Helping Someone Start
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What are effective strategies for helping someone start decluttering?
Hello and welcome to the Art of Decluttering podcast. I'm your host, Amy Revell. I have just got off a great radio interview that I did with the ABC and it inspired me to come on and talk to you guys a little bit about the things that we discussed. What they asked me to do was share with them some ideas around what to do when you're unsure how to start decluttering. If you're feeling kind of a bit reserved about it, you don't know where to start, but you also want to get started, but you're unsure how. And often this is the case. If you haven't followed minimalists and declutterers and professional organisers, if your For You page is not full of it and your YouTube next recommendations is not more professional organisers, this might be you.
And I also thought this might be a really helpful episode for those of you who want to help someone that you live with to declutter. Maybe it's a child or a partner. Maybe you want to help your friend or you want to go and help your parents. Maybe you're even thinking about starting your career as a professional organizer. These are some really great strategies that you can use for yourself. But I want you to think a little bit creative today about how you could use what I want to share when you're working with someone else. And so what I said to them is the biggest tip that I can give you when you're starting out. So the key is to break things down into small amounts of time, small categories and small amounts of space.
So I'm going to talk about those three things for you. And again, think about this when you're helping someone else. So a small amount of time, it kind of goes without saying. It just means you're not trying to engage a child in a four-hour decluttering session when they've never done it before. Or you're not trying to say to your partner, we need to set aside all of Saturday to declutter the garage. You can actually break it down. And it might be still that you need to calendar that in and give people the respect of giving them advance notice when you're wanting to do this with them. But you might say, hey, I really want to tackle the bathroom cupboard with you. I know we both share it or the laundry cupboard or the plastics in the kitchen.
Can we set aside 15 minutes after work tonight and just get started on it? And so by making it kind of a set and short period of time reduces that overwhelm, enables someone who's brand new to it, maybe overwhelmed by it, maybe hesitant, doesn't think it's going to work, not sure what you can get done. It allows them to go, all right, well, I can do almost anything for 15 minutes. I can tolerate it. Let's give it a shot. And you can be quite strategic in that 15 minutes. You might just focus on rubbish. You might just focus on donations. You might just focus on organizing it so that it functions better. And when a space functions better, you can decide what you do and don't need in that space. And if 15 minutes is just too much, just do five minutes.
Just a short amount of time and set a timer so that it doesn't just kind of creep on. If you're working by yourself and the 15 minute timer goes off, snooze it, keep going. Absolutely perfect. However, if you're working with someone else and you've asked them to set aside a specific amount of time, I would really encourage you to stick to it. And maybe it goes so well that you go, let's do this again tomorrow night. Or could we do this again in a couple of hours and just see how much we can get done? Maybe next time we could push it out to 25 minutes. Think about that when it comes to time. Don't take advantage of somebody else committing to it and just be like, all right, I'm going to sneakily just keep going and going and going.
They may be more resistant to joining again in the future. It's also really helpful to do these short little bursts. If you've got someone who's older, they might take a little bit longer to process things and make decisions. For a child, they just might get distracted. And if you're working in a relationship, the longer that you do it, the harder it gets.
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