One key to staying organised is **maintenance**, but how often and how should you declutter your house and how to declutter your house? If you want to keep your spaces maintained, here are two great ways to declutter your house daily and yearly.

Before we learn how to declutter your house.

Remember one thing maintenance:

If you put your mind to it, I can teach you how to declutter your house and organise it in a few days. The key is to keep it this way. When asking questions like how often you should declutter and how do I stay organised, there is nothing that will remotely be more effective than maintenance, however boring it may sound. One of my main philosophies regarding decluttering and staying organised is maintenance.

For example, if you do regular decluttering sessions, it will, after a while, become an automatic routine.

This activity, done regularly, will help you get your home decluttered by going systematically through:

Every category of stuff you own
And/or teaches you room by room how to declutter your house.

Regular decluttering and maintenance sessions also keep your place feeling organised after you learned, how to declutter your house.

There are several options when you learn how to declutter your house.

You can break it down into two main ones:
Daily decluttering
A year of decluttering or seasonal decluttering

How to declutter your house - work on it daily

Declutter 365
Nip it in the bud
Decluttering with a daily theme.

How to Declutter your house - Declutter 365

Doing little things each day the "declutter 365" is style is option.

It means every day of the year you only spend a tiny bit of effort but it yields big results over many days. If you skip a day dust yourself off and continue where you left off.

How to declutter your house - Nip things in the bud

Have you heard of the concept; nip it in the ‘bud’? Officially a gardening term but for our purposes, it can also be a way of thinking about the things you do, and how you go about your day-to-day chores. It can really help you, be and stay more organised and make your spaces feel less cluttered.

Decluttering and getting organised is not a race., it is a conscious decision, to change habits slowly over a period of time. This will create a more comfortable experience in your day-to-day surroundings and the tasks that you have to do.

How to declutter your house - Daily decluttering with a daily theme

Another way to declutter your house (and keep it that way) is using a daily theme

Give every day a theme

This is quite a creative option when learning how to declutter your house in which every day is given a specific name. You could use it when you learn how to declutter your house, but also later in the process when you are organised and simply maintain your areas.

This suggestion could work well with small children. What day is it today? It is Wednesday. It is Wipe down Wednesday.

Here is an example for when you want to learn how to declutter your house with a daily decluttering theme:

Mop-on-Monday: Tackle floor clutter in a room of your choosing.
Toss-out-Tuesday 10 items
Wipe-down-Wednesday: Wipe the bench-top, kitchen or bathroom sink and declutter what is there but shouldn’t be.
Toss-out-Thursday again 10 items
Finance-Friday
- Is there something you can dispose of or sell?
- What items in the long term make you feel financially better (less guilty) we all have made wrong purchases out they go.
Specific-Saturday
- Need to declutter, toys, papers or the kitchen? Do something specific on this day.
- See if others at home can help.
Slow-down-Sunday
- What can you do that will help you relax for most of the day - declutter that area?

What is the problem with daily decluttering when learning How to declutter your house?

All the above assumes you want to and will do something every day.

You might think, “Haha, not me; my life is too chaotic.” I am with you on this. I could never follow a year of decluttering or the declutter 365 option, as I would be behind in two to three weeks. The daily theme days work for me because if I miss one day or several, they come around quite quickly again, and I can jump in where I left off.

Once you learn how to declutter your house, you might declutter your house daily without even realising you are doing it.

Ask yourself how this daily decluttering can apply to you.

You can use this concept of daily decluttering after we have decluttered an area.

How to declutter your house the dining table example

If you do not maintain a newly decluttered area like the dining table. New clutter will find its way to that spot within days, if not hours. Your job is to do some daily decluttering and keep that area clear. Don’t worry about the rest of the room. Keep that one area clear for an extensive period of time.

How often and how to declutter your house - make it a daily habit

The recommendation is at least 21 days. After 21 days, you have formed a new habit and can move to another area because now, it will feel weird putting things on the dining table.

You can extend the daily decluttering concept in many ways:

From quickly whipping up crumbs,
To putting dishes away.
Or reading and responding to your paperwork regularly

Daily decluttering requires some determination, but the rewards of doing things before they escalate into big, time-consuming tasks are absolutely worth it.

A final thing for daily actions when learning how to declutter your house is finding a time in which you are most energetic: morning, evening or afternoon. Use your energy levels to do hard things like learning how to declutter your house.

2. Alternatively, how often and how to declutter your house can be done through a year or seasonal of decluttering

This is an option if you are a planner and decide when to learn how to declutter your house or if you recently had a big life change, such as a new home, child, relationship, or suddenly being single. You may have started a new job or recently retired. Doing a year of decluttering allows you to break things down. You can start with quick wins and work up to learning how to declutter your house in the more complex, less high-traffic areas.

Let's look at a yearly calendar year and how you could use the ebbs and flows of the year to achieve your goal of learning how to declutter your house. Spreading the goal out over twelve months means you do not declutter too often. It allows you more time to enjoy your life while slowly seeing progress or seeing bursts of progress throughout the year. The key is sticking to your plan to avoid losing momentum and not getting to your decluttering and organising goals by the end of the year.

Declutter on calendar years

I personally love this method. My life is pretty full from February to October, with a small break in July. Learning how to declutter my house could only happen between November and January, a calm time with great weather in Australia. If I set my goals clearly, most of the key decluttering for the year will be completed by January each year.

Let’s look at some examples of how to declutter your house with the year technique

Early in the Year Jan - March

Early in the year is a good time to learn how to declutter your house and do bigger declutter projects in general. All the pressure of the holiday season is well behind us, and most children have gone back to school. Life has some more structure to it once again. So although we might be busy with work, our weekly leisure activities, and possibly the school run, we could incorporate regular pockets of time to declutter.

If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, it is still cold before spring starts. In the Southern Hemisphere, we can happily walk around in our singlets and shorts, sorting through our spaces.

Please take note that I live in Australia and have lived in Europe for half my life as well, so we could look at the time of year, for example, the month or the seasons (which are different for Southern Hemisphere dwellers or the North).

Mid-year April - June

Most of us are experiencing high work and school demands at this time, so don’t learn how to declutter your house from top to bottom; instead, do smaller projects. Focus on the living room, the laundry, bedrooms, wardrobes (especially if you have a change of seasons), and kitchens (the engine of the house with people who require fuel for busy school and work days).

Mid-year July - Sept

This time is either mid-summer or mid-winter. For us in Australia, it is winter with less pressure to do things and be places than there is earlier in the year. This time could be used to learn how to declutter your house with harder projects like decluttering and organising paperwork. Or doing a tidy-up before the end of the financial year or the end of semesters. Another great way to declutter your house project would be decluttering and organising photos on windy, rainy days (for Northern Hemisphere dwellers, change these ideas to the early part of the year if you like or go and sit in the garden and do this). It might be a good time to declutter and organise the garage (although summer is also a good time). Work on your finances. You can even start to prepare and organise Christmas during this time as the time, emotional, financial, etc. pressure isn't there yet.

End of the year October - December

This time of year seems to speed up for us, things need to be finished before the end of the year. There are many social occasions and things to attend to. These months are more expensive, there is the pressure of Christmas postcards, presents and events. I personally wouldn't start a big organising project or learn how to declutter your house until the dust settles and we enter a quieter period of the year.

“Match this yearly decluttering approach to your needs and take into consideration the ebbs and flows of your work”

— Sabine Straver

This type of planning on what and how often you should declutter and when you learn to declutter your house is very holistic and strategic, especially if you look at it in yearly goals. Whilst you map out your ideas and goals also think about your work and its yearly ebbs and flows for example, I work in academia not much happens between December and January, which allows me to dive into some projects I can't even entertain thinking about whilst I am in the middle of marking a hundred assignments or preparing a semester of teaching material. I have a number of friends in the finance field in Australia. This means they work from June to September, as the majority of the paperwork for the end of the financial year is done at this time.

Over the years, I have started to really love the ebbs and flows of my working life rather than feel frustrated by the lack of tasks or the mountain of tasks.

How to declutter your house -Yearly decluttering - plan strategically

If you do this, you won't feel:

· bored when the quiet time hits.

· guilty when you have a lot on your plate as you know you will reach your goals another time of the year.

Combining daily and yearly decluttering techniques

“For me, it is a combination of the daily little bits of decluttering and some big burst of yearly/seasonal decluttering that is the secret to how often and how to declutter your house.”

— Sabine Straver

So there you have it, a whole array of ideas helping you decide how often you should declutter.

You decide what suits your life now, next week or next month.

Combine techniques and let yourself evolve with your decluttering and organising skills.