If I’ve been asked once, I’ve been asked a hundred times. How in the world am I supposed to get all of this crap out of my house when I have zero time? How do you declutter your home in ten minutes as a busy stay-at-home mom? I just need to pay somebody to come and take it all out, which is totally an option. And y’all know I’m all about outsourcing things in your home and anywhere that you can free up time for you to be intentional in the areas of your life that you want to be. 

Today ladies, I’m going to challenge you to think through this process just for a minute because it is my deep belief that you really only need a fraction of time, like 10 minutes here and there. And you can make this happen in your life. Escape the clutter, you can live mess-free. I promise I got a system for it. We’re going to dive into it in today’s episode. What do you say? Let’s go ahead and dive in.

Listen below for the entire episode on The Systemize Your Life Podcast

Declutter Your Home

I am speaking to that woman that knows her house is really hard to keep on a regular basis. You get it back to this place that, I call ground zero, where everything has to be picked up and put away in order to actually clean your house. And so whether or not you are paying a cleaner, then that forces you to tidy your house and put everything away on a regular basis. And how you declutter your home in ten minutes.

But you may just have a room where you shove all the clutter, shut the door, and tell the cleaners not to go in there. You may be living that life. Or you might be the person that doesn’t have cleaners and can never clean because you don’t ever have the clutter put away. I know what you really want to see a very stress-free, simple way to have all of your clutter put back at the end of every day and your house be really easy to maintain. I envy that just as much as you do. 

When I go into someone’s home and it looks like an Airbnb where there’s hardly anything and it’s super minimal, I’m like, this feels like a retreat. But I also have that Martha Stewart, Joanna Gaines bone inside me that really loves to make a house a home. And I like to meet somewhere in the middle. 

I also have small children and they have a lot of things and maybe even older children have a lot of things, but I just feel like there are so many toys when they’re kids and that’s going to be part of the thing that we talk about here inside how to declutter your home in ten minutes.

Stop Fighting With Clutter

I want you to take away one thing today and make this happen in your life so that you’re not constantly fighting with stuff and clutter. Why do you have too many things? And I’m going to follow up with how in the world you’re going to be able to get rid of it in just 10 minutes a day. I actually still do this in my life today. 

So, why in the world do you have so much stuff in your house? What are you holding on to? Why don’t you want to get rid of clothes? Are you afraid to get rid of the clothes that used to fit you because you’re afraid you might gain the weight back? Or do you not want to get rid of the clothes that you sized up into because you don’t want to do anything with the old clothes? You’re hoping and praying that you will get back to the size you used to be.

It’s all related to fear. You are afraid that your husband’s not going to help you and you’re going to be resentful. You have a fear that your kids are going to fight you and you don’t want to deal with the emotions. 

There is a reason and if you say that, it’s because you don’t have time. I want to call you out on that because we make time for the things that we want to make time for. Why don’t you want to make time to declutter a drawer or a closet? Is it because you feel like you have to tackle the whole shebang all at once? Well, let me speak a little sound wisdom into your life right now and tell you that not everything has to be done in one swoop.

It’s An Evolution

The process of having your house turn into the thing that you want is about creating the habits that are going to build that house. If you can just go in and ransack your house, that’s awesome, but you also need to look at those places that constantly get cluttered. What about your shoe shelf in the garage? What about all these areas that are constantly piling up and gathering clutter that you’re going to have to build a habit of decluttering on a regular basis? 

“The process of having your house turn into the thing that you want is about creating the habits that are going to build that house.”

Things need to have a home that they get put back to at the end of every day and the end of every week. You have to have these master resets. You have to have these tidy cues. It’s what I teach inside of the Academy, inside of tier three, systemize your home. I teach you all the way down to the nuts and bolts, how to escape your clutter and live mess-free. Getting into the nitty gritty of why this is happening and that’s when it’s like, oh, well that wasn’t so complicated. 

Declutter Keepsakes

Now let’s talk about the next step. What do you do to be able to, in a short amount of time, get into the nooks and crannies of your home and start organizing? 

Look, my house is relatively minimal, especially when we compare it to other people in my family that like to keep all the things. In one of our group calls, we talked about how I have had to become basically the black sheep of the family in that regard, probably in a lot of ways actually. And just say, no thank you.

Where you might keep something because it is sentimental, I say no because I’m not going to put it in a box and shove it somewhere just to say I’m holding onto memories, I’m holding on to clutter. I made a very long, hard, slow transition into being the person that I am. 

Keepsake Box

I do have a little box of keepsakes that I keep and that’s it. When somebody tries to hand something down to me as my grandma gave me this little salt bowl. I love to have my salt in an open dish where you just pinch it with your fingers and sprinkle it on. And I don’t even know who had it before her, but it’s special to me. I know that it’s been on my grandmother’s side of the family for a long time and I see it every day. My kids touch it every day. We use it every day. And that’s the kind of stuff that’s meaningful in my life. It’s not clutter

So you’re going to have to understand what the difference is between those two. And when you go into a specific space, remember you don’t need to go through everything all in one fell swoop. You’re going to just tackle one tiny space at a time and take the things out that you’re not using and get rid of them. Move a few things around, make it more effective, make it more efficient, and call it good.

Make It Simple

You might be saying to yourself, my kitchen is a mess. Every time I open up the cupboard, something falls out, and I can’t get to the dishes. We have mismatched silverware. I don’t know where anything is. There’s literally just stuff everywhere and I don’t even know how to cook. Now things are just sitting out on the counter all the time because they don’t even have cupboard space. I cannot get my kitchen done in 10 minutes. 

Well, I’m not going to ask you to get your kitchen done. I’m going to tell you today that when you go in to fill up your kids’ water bottles, take all the water bottles out. Have each kid pick two, and you’re going to throw out the rest. Throw out the ones that have chewed straws, throw out the ones that the lid leaks, and throw out the ones that you don’t use anymore. 

You can’t find the lid too, I don’t care if you think you know where the lid is and it’s probably under the seat of your car, throw it away, and get rid of it. And then put your two water bottles back. Put the ones that are insulated in a row, the ones that are not insulated in a row, and the two for the kids in a row. And mom has two water bottles and dad has two water bottles and you’re done. 

It literally will take you 10 minutes and that is it and is a huge win. It makes you feel amazing. You don’t have to tackle everything head-on or do anything extra in your day. All you had to do was not pick up your phone while your water bottles were filling up. Just start with something small. 

Example:

I have this one drawer in that we keep all of our rubber bands, bag ties, and chip bag clips. And our sandwich bags and parchment paper are also in there. And whenever one box of Ziploc baggies runs out, everything starts sliding around because a box came out and it’s just been transitioning from one way to the next to when the foil runs out, then where the foil was, it was holding everything in place. It also has some post-it notes and other things in there but every time I go in there I’m like, oh my gosh, it’s so frustrating. So, I took the things out, move the things around, and got rid of things I don’t use. It did not even take me 10 minutes.

There were a couple of things in there that clearly did not belong. And so I took them out of the drawer. And this is what you do when this happens because a lot of your spaces are going to have things in them that don’t belong in that space. 

You’re going to start to see a random item that does not belong inside the drawer because you don’t really know where else to put it. So I’m just going to leave it in here and I’m going to challenge you to pull it out, this will help you to declutter your home in ten minutes.

“Junk Drawer”

You can have a “junk drawer,” but even everything inside there is categorized and organized. There’s always somewhere else in your house where there are other items with other items similar. And I want you to try and find the best place for it. If you don’t have a place for it at all and you don’t use it regularly, get rid of it. Don’t save it for a rainy day, just get rid of it. 

Now if it’s random, we’ll just use the example of your kitchen. If it’s the random potato or cucumber peeler that peels special things, and then you have the nutcracker, and then you have the orange zest peeler, right? And you have a couple of these random cooking things and they’re all dispersed in different drawers. Guess what happens when you pull them out of all those drawers? And you begin to see that they create their own family and they all belong together. 

You might have that in every area, like your makeup drawer, your garage, your kids’ rooms, your nightstand, and your office. You may have these items that you feel don’t belong somewhere, but they can actually get grouped together. 

This is what I teach inside of the Academy for women to be able to use one system to declutter every single space in their home from an entire room to a drawer. And anything in between, every item in the house can be categorized, organized, and purged underneath this escape method. The real crux of the whole thing is learning how to group items like I just talked about.

The Escape Method

When you do this it is so important that you pull everything out. That is the first step in the escape method is to extract or pull everything out. 

Then the second part is the S, which is for sorting. That’s what I want you to do inside of this drawer in the kitchen, the shoes in the shoe bin, your makeup drawer, your towels,  or maybe your linen closet. 

If you’re going to go through your towels, I’m not asking you to tackle that whole closet. I’m asking you to tackle the towel shelf and that’s it. Be okay with just the towel shelf because once you get that relief, you’re going to want to go back in there and do the next one.

Sometimes this will spark major motivation for you and you will begin to make more time than you even thought you had possible. You start to make time because you see the benefit of it, you feel the relief, and your whole family starts to see the relief. 

It really does begin to bless you in the way that you are able to nourish and rejuvenate yourself in your home. Connect with other people in your home just by doing these little declutter sessions.

It doesn’t have to be this huge, overwhelming, daunting task. And you don’t have to hire somebody to come in and do it, although there are people that do it and will do it well. They will also charge you and it might be the best money you’ve ever spent and that is totally up to you. But I hope this encourages you and has educated you in some small way to be able to go clean one thing out.

Share Your Success

If this has empowered you to take action, take a picture, and share it inside the Facebook group. I’d love to see it and hear about your success in decluttering in less than ten minutes. 

If you’re in a place where you’d like to know all about that escape method and want to know what that looks like, it might be time for you to join the Academy. It is the best money you will ever spend. 

Not only will you learn how to declutter your house, and you will pay less for this academy than you will to have a professional organizer come to your house. And you will also learn so much more like how to time block and how to have a successful mindset to help you in every area of your life. You’ll learn how to communicate and automate with your family members and your spouse. To have a framework that gives you the freedom and flexibility to do your very best work in every single area of your life, without feeling like a chicken with its head cut off.

So if that sounds like something that would help you or something you’re interested in, click here to join. We hope to see you inside!