There’s something slightly tragic about spending an entire weekend purging, sorting, and reorganising—only to find yourself six days later balancing a coffee mug on a precarious stack of unopened mail, wondering when the clutter crept back in. Again.
The thing about tidying is it works. Briefly. What doesn’t work quite so well is treating it like a one-off event, a chore to be ticked off once and never revisited. Decluttering, like brushing your teeth or regretting late-night online purchases, is something you need to keep doing if you want lasting results.
And no, it doesn’t have to involve elaborate systems, new furniture, or asking the internet for a “rubbish removal service near you” every fortnight. The real trick is in the small things. The repeatable things. The things that barely feel like effort once they become habit.
Here are five of them.
1. The “one in, one out” rule
It’s easy to justify bringing things in. A scented candle on sale. A new shirt that looks suspiciously like three others already in your wardrobe. A gadget that claims to halve the time you spend chopping vegetables and, of course, does nothing of the sort.
What’s less easy—but far more useful—is building a habit where, for every item you bring home, something else has to leave. One in, one out. No exceptions.
This approach isn’t about minimalism or martyrdom. It’s just a way to stop your storage from slowly swelling like an unattended sponge. The rule forces a pause. A brief reckoning. Do you really need the thing? And if so, what are you prepared to part with in exchange?
2. Deal with the day’s debris… today
It’s astonishing how quickly clutter piles up when you put things down “just for now”. Receipts, takeout containers, unread catalogues, wayward socks—they all become invisible the moment they hit a surface. Until they multiply. Then they become furniture.
Instead of allowing these items to marinate for days, build a five-minute ritual into your evening. Nothing extreme. Just a quick whip around to return things to their rightful place, bin what needs binning, and reset the room to something vaguely respectable.
You don’t have to organise a filing cabinet. Just don’t let your dining table double as a stationery graveyard for the third day running.
3. Respect the drop zone
Every home has one. That spot near the door where keys, bags, post, coins, and rogue paperclips seem to accumulate without consent. The drop zone is a natural behaviour—fighting it is futile. But leaving it unmanaged is a shortcut to chaos.
Instead, contain it. Use a tray, a bowl, a box with a lid—anything that sets a clear boundary. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t stay. Once a week, empty it. Sort it. Toss anything that qualifies more as “lint” than “belonging”.
Taming the drop zone doesn’t just make things tidier. It makes things findable. Which is arguably more important.
4. Stop postponing decisions
Clutter is often just deferred thinking. You don’t know where to put it, whether to keep it, or if it still works—so it stays. In limbo. For months.
Get into the habit of making micro-decisions. When you pick something up, ask yourself what’s actually going to happen to it. Are you using it? Fixing it? Filing it? If not, you’re storing guilt, not stuff.
We’ve found that “I’ll deal with it later” is clutter’s favourite sentence. Best to deprive it of the oxygen.
5. Make it visible (or invisible) on purpose
Things left out should earn their keep. Daily use, visual appeal, or function. Everything else should have a home that isn’t your benchtop or floor.
Visible clutter nags at you. It whispers of things undone, decisions unmade. On the flip side, hidden clutter becomes out of sight, out of mind—until the cupboard door won’t close, and you’re quietly furious at the contents.
The trick is to be deliberate. Keep surfaces clear enough to be useful, but not sterile. Tuck things away, but not into black holes. Store like with like. Use labels if needed. Open a drawer and know what’s in it. It’s less about neatness and more about knowing what you actually own.
Clutter isn’t the villain. It’s just a symptom. Of busy lives, of small delays, of good intentions never followed through. The habits that keep it at bay are almost boring in their simplicity—but they work.
And once you start doing them without thinking, you’ll find the clutter stops returning with quite so much enthusiasm. Or at the very least, you’ll stop tripping over it on your way to the kettle.
