today's video we are very lucky to be passing over to Kay from the organized soprano who is
a professional organizer who cleans and organizes homes it is great to see this sort of content here
on the channel because it's all about productivity around each aspect of your work day and one of
those things is making sure your home can be clean and organized and ready for really effective work
especially when you're working at officer than desks and she's got some fantastic videos that
dive just into that which I'll link in the description below today she's diving into 10
tips that you can explore about getting started with keeping your home decluttered and ready for
work so you can find the link to her Channel below I will be on her Channel very soon diving into
a couple of applications that I recommend for keeping your digital space decluttered a very
interesting aspect of that space so a big thanks to Kay for coming on and I'll pass right over to
you thanks Francesco hey there my name is Kay and I'm a professional home organizer advisor and my
channel is the organized soprano where I Inspire everyone to love their home as much as I love my
home by changing the way that you think about your home today I'm going to offer 10 tips and tricks
for you on how to keep a clutter-free home these are my 10 biggest takeaways from my years and
years of working with people to keep their houses clean neat and clutter free so let's get started
the first tip I have is to basically keep it simple so I know a lot of us like a little Variety
in our day but if you have the choice between 30 different t-shirts and five different t-shirts
you're going to have an easier time making the choice between the five different t-shirts then
the 30 different T-shirts if you're getting ready in the morning there is something called decision
fatigue that happens when there are just too many choices imagine you're going to the grocery store
to buy a box of cereal and you find that there are over a hundred varieties of cereal what do
you do you feel a little overwhelmed you feel kind of like stressed the same thing can happen to you
in your home if you have it too many or too much for variety of items so the first tip I have is
to just keep it simple if you don't mind making the decision to wear it one shirt out of 30 that
works for you but if you can reduce the number to where you don't feel stressed when you have
to make a decision that's really going to help because this decision fatigue can actually add
up through the day and add a lot of stress to your day and you don't even realize it so keeping it
simple can help you actually keep a clutter free home by just reducing the amount of decisions
you have to make every day my next tip is the Golden Rule of organizing and that is everything
in your home must have a home this sounds very overly simplistic but it is the Golden Rule of
Home organizing if you don't have a place for the scissors if you don't have a place for shoes if
you don't have a place for that video game that you bought from the store you either don't have
room for it or you have to make room for it we can actually turn this over on its head and instead
of saying everything needs a home you need to be able to put everything away so if there's a pile
of things in your home that you cannot put away I challenge you to either declutter these items or
find a place for them to live permanently number three goes along with having a home for everything
and that is practicing mindful shopping what is mindful shopping you may ask mindful shopping
is the act of shopping and having a home for the item before it comes in your house actually before
it even gets into your shopping cart you need to know what's going to happen to it once it
gets into your house impulse shopping is a trap that we can easily fall into especially if we're
still staying at home a lot the online shopping is there Amazon is there waiting for you but if
you mindlessly put things into your shopping cart order them they come to your home you open the box
you're thrilled but you don't know what to do with it then you've just created a problem for
yourself so I encourage everyone to mindfully shop that means thinking do I need this was I looking
before this before I saw it in either in the store or online and do I have a place to put it when it
gets in my home number four is declutter regularly not just once a lot of people will go through the
trouble of decluttering their home and they are so excited they would did this big Purge maybe
they the stuff get taken away or maybe they took it big Dono to a donation center and they're super
excited and then they never do it again and wonder why they have all this clutter like maybe a year
or two later well the answer is that your life is dynamic you things are always changing maybe
you're buying new shoes maybe you are interested in sewing now but you were interested in skiing
before and all of a sudden these skis are you don't need them anymore so there's just a need to
declutter more than once a year at least I always tell my clients to practice seasonal decluttering
that way if they've Used winter coats all season they can go through the coats at the beginning of
the spring and find out which ones they want to keep for next year and which ones they want to
pass on to someone else so I say your life is dynamic and so should your decluttering habits
be number five is choosing quality over quantity it may hurt your wallet a little bit to pay more
for one item one time but I can assure you it definitely hurts more to pay less for one
item five or six times or maybe even ten times it has never really benefited me to cheap out on any
particular item that I'm Gonna Keep for a long time because Things Fall Apart they don't last
another benefit of choosing quality over quantity is that if items are worth more like if you paid
more for something you're more likely to treat it better than if it's some cheap thing you got
from the dollar store now maybe that's playing a little mind game with yourself but that's
unfortunately the way that we are wired items that are lower quality you tend to think of them
as lower quality so you kind of toss them around you're like I don't really care about them we're
worth items you pay a little bit more for up front you might be more likely to treat with kindness
another Golden Rule of organizing is that things get lost in one of two places and keeping them out
of these places is the key to keeping your home at and place organized and that is the bottom
and the back the bottom is where things go to die so I always recommend when people are organizing
drawers that they choose the drawer size relative to the things they're storing in there so let's
say you have a really deep drawer you don't want to store socks in that deep drawer because you can
fit a lot of socks in a really big deep drawer you'll never get to the ones at the bottom even
the ones with the middle layer you might not even find but if you store them in a really
shallow drawer in one layer you'll always be able to see every single pair of socks so this applies
to the back as well I always implement the magic of turntables that way nothing is ever ever in
the back because you just spin the table around and what was in the back before is suddenly in
the front so just don't let things get lost in the bottom or in the back and you'll be good to
go the other really weird secret to a clutter free home is a do it now mentality and the do
it now mentality is for lazy people like me if I have a choice between putting away the dishes now
and putting away the dishes later I will always do it now because later is for chilling because
if I do this action now I don't have to do it later I can just chill later play some video
games hang out and that is why I say that I am organized just because I'm lazy not because I'm
you know motivated I'm lazy so I want everything to be nice and organized so I can just sit back
relax the do it now mentality is such a game changer because you're going to use just as
much energy to do it now than to do it later so if you want to pick up your room really quickly
it'll do a little tidy up take 10 minutes do it now you'll be glad you did my eighth tip is set
up systems that work for you and your family and don't do anything different I know that there's
a lot of inspiration on Pinterest on tick tock on Instagram on how to organize and some systems
that you may see online may look really cute and or they may look really beautiful and you want
to keep up with that like let's say you want to arrange everything in your Ridge in Rainbow order
that may work for some people but it might not actually work for you and your family I encourage
you to have a talk with yourself about your own habits and what you're going to actually be able
to keep up if you don't have the energy to come home open the closet door take out a hanger put
your coat on it put the hanger back in the closet and close the door then that's probably not going
to be the best method for you when you come home and you should probably install hooks instead that
way when you just come in you can just throw your coat on a hook and move on with your day and not
worry about the closet so really just examine your own behaviors be truthful to yourself and be kind
and choose something that's going to work for you and your family and speaking of things that work
great for families I am a big proponent of the label the label is a magical organizing device
in which everyone can see exactly where things are supposed to go even you labeling is great
because you don't have to be there in order for your family to be able to put things in the right
place and if you have younger children you don't even have to use words to label you can label with
pictures like you can have little Toy Bins set up with the time the kinds of toys on the label
to put inside the bin that is a really good tip for little ones but even if you don't live with
little ones labels can be really really helpful especially if you decant a lot of dry goods in
your home you'll need to know when they expire so I always put an erasable label at the bottom
and write the expiration date really quickly so that way I can know whether or not these oats are
from last year or last decade then the last tip I have is to be very deliberate about the belongings
that are in your house you have a finite amount of energy and the things that you live with should be
things that you love things that are necessary for everyday life or things that just make you
feel happy and there's no room for anything else you're already so busy I know that everyone has
so much going on and you have a relationship with every item in your home so be deliberate
that every relationship between your items and you is a healthy one if you think something
in your house is junk and you get stressed out when you look at it it's gotta go okay
well those are my tips for keeping an organized and clutter free home I hope they were helpful