Control Clutter
In These Main Areas
You need to control clutter in order to make serious steps to improve your life. Without doing this you are only fooling yourself if you think you can get organized. Clutter can overwhelm your life. Excessive stuff in all it's forms can quickly creep in and mount up. Stuff is so easy to obtain. You do not even have to try to acquire it. Mail is delivered to you. Every group, school, store, association of any kind will mail you information. There are bills and ads pouring into your home on a continuous basis. Whenever you go shopping there will be all the packaging, bags and receipts to deal with in addition to the goods you purchased. You wear multiple sets of clothes everyday so there is the constant battle of dealing with mountains of dirty clothes. Every meal you make there will be a mess of packaging and leftovers along with the time spent cooking, eating and cleaning up afterwards. The weather is constantly changing so you need an unending sea of different clothes, coats, boots and shoes and you just do not seem to have the space to store all these things. The holiday season is coming and there will be the gifts you buy for others and the gifts you receive. Plus the various decorations for each holiday and season. What do you do about all this? What is the best way to deal with this unending amount of stuff? You have to realize that clutter and stuff will always be there working it's way into your life. It comes and will keep coming. It will never stop. It is always there. With this thought in mind you can control clutter by tossing out huge amounts of it now. That is the only way to control it. You could throw out everything you own today and within a month have a house full of stuff that you hardly paid anything at all for. It may not be as nice as what you got rid of, but it is possible to obtain lots and lots of stuff for nothing or for so cheap as to be almost nothing. When I am advising people on how best to deal with clutter, I tell them to start with the areas in your life where clutter creates the most problems. It really doesn't matter if you have a drawer full of junk if you have a hard time getting through your halls. So start with these 3 main areas:
1) Control clutter on the steps.
There is nothing as treacherous in a home as having stuff stacked on your steps. This is just asking for trouble. I know, you say well I have been fine so far, no one has tripped on the stuff on my stairs. I would say, they have not yet, but they will. The effect of falling on the stairs can be catastrophic, it can kill, it can cripple. Stairs have to remain uncluttered at all times. This means not even any decorative items. This means no stuff you mean to take upstairs or downstairs. Just deliver it upstairs or downstairs right away. Take care of it. This means just because the stairs are wider in a big house, you still need to keep the stairs clear. I do not even like to see picture on the walls. Stairs are so much safer without anything but a railing.
2) Control clutter in the area by the main door you get into your home.
This would be the main door you use on a daily basis. Usually this would be the back door in a normal home. There is nothing quite so maddening as opening up the back door and seeing coats and shoes laying on the floor by the back door. Placing all kinds of extra stuff by the back door is a huge problem. The way to counteract all this is to leave the closet by the back door only for coats and shoes. This closet tends to get filled with all kinds of things besides coats and shoes. You can squeeze all kinds of things in there. My point is that you do not want to squeeze things in. You want to leave it open and easy to hang up coats and put shoes in. This closet should be really open. All those things that accumulate around the back door need to be removed from this area and put back in the proper place. Sometimes the proper place is just in the basement until you decide what to do with it.
3) Control clutter in the car.
Cars tend to be dumping grounds of excess also. We just leave all kinds of stuff laying around in the car. It just seems like so much effort to deal with this everyday. What I am saying is to concentrate on keeping your car clear of clutter so it is always clutter free and safe. Concentrate on clutter in these 3 main areas first. These areas get cluttered up because you are using them all the time. You tend to be blind to the trouble they are causing you. Once you control clutter in these areas, and keep them free of clutter, moving on to other areas is easier. 
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