5 Easy Steps to Make Your Home and Your Mind Clutter-Free

0:00Hey, it's your friend Mel, and today I'm coming clean about something on the Mel Robins podcast. Let's go.

0:11Okay, it's Mel. And today's episode of the Mel Robbins podcast is dedicated to those of us who feel overwhelmed by the process of trying to stay organized, organized at work, organized in your house, organized with all of the stuff that you need to do for everybody else. And according to our expert today, it is normal to feel paralyzed or like a failure or overwhelmed when you look at the piles of things that you can't seem to get to at work or at home. Is your desk a nightmare? When somebody says, hey, can I ride with you? You're like, no, because it would take me an hour to clean out the front seat of my car.

0:56And God knows I don't want you to see what's in the back seat. I beat myself up all the time because the wheels are off when it comes to my home. And just so you know that I'm not making this up, I decided to walk into my husband's office this morning and record his thoughts on what it's like to live with me for real. Hey, Chris, I'm recording something. Could you describe for everybody what my bathroom sink looks like compared to yours? Are you kidding me? Yeah, like for real. For as long as I've known you, your bathroom has just been an absolute shitshow. I mean, like a bomb went off it all the time.

1:51I mean, I, I, I. Describe what it looks like when you walk in there. Um, mayhem. I don't even know how you do makeup without, with all. You have your whole life. It seems like sitting on top of the bathroom vanity. Okay. I don't even want to begin with your closet. Well, I didn't ask you about the closet. I don't know how somebody who's so, so organized and so successful in so many other areas of your life that there can be such a black and white sort of dichotomy between your work life and your bathroom life. Do you think anything could help me change? God help us. But I mean, I'm at least content with my own cleanly bathroom vanity.

2:46your your your own is your own battle all right well thank you chris see guys i'm not lying you know i'm laughing but the truth is i need help with this and maybe you do too so if you're embarrassed that you just can't keep up i hear you i am desperate to have a house that is pulled together at this point there's no way it's going to look like it's on pinterest i just want to not feel overwhelmed. There has got to be a better way. And according to our expert today, Dana White, she is saying it is normal to feel the way that we do, overwhelmed by our stuff at work, at home, and it is fixable. She has a hit blog, a slob comes clean.

3:28She has a five-step process to truly going from feeling like a failure to getting your life under control. Her book is How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind, and this goes way beyond your house. Dana White, I'm so excited you're here. Thanks for having me on. Dana, when you've got a person like me, who's literally a disaster in certain places in her home, just overwhelmed by everything, where do we even start? I mean, it's you're where you are. You have the makeup products all over the counter. And you think that that's what I want. Those images on Instagram, and it looks like a magazine.

4:05Yes. Are we ready for me to tell you what the difference is? Yes. What is the difference between that perfection that I want and where I am right now? Here's the reality. Organizing and decluttering are separate things. They are not the same thing, but I always thought they were the same thing. I would look around at my mess and I would think I have got to get organized because that logically makes sense, right? Yes. But the problem was I would buy a bunch of products, bring them into my house. The organizing energy was gone by the time I got home and I just dropped them by the back door and they turned into more clutter, you know, So it never made a real impact on my house.

4:40I was at such a rock bottom point that I honestly thought I was giving up by saying, I don't even have it in me to get organized. I am just going to declutter. Wow. Like in my mind, I thought that's how bad I am. I've just got to declutter. I can't even think about organizing yet. Decluttering changed everything. in my home. So the beauty of realizing that organizing and decluttering are not the same thing and that you can just declutter and that just decluttering will change everything. It's just starting to get stuff out of your house. So are you saying Dana, that as an organization expert, that in order to have a home or a workspace or any area of your life feel manageable, which would be the opposite of how I feel right now when I look at my bathroom sink or my closet, that you just got to forget about organizing because you're not ready to organize.

5:43That you need to first declutter. Is that what you're saying? Yes. You need to declutter. Decluttering is everything. When I decluttered, then I knew what I had. I knew where it was. I could get to it easily. I could access it easily because I'd gotten rid of all that extra stuff so that when I opened the cabinet, I just saw what I needed and I could get to it without moving 15 things. Decluttering made my house look better, function better, feel better. It was the thing I had been needing that I didn't know I needed. I thought I to get organized. So what is the difference between decluttering and organizing?

6:27In my mind, organizing was bins and boxes and systems and all these things that I would look at those images on Instagram of the color coded things and all that. You look at that and you think that's it. I need the colors. And so you bring the colors in and then you're trying to fit all the stuff in there. I'm laughing because I thought the solution to my bathroom sink problem was to go to Walmart or Target and buy a bunch of bins to put all the stuff that's on my counter in. Why doesn't it work for me to go buy a bunch of containers for this stuff? Everyone has a clutter threshold. It's the amount of stuff that you personally can keep under control.

7:10It's the reason why you and your friend can go shopping together, buy the exact same things. She puts it in her house. It looks like a magazine. You put it in your house. It looks like a thrift store, right? Like that, that difference between like, she can handle this stuff. I brought all this stuff into my house because I wanted it. I saw potential in it. I'm a lovely person who sees value in things that no one else sees value in, right? Like, that's a great quality, except that I was bringing it into my house and I couldn't handle it. it was not possible for me to keep my house under control with the amount of stuff that I had in my house so it's not it's not aesthetics some people hear clutter threshold like oh yeah this drives me I'm talking about what can you handle what's easy for you to keep under control so if a space is continually getting out of control get rid of more stuff oh it's still getting out of control get rid of more stuff get rid of until you realize at some point this is what happened to me as I was like, wait a minute, I can do this.

8:11Like I can keep this under control. And that's where I realized there's this point, this level of stuff that I can handle. You are a genius. When I hear the word organization, I think it looks pretty. I just have to get the bins that line up and the labeler that has the nice font and the little tags in my laundry room. And then I take all the shit that I have and I stack it all in there. And then I make it look nice. I spend six hours in one space and I bought all the crap. The baskets match and it looks like a photo shoot and everything's in its place. You're right. I'm managing shit that I can't manage because the second that our son walks in the laundry room and pulls out the thing and puts it in a different place, then everything's out of whack again and I feel unorganized again and it all spills out from there.

9:03and then I go buy a different basket because it needs to be a bigger basket. I am driving myself and my husband crazy. How do you know what your clutter threshold is? I hate to tell you this, but there is literally no way to know other than to declutter. You can just know if my house feels overwhelming, I'm over my clutter threshold. If my house is consistently getting out of control and I feel bewildered by that, then I'm over my clutter threshold. So the only way to find your clutter threshold is to declutter. I think I'm starting to get what you're saying. You're saying there is a critical difference between organizing your stuff versus decluttering.

9:56organizing is just moving everything that you already have around to different places and the problem is that you are organizing because you feel overwhelmed by your stuff so no amount of baskets or containers will take that overwhelm away because you have too much stuff yeah the root problem is you have too many things too many things on your desk too many things in your closet too many things in your mudroom so you have to start with decluttering which is a nice way to say it's time to get rid of a bunch of your stuff because it's all overwhelming you. Let me just say, the less stuff you have, the less stuff that can pile.

10:33Right? You are a genius. The less stuff you have, the less stuff that you can pile. And the less piles that you have, the less overwhelmed you're going to feel. Here's what I also am starting to find really fascinating about your approach is that it makes sense when you look at the research about how our brains work. See, when there's too much input, too much going on in your family or too many things on your desk or in your mudroom, your brain gets overloaded. It can't process all that stuff. And so what I'm realizing is the reason why we have this instinct to just organize it all and put it in baskets and make it look good and put colors and labels on it is because we're trying to make it less overwhelming to our brain.

11:19when actually what we need to do is hit delete and remove a lot of the stuff that is overwhelming to us. But I'm still hung up on the containers. Maybe I've been brainwashed. Maybe I've watched too much HDTV, but I feel like this process is missing containers. So how do you handle the desire to either put things in piles or put things in containers? I used to think that containers were for putting things in, right? Organized people love containers. They buy containers. Their house looks great. I must need more containers. So I would bring containers into my house. So here's my little scenario that I give.

12:04Let's say my friend whose kids were the same age as mine, her little craft area looked amazing. Mine was this huge pile disaster spilling out of the cabinet. Okay. And I would look and say, oh, she has her crayons and a red bucket. Yes. That's the difference between her and me. Yeah. Right. Like she has a red bucket. I don't have a red bucket. That's why my space is a disaster. So I would go and buy a red bucket and I would dump crayons in there and I would realize, oh, I still got 700 crayons left over. Why does this not work for me the way it works for her? So I would go out and buy two more red buckets and then I would put the rest of my crayons in those red buckets.

12:42I go to put the red buckets on the shelf. and my shelf wouldn't fit three red buckets. And I would think, are you kidding me? Why is this so hard for me? Like, why does this not work for me? And then eventually I would be like, well, obviously I need more shelves. So I'd buy more shelves. And then at some point I would think, well, I don't have any room for more shelves. Obviously I need a new house and we can't afford a new house right now. So I am doomed to be disorganized. That is just how my brain worked. I just thought that if I, you know, ran out of space in a container, I bought another container.

13:17And in reality, her house was smaller than mine. But in my mind, my issue was that my house was too small. Okay. Right. Like, which doesn't make sense, but it made total sense to my brain before. So when I was working, I was talking to myself and I was saying container. And I went container, contain, like the word contain is in there. serve as a limit, set a boundary. You know, like firefighters contain a fire, they create a boundary. And as long as the fire stays inside the boundary, they can keep it under control. Their whole goal is to keep it within this boundary. And I realized, oh, a container is not for putting things in.

14:00A container is meant to serve as a limit, to serve as a boundary. And that changed everything for me because I was able to say, okay, here's the red bucket. It's not going to fit everything, but it's the boundary. So I'm going to put my favorite crayons in first. And when it's full, something happens in my brain and I realize, oh, maybe I don't need a thousand crayons. Oh, okay. Before I would pick up every single crayon and be like, well, I mean, I know it's broken, but broken crayons still color, right? Oh, yes, that's right. So I would make all these and it took forever for me to analyze every single one.

14:45And instead, it's just I'm going to put my favorite ones in first. And I'm going to let the container make the hard decision for me. Wow. And then when I go to put the the red bucket on the shelf, I have to acknowledge that the shelf is also a container, the shelf is a limit. and it determines how many red buckets I can have. And the size of the room determines how many shelves I can have. And the size of my house is the size of my house. So I'm like, the size of my house is the size of my house. And if I'm gonna put my favorite things in first and I'm gonna realize my house is a container, my house is a limit, what's my favorite thing in my house?

15:27It's the people who live in it, right? So like we deserve space first. And so that just shifted everything. It actually doesn't matter how valuable something is, how much sentimental, you know, feelings I have toward it. It doesn't have space. I can keep anything, but I can't keep everything and my house ever have a chance of being under control. Okay. Wow. So that's the container concept, which changes how you look at your house and how you look at your stuff and lets me let go of things because I'm like, it's not me. It's the container. I don't have the space for it. And that is very freeing.

16:09Wow. That's obvious. It makes so much sense. And more importantly, I feel like I can do it. Don't you feel like you can do it? Okay, now what I would love for you to do is, can you walk us through your five-step process that we go through when we declutter? And I wanna get really granular. So let's take a quick break, hear a word from our sponsors. And when we come back, let's go step-by-step through the actual process you created. We'll be right back.

16:55Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins and I'm here with Dana White who wrote the life-changing book, How to Manage Your House Without Losing Your Mind, The Supplies to Home, Work, Everywhere That You Feel Overwhelmed. And she's about to walk us through her five-step process that she created for decluttering. All right, Dana, where do you start? Yeah, I recommend what I call the visibility role. I recommend that you go to the place that visitors to your home will see when they either come inside or are standing at the door and you're trying to keep them from coming inside, right? Because it's a mess, whatever.

17:33That is the place to start. And we're going to go through the decluttering process there. I'll explain that. But the reason why you want to start in a visible space is that you will see the progress that you're making. You will see your house getting better. The people who live with you will start to see your house getting better. You'll experience that it is easier to live in a space with less stuff. Okay. Because here's the thing. So many times when we get that desire to declutter, we go to the pantry, we go to the linen closet, we go to the top shelf of the master bedroom closet. Yes. We do those spaces because we think, okay, if I will work really hard on this, we really don't use this space that much.

18:15And so maybe it'll actually stay that way. Right? Yes. When in reality, you can work really hard on that. You talked about like, you know, all the color coding and blah, blah, blah in this random closet. And then at the end of the day, your husband, you know, is like, so what'd you do today? And you're like, oh, I have been organizing all day. And I don't know about you. I'm not going to project this on you. But in my experience, I've had that exact scenario happen. And my husband would be like, really? Okay, well, what is more defeating than that? Right? Yeah. Like is to feel like I have been organizing all day, and I'm still embarrassed to open my front door.

18:53Yes. But if you work on visible spaces first, then you see the progress that you're making, and you inspire yourself to keep going because you're like, oh, wow, that looks good. I may not have noticed when it was messy, but I notice now when it looks great. And then that inspires me to keep going. Okay, do you want me to talk about the actual process? Yes. Okay, I know. See, I have to have like real steps because I have to remind myself still. I still look at a space and go, and I'm like, nope, I have steps. Okay, all right. So the first step is trash. grab a black trash bag or whatever you have available.

19:33Ideally, it's black just because then you can't see what you just put inside of it. Your family can't see what you're putting inside. Can I just confess something? Yes. I'm almost embarrassed to tell you this. So Oakley, he's our 18 year old son, cleaned his room Sunday. Okay. And he put all kinds of clothes in a bag that no longer fit them so we could donate them. I spotted a flannel shirt that I paid a lot of money for and I tore open the bag and I pulled it out of the bag just this morning. It happens, right? Yes. You know what I'm going to do with that? I'm going to hang it in my closet because I can wear it, but I don't even want it.

20:18What is wrong with me, Dana? Nothing's wrong with you. This is normal. So is that why you have a black bag so you can't see the stuff that you're throwing out? Yes, that's exactly why. Now, with that, if you're like, I don't have black trash bags, start with whatever. Start with a paper sack. It doesn't matter. But if you have a black trash bag, use that for exactly the reason that you're talking about. But I'm talking about trash, not necessarily donations at this point. The reason I start with trash is it is literally the easiest of the easy stuff. I am not talking about deciding whether this item is trash.

20:56I'm talking about just saying that's trash. Put it in the bag. That's trash. Put it in the bag. It starts the movement. Okay. Like there are literally no decisions to be made, no emotions to be felt. It is just the action. And that immediately makes the space less overwhelming because there's less stuff in it than there was before. Okay. But it also helps my brain start to adjust to what's actually there. Because when I look at it as a big pile, the pile is overwhelming. There's important stuff in there, I'm sure. And so it feels like the whole pile is full of important decisions, difficult decisions to make.

21:35But as I'm looking for trash, I'm seeing what's actually there, which then helps me be ready to move into the next steps of the process. Okay. So we start with trash and a black bag and anything that is trash. Are we just talking papers and crap people have not thrown out and that kind of thing? If you have to think about it. Yes. Skip it and we'll get to it in the next step. I love that you're breaking it down because this is like a real thing that we struggle with. Like I see a pile and you're right. I can become paralyzed because I think there might be something expensive or important in there.

22:10And so I don't know if I'm ready to sort through all that stuff. I just don't want to see the pile because I want it to be pretty. You're saying is I just want it to be pretty. Change your mindset to I'm going to make this space better. That means I can literally throw away two pieces of trash, get distracted, step away, step away because I'm just don't want to do this right now. And I've still made it better, which means I have been successful. like if I do anything I have achieved better okay so all right sorry that was a little preachy break there no I think it's I think it's perfect because I don't feel successful in this area but you are successful with every piece of trash it is better because my goal is to have less in this space if you have less in this space than you did when you started you have successfully decluttered you're not done but you have successfully decluttered right yep okay so let's move to step two.

23:06Step two is the easy stuff. So trash was the easiest of the easy stuff because it's just going straight into the trash bag. Yep. But the second step is the easy step. Easy stuff I define as anything that already has an established home. It's just not there for whatever reason. Like I'm not going to agonize over why is this in the bedroom. It's just, oh, this goes in the kitchen or whatever. I'm going to take those things to their already established homes immediately. I can take as many as my hands will hold, but I can't take any more than that. Like I'm not going to put them in a box. I'm not going to set them aside and do it later.

23:49I'm going to go everything that comes into my hand that I pick up that I identified as easy having an established home, no decision to make, no emotions to be felt. I am just going to go ahead and I'm going to take it there now. Okay. So again, I am making the space better. I can step away at any time because I'm making progress and only progress, right? Got it. Then the third step is the donations. Okay. When you are someone who hasn't felt successful at decluttering before, it feels like all decluttering decisions are going to be difficult. So we want to narrow down the ones that you really have to make decisions about.

24:24Okay, and go ahead and just stick stuff in the donate box. The key with the donate box, like the black trash bag, is that the box itself needs to be donatable. So don't stencil the word donate on the outside of a cute wooden box. Like that's not what we're doing, right? Because that's organization. right and and two it just sets myself up to have to go back through that box again right so you're basically just saying no have a box that's already going to get donated to write the word donate so that you remember that was a donate box but don't decorate it don't make it something you're going to want to reuse got it now when you do this do you recommend that you just take that box and just put it in the back of your car or do we leave it somewhere?

25:11I always have a donate box or two or three in a spot in our garage that is ready to be taken wherever it needs to go. The decision making though is where the real power is. You just keep dropping grenades in my head. This is so good. I don't want to stop, but let's take a quick pause, listen to the sponsors, And we'll be right back with more amazing advice from Dana White.

25:49Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins and I am here with author Dana White, how to manage your home without losing your mind. And let's jump right back into it, Dana. What comes after donate? Okay. So at this point, we have removed trash, easy stuff and obvious donations, right? So we are down to things that at first glance, you're like, either yes, they go here, or I have no idea on this item, what to do. Okay. So this is where my two decluttering questions come in. When I started this, I had seen lists, beautifully written lists of all kinds of questions to ask yourself about items and whether you want to donate it or keep it.

26:31I had too much stuff in my house to ask myself 10 questions about everything, you know, besides those questions generally let my brain spin out, right? Like, like, do I love it? Well, yeah, I love all this stuff. You know, like, why would I have it in my house if I didn't love it? Right. You know, so I couldn't ask myself those kinds of questions. So I came up with two questions. And if I can answer the first one, I don't even have to ask the second one. So the first question is, if I needed this item, where would I look for it first? Okay. It's really important that you ask exactly that question.

27:10Where would I look for it first? It is an instinct question. Okay. The word would is the key word. That means if I needed my headphones, where would I look for them first? It is literally the first drawer or cabinet that I would open. Even if I had no confidence, they would be there. It is because something it needs a home, right? Like the whole place for everything and everything in its place that organized people say and think is so obvious. I was always like, what are y 'all talking about? Like, I don't have places for things like what, like, it just didn't make any sense in my brain. And so I had to come up with where would I look for it first?

28:02Because here's the thing, the beauty of putting something in the place where you would look for it first is that when you look for it, you find it in the first place where you look for it. Isn't that the goal that you've had all along wanting to be organized? What I'm realizing my goal is that I just want shit to look pretty. I've never even thought about organization as a way to make my life easier. And it's a genius question because I've put things in cabinets and drawers because I didn't know where else to put it. Yes. What I used to do was think about where my grandma kept hers. Yeah. And think, okay, well, she, her house was always great.