Tracy McCubbin
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Tracy McCubbin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But then you've worked a 12 hour day and the kids are screaming and you find yourself eating a whole pepperoni pizza. You're making a bad decision because you've made so many decisions. So I like to say to people that clutter is a constant decision. You always have to make a decision about your clutter. Do I need this? Do I like it? Do I want it? Where should it live? Where should I put it away?
Clutter is a constant to-do list. So having a house that's really full of clutter puts you in a space where you're making decisions all the time. And you basically just put yourself into decision fatigue.
Exactly. And there's also something else that happens in the brain. And we've all experienced this in our lives. Like you have a pile of clutter on the dining room table and you walk past it every day, you kind of start to not see it anymore. Like your eyes literally zone it out. And then all of a sudden you're gonna have people over for dinner and you're like, oh, wow, I gotta clean that off.
So we really start to see it and people get stuck. People get stuck on knowing how to start, where to start, and are really just daunted by the task. So I always tell people a couple things when it comes to their decluttering journey. First of all, spend a week just living in your house and figuring out where your house doesn't work.
Are your kitchen counters so covered with stuff that you just don't even go in there anymore? You don't cook anymore. Are you parking your car outside because your garage is so full? Figure out where your house doesn't work. And then also, what would you gain by decluttering that space? What's the positive outcome?
So if you clean out your garage, does that mean this winter you're going to be able to park your car in there and not have to scrape off the ice every morning? What are you going to gain by decluttering?
Exactly. So I always tell people, start small. Rome was not cluttered in a day. This did not happen overnight. So start small and pick a category that you're not as emotionally attached to. So don't start with photographs. Like that's the mistake people make all the time. They're like, well, I tried to declutter all my photographs. I'm like, that's That's the hardest thing.
You know, so start small, have success. So let's say do your junk drawer. We've all got one. Every house has a junk drawer. Get rid of the broken rubber bands, the dead batteries, like organize your junk drawer. Then see what it feels like to when you need something, you know exactly where to go for it. Start small, have a small success, and then you build on it.
I started doing these on Instagram, things you can declutter in under five minutes. Coffee mugs, baseball caps, socks. And they absolutely blew up. People loved them. They were manageable, bite-sized tasks that people were accomplishing. And every day, I think we've been doing them for about six,
weeks or two months now every day i get messages from people who are like i started doing these videos i've done my whole house i didn't even really notice right that i did it when i was listening to a podcast or watching the news so it was a way to break it down into manageable chunks that people could get done feel successful and then move on to the next thing
you need a regular decluttering practice. You know, it's like cleaning the house. You clean your house and it doesn't stay clean, right? It gets dirty and you have to stay on top of decluttering. The clutter builds up. The holidays are right around the corner. We're gonna get gifts we don't want. You know, you're gonna like clothes you don't wanna wear anymore.
You've gotta make decluttering a part of your regular process. And this is also really interesting for people to think about. Decluttering, organizing, and cleaning your house are three separate tasks, right? I think a lot of people smush them together, but they're very different. Cleaning your house is cleaning your house. Getting a sponge, you know, cleaner, cleaning your house.
Organizing is finding a home for everything, putting it away, knowing where it lives. And decluttering is getting rid of what you don't want, need, or use. So I think people get really log jammed when they try and do them all together. And they need to understand that there are three separate tasks.
It's baloney. Because what they're really saying is, I know where everything is. It's in that giant pile on my desk that it's going to take me 22 minutes to find it when I have to go through everything. You know, there's this idea, and a lot of people have said this, well, if I put it away, I'm not going to know where it is. And I'm like, that's not, you know, I need a visual reminder.
I feel like if you put something away and you make a conscious decision about
you know these are where my pens live my pens always live in this drawer i put them away i always know where to get them you won't need the visual reminder anymore so i think when people say that they haven't set the systems up right this is where my tax documents go this is where my x y or z goes so it's about setting up systems so that everybody in the house knows where to put things away because then you know where to find them
You know, I think it's about putting things in logical places, right? You know, putting hats and gloves to go outside in the hall closet, you know, put, you know, things that live in the kit that you use in the kitchen, in the kitchen, where I see things starting to fall apart for people is when it's there's sort of putting things away where they have space for it.
Oh, well, this should just live over here because I've got an empty cabinet. It's like, but that doesn't make any sense because those are batteries that you use in the kids' toys and the kids' toys are all the way across in the family room.
When people don't acknowledge the emotional hold, I think when people don't understand how emotionally attached to their stuff they are, then it all sort of falls apart. Because all of a sudden, if you don't have that conversation with yourself and realize that you're making your things important, everything becomes important, right?
If you keep everything because it's special, then nothing is special. And I also think it's like you said, not understanding that being decluttered and organizing is a regular practice, something that you got to do, you know, once a week, tidy everything up. And also the number one thing that people can do to be less cluttered. It's so old fashioned, but it works.
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