Clutterbug style you have, try taking the Aarssen test .
The good thing about understanding which of these categories describes your personal habits is that they also describe how you should organize in general. Assessing your style doesn’t mean you have to work hard to overcome it; it just means you have to work with it. For example, a ladybug who likes a nice appearance but hides clutter should try keeping a bunch of small, decorative storage baskets around the house rather than relying on a hidden junk drawer. Better yet , consider multifunctional furniture with hidden storage inside . On the other hand, bees and butterflies (or anyone who wants their stuff to be visible for any reason) should choose clear storage containers. Some, like these ones , have dividers inside that keep things organized but still transparent so you know exactly what’s in there when you need it.
Crickets need to manage their time better, be a little more relaxed and less focused on perfection, so if you fall into this category, try a method like the Core 4 method to plan a less stressful decluttering session when you have time.
Once you’ve determined your category, you can get the storage solutions you need and begin the real journey of getting organized, whether you follow Arssen’s next steps or methods like Core 4 or 12-12-12 . You may need to try a few different methods, but taking into account your personal habits and inclinations will go a long way in helping you develop a cleaning strategy that you can stick to in the long run.