Decluttering — One item a day

A few weeks ago, my aunt shared with me her method for decluttering:

One item a day. 

Every day, she looks at her stuff and asks, “Have I used this in the past 6 months?” 

If the answer is ‘no’, out it goes.

While I am a fan of batching – grouping similar tasks together and performing them at one go – decluttering one item a day has its merits. 

For one, it cultivates a daily habit of decluttering your life, as opposed to doing it all at one go. While the latter has many positive feelings attached to it, it often requires a lot of uninterrupted time. 

And very often, the person doing the interrupting is you. 

For another, having a daily habit of reducing the number of items you have one item at a time reduces the amount of willpower needed to perform the task to almost zero. 

Doing it daily is a habit and something feels odd if you didn’t do it today. 

After a while, it becomes part of us. We are constantly looking for ways to reduce our attachments to our possessions. 

After all, we don’t take any of it when we die, so why get so attached to them? It becomes easier to let go when it’s our turn to go. 

P.S.: Yes, declutter is a word. The English language evolves.