How to declutter and organize your bedroom and everything else in it?
In honor of Marie Kondo, I cleaned my bedroom according to her famed method, KonMari. I know it’s a bit late following the trend, but I decided to give it a go. In this article, I’ll show you how to declutter and organize your bedroom like Ms. Kondo.
PS, I’m not even done with my room yet! Soon, I’ll post photos of my experience in another article.
Now, envisage a clean, clutter-free bedroom you would want to wake up to. Kinda great, right? Keeping your bedroom tidy has this domino effect on how you start your day. First, you start with your bed and now you just can’t stop keeping sweeping every dust particle away.
Reasons to organize your bedroom
Before we talk about how to declutter and organize your bedroom, let us look at the reasons you should get it done.
Reduce stress and raise your health
It is often said that your outer world is a reflection of your inner world, which translates to mean that a cluttered home can lead to excessive levels of stress. Besides, it’ll slow you down at work, especially if you’re a work-at-home freelancer. And if you’re lacking time and productivity at work, it can put more pressure on to you. Which brings us to–
Increase productivity
If you work from home, maybe a corner in your room, and you regularly struggle to find things such as scattered pens or buried credit cards, for example, or search through or rearrange piles of paper, the process not only wastes time but diverts your focus from your prime task and it makes you feel unprofessional.
Elevate self-esteem
Aren’t you happy that you’ve cleaned your room? This simple act will make you feel like a grown-up – a happy adult who has just “adulted” for the day. With a clean bed, decluttered closet, and organized desk, it’ll make you feel like an accomplished adult who pulled yourself up from a black hole called procrastination.
You get a self-esteem boost when you declutter, organize and simplify where your room. You’ll feel better about yourself as it all comes together. A sense of accomplishment, relief, and joy almost always follows.
Start the day by crossing out a major to-do list
Even bed-making is a huge to-do list. Isn’t it great that you started the day right by organizing your bedroom? You can finally have that motivation to finish all your to-do lists at home, work, or personal space.
Create a strand of good habits
If you start every day fixing your bed, it creates a domino effect on other positive behaviors throughout the day. Bed-making becomes a positive keystone habit and produces a string of more positive habits affecting your work, home, and life.
Makes you sleep better at night
Clean bedroom, clean bed, and clean sheets… it’s a recipe for a good night’s sleep! That’s because the bedroom environment plays a huge factor in your sleep quality. The feeling of cleanliness, crisp, and coolness of your room improves comfort and air quality that induces deep slumber. Who wouldn’t want to sleep in a dirty room anyway?
How to declutter and organize your bedroom
The bedroom is where you get to spend most of your time at home. It’s a no-brainer that it’s also the first room to dumping your used clothes, bags, papers, and work items.
Our minds always tick us to place all items in our “nesting grounds” aka bedroom. However, it’s the one place clutter should accumulate because it can affect health, working habits, and home lifestyle.
The bedroom should be a place for relaxation. Work and entertainment should be kept at minimal because it disturbs your sleep and habits. Here are ways to declutter and organize your bedroom:
Start sorting your things into three piles
This three-box method allows you to see whether you keep, throw, or donate the items needed. For those you can keep, store them into containers and label them.
Throw away things you don’t need like expired makeup, old lingerie, worn out foam, and more. If you can donate your old clothes or gifts you don’t like, place it in a box and look for organizations that accept donations.
Keep only the essentials
Keep the bare minimum number of items in your bedroom. Ask yourself, “what do I need in here?” Once you have figured that out, do away with anything that you don’t need, and that is not conducive for a restful, relaxing environment.
Take things one step at a time
It will be overwhelming to pull the entire contents of your bedroom out, all at once. It may take far too long to organize. It is advisable to start small. Focus on a particular area, work on it, and make sure you complete the work there before moving on to another section.
Sort out the wardrobe storage/dressing area
Your clothes are probably in the bedroom, and it is probably convenient for you to get dressed there. Make sure no clothes are left out of the wardrobe. Neatly fold or hang them back after bringing them out. Ensure you have a laundry hamper so you can put your worn clothes as soon as you undress. It helps to keep things organized.
Dispose of it or donate it
When you have tidied up, you probably find those items you don’t need. Instead of keeping them and donate or sell them; and if they are of no use to you or others, dispose of them.
Spend 45 minutes organizing your room every day
The more often you clean your room, the less time it will take to declutter it next time. And if you have more free time, you can opt to work on your pet projects. Take 30 to 45 minutes of your time every day to sweep your bedroom.
Use trays, boxes, and bowls
Every piece of your item should have a home – and that’s what Marie Kondo tells us on her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. When you have assigned spaces for everything that you want to do in the bedroom, you’ll prevent clutter from accumulating. And, when your bedroom is organized, you’ll have a well-justified feeling of accomplishment. Decluttering your bedroom will help you sleep well, and you’ll have a room in which you can relax.
Creating a chain of home organization habits
The first step towards bedroom organization and decluttering is making the bed. You would be surprised how much more manageable everything else seems when the bed is neatly made.
Isn’t it great that you just finished a simple everyday to-do as soon as you get out of the bed? When your bed is made, you can then use the extra time for sorting and organizing everything else.
That’s because human behaviors are tied to one another, thus creating a stack of habits or lifestyle choices.
For example, one morning, I finished making the bed, then I began picking up a few papers lying on the floor. Next, I found myself dusting the space, pulling the dirt out under the bed, changing my beddings, and organizing my desk, books, financial records, etc.
The first act of fixing the bed creates a chain of routine that made me very happy. This is called the domino effect.
What is the Domino Effect?
A Domino Effect happens when you make or create a behavior that triggers a chain reaction of related behaviors. As seen with the example above, when I made my bed, I suddenly began fixing things around my bedroom.
This behavior, I’ve noticed, begin to spread around my workplace as well. Sometimes, I see myself cleaning everything up after I’m through with it – whether that’d be with my emails, my activity records at work, my girl’s out in restaurants – everything’s about cleaning and organizing what I touch!
The domino effect can instill bad habits as well. For example, what’s supposed to be break time, I spend on social media mindlessly. I’ve wasted the hours, then I get to sleep all the sudden, with me procrastinating over a deadline after I wake up. Afterward, I spend the night more on social media and sleep around 2AM for just hitting “Likes” on my friends’ newsfeeds. I wake up the next morning groggy and grumpy and push everything else on my to-do lists.
And that’s just bad.
Domino Effect is an interesting case of how people build new habits. It cascades a new set of behaviors and personal beliefs starting from one-keystone habit. And organizing your bedroom starts from that bed-making habit of yours.
