The pursue of a clutter-free home and organized life
This post is about my fight against clutters for decades. Counterintuitively, cluttering is not a bad habit or indiscipline but a symptom of deeper trouble. I will explain in this post:
- The vicious cycle behind cluttering
- The key insights to escape the cycle
- Specific methods to organize a home
The vicious cycle
It began with poverty. I still vividly remember when my parents told me I couldn’t buy the toys I dream of because we didn’t have money, because it was too expensive. Scarcity strengthens longing; I grow up believing things are precious, a common belief in low-income families.
Hoarding naturally follows this value. So we collected stuff as much as possible, especially if they were free, regardless of whether being useful. Like humans are geneticized to hoard calories, thus eat as much sugar as possible, we had tons of stuff thinking they might be useful someday, somewhere.
Like all sugar addicts inevitably get into obesity, we hopelessly got into clutters, in every home we lived. Stuff was like cancer to our rooms; they occupied the sofa, the bed, and a large part of the floor; they stacked up and expanded everywhere. One of our boxes was labeled ‘Misc.’ In fact, an overwhelming majority of our storage space should be labeled this way — everything is everywhere!
Clutter is a symbol of disorientation. As discovered by Marie Kondo, most people living in a cluttered home don’t know what’s important in their lives. Disoriented people are way harder to be successful in their career, if possible at all. This means most of them will stay in poverty and pass it on to the next generation.
The momentum
The above cycle is powerful because each component is, in essence, a habit; thus, even one of them is broken, they continue to strengthen each other by momentum.
For many years, I’ve been able to buy all stuff worthy for my lifestyle, and I’ve no logical incentive to hoard stuff. Yet, under the decades-long habit, I continued subconsciously hoarding until I was deeply troubled by the clutters and began to do the research. That’s how I discovered the vicious cycle and my being a victim of it.
My journey began from reading books about decluttering and organizing. Although presented the same idea differently, all the books told me discarding is a prerequisite for organizing and tidying. To break the vicious cycle, we must start by breaking the hoarding habit, which implies discarding the existing clutter. However, it’s more about perspectives and mindsets than about discipline.
How to stop hoarding
Besides being aware of the vicious cycle, the following insights and perspectives helped me break from hoarding.
The power of essentialism
At work, the relation between our total output and the working hours is a Pareto distribution — 80% of output comes from 20% of working hours. The most productive time allocation strategy is: Spend 80% of the time on finding out the right priority — singular form is intentional; spend 20% of the time on actual producing; This strategy is far superior to oversubscribing and being busy all day. We achieve more by committing to less.
The same principle applies to one’s belongings — 80% of the value is attributed to 20% of the stuff. However, the marginal management cost is constant, making a linear relationship between the amount of stuff and the total organizing pressure. In practice, discarding 80% of our stuff will reduce the organizing cost by roughly 80%; yet, I didn’t experience any lack of functioning. On the other hand, enjoying the space freed up from clutter is one of the most comfortable experiences in life.
I can’t imagine any of my role models hoarding stuff. The image of them living with essential materials transmit power, vibrancy, purity, and inner peace. Below is Gandhi’s room in Sabarmati Ashram:
The actual cost of buying a stuff
If I buy a service, say massage, the cost is the price and time spent on it. What’s the cost of buying stuff? Besides the price and time spent using it, there are huge hidden costs that most are not aware of, yet overshadows the cost in appearance:
- Environmental cost to our earth
- The physical space it seized from my house
- Labor to unpack
- Labor to trash the box
- Labor to set up the item, potentially learning how to use it
- Labor to organize it
- Labor to donate or recycle it after its life cycle
According to the story of stuff, 99% of items we bought won’t be in use after six months. That means I will return many of them. Even on Amazon, whose return is easiest, it took roughly one hour to return an item.
Nowadays, I’m far more conservative on purchasing physical goods than services. I feel all the services I bought helped me effectively and instantly. In contrast, I’m a steward to the stuff I bought — they own me, not the other way. Although some of them eventually helped me, many of them returned with nothing.
Clutter eats the home
When I see people squeeze through narrow passways surrounded by random stuff or stumbled by clutter in their homes, I realize that cluttering is eating the living space of human beings in a house. For most families, the house is the most valuable asset; allowing clutter to eat it like cancer is unwise and uneconomic.
With all those hidden costs, the real value for money ratio of most stuff we own is negative, even without the sunk purchase cost. They should be immediately donated, recycled, or trashed.
Organizing a home
After discarding everything unnecessary, I used the following principles to organize the rest of my stuff. They are all essential, either functionally or emotionally.
Store stuff vertically
It’s simple and effective. There are two folds:
- Don’t stack things up because it takes more space and makes it hard to retrieve things buried in the bottom.
- Utilize spaces on the wall
Many people use their closets to hang clothes. Unfortunately, it’s a massive waste of space. The closet can store four times more clothes if the clothes are folded and kept in a cupboard.
Every item have a dedicated location
This is a point from Marie Kondo. All items should either be in use or at their ‘home.’ Not only making retrieval easier, but this discipline also ensures that spaces for humans, like the bed and sofa, won’t be invaded by any stuff.
Celebrate emotional stuff
Old photos, the blueprint of the house, the first driver's license, a Feng Shui stone, all such stuff should be celebrated rather than stored at the bottom of a drawer. After removing the clutter, most homes have abundant space for display. The emotionally important stuff should shine in one such spot; they make the house a home.
Organize functional stuff
Functional stuff is grouped into two categories: frequently used ones and infrequently used ones.
The storage spaces are categorized into three tiers:
- Tier 0: directly visible and touchable, like bookshelf or TV stand
- Tier 1: need single indirection before retrieval, like a shelf that’s inside a closet
- Tier 2: need two or more indirections before retrieval
Most functional stuff should be in tier 0 and tier 1. Having lots of things in tier 2 is a sign of hoarding.
The principle of mapping stuff categories to storage categories is following.
Frequently used functional stuff in tier 1 needs special effort for aesthetics.
They shouldn’t exist, mostly
I get rid of the following categories with few exceptions.
- Paper for information. Information should be kept in cloud, on any paper.
- Gifts. The true purpose of a present is to be received. Presents are not “things” but a means for conveying someone’s feelings — Marie Kondo
- Cords. The cost of keeping most cords outweigh their usage, and most won’t have any.
- Packages. Small packages can be used as in drawer organizers; others are too ugly to fit in my home.
- Extra bedding. Same rationale as cords.
- Wrong purchases. Donating or recycling them didn’t mean I’ve made a mistake. The purpose of those stuff is teaching me what I don’t need and what makes a bad buying decision. Being built to help people, used stuff are happy to be donated to next owner in need.
Reference
The following books helped me tremendously in this fight against clutter.
