Simple Decluttering Hacks You Need To Finally Get Your Home Tidy This Spring

If there's one thing that can instantly drag down your home aesthetic and functionality, its clutter. Despite your best intentions, it finds its way into your home and takes up residence. Indeed, when Yelp completed a 2025 survey of America's most loathsome chores, the dreaded task of home organization made the list at number #4, just behind the even more hated and stressful chore of carpet cleaning, followed by gutter cleaning, and window washing.

Yuck, yuck, and yuck. While decluttering is far less icky (or physically exhausting) than the top three chores, the long-term commitment alone is enough for people to avoid the task altogether. The idea that you need to tear apart your whole house, purge, reorganize, and put it all back is as overwhelming to think about as it is to do. And the last thing you want is to get halfway in with a massive reorganization project and burn out with mid-project regret syndrome, leaving a bigger mess than when you started.

Therefore, finding the motivation to kick off the decluttering process is often the hardest part. The good news is that there are small, actionable ways to get started small and make steady home organization and storage progress instead of stuffing it all into one miserable weekend. 

The key to remember with decluttering is that even small progress is still progress. To help keep things focused and doable rather than overwhelming, tackle one room or specific area at a time, such as the spice cabinet, cleaning supplies, or junk drawer. You can also declutter a specific type of clutter like books, papers, or clothing. Or just commit to decluttering five items a day! Over time, you will see real progress that will fuel your motivation.

In the same way you can keep the scale of your decluttering small, you can also keep your time commitment to a minimum — to keep your sanity. Set a 15-minute weekly decluttering reminder on your phone, or even a shorter five-minute daily option, to ensure you are setting aside a small amount of time to make consistent progress. Set a timer, use your favorite song(s), or listen to a chapter of an audiobook or segment of a podcast to clearly define your decluttering period of time.

As you make the rounds through your house, set up a system for decluttering that involves four boxes (or simply labeled piles so you aren't limited to the size constraints of the container) labeled put away (or keep), sell, donate, and trash. The idea is to pass every item through your hands and sort it into these categories to purge unneeded items and take stock of what you're keeping. Once you've made your piles, take action and follow through with what the label says before checking the project off as complete.

A key to decluttering is to actually manage the purged items as efficiently as the items you are putting away. Donated items should not be placed in a bag and simply relocated to clutter up another spot in your home (or, ahem, the trunk of your car). Immediately throw away the trash pile. List all "sell" items and donate all "give away" items right away to avoid an excessive pile of unwanted stuff. The longer they sit, the more likely they are to be reabsorbed into your home.

We all hit that same hiccup with decluttering, during the "put it away" phase, where we get stuck on a random one-off item that really doesn't have a home. Having an organized junk drawer for individual miscellaneous items is a great way to ensure everything has a place. As you tackle your home decluttering, save the junk drawer for the end so you can properly organize all items it acquires during the process. Once you know the contents, use drawer organizers to designate specific locations for each type of item.

We all know and love the shiny photos on social media of perfectly organized drawers with matching drawer organizers. And while they are onto something with creating separated compartments for keeping your drawers tidy and efficient, you don't need to spend money on special drawer organizers unless you want to. Repurposing small cardboard boxes — such as tissue, phone, shoe, or jewelry boxes — as drawer organizers is a sustainable, budget-friendly, and efficient way to accomplish the same task.

While on the topic of corralling clutter, baskets are also a great way to keep things organized yet out of sight. Within cabinets, cubbies, or even freestanding on the floor, attractive baskets of all sizes work wonders to group clutter by type, location, person, or purpose ... while being nice to look at! Large floor baskets can stash extra blankets in the living room, while a small basket in the media console can round up all of your extra cords. Where pretty baskets and ugly clutter meet, the options are endless.

Once you've gone through the hard work of decluttering your home, the key to keeping the house organized is to clean as you go. By taking a few minutes at the end of each day to put away the couple items that have been displaced into their designated locations that you created during the decluttering process, it only requires a tiny amount of work to keep the system running properly. When you let the clutter reaccumulate, you are leaving yourself a bigger job to deal with in the future.

One type of clutter that constantly reappears to wreak havoc on your otherwise organized home are papers, especially if you have school-aged children, as the accumulation takes only days before it's out of control. Opt for paperless statements or bills wherever possible to eliminate physical copies. Scan important documents, to save them electronically instead of physically filing. Implement a basket for important need-to-deal-with documents. Schedule a daily or bi-weekly reminder to sort through your drop box to avoid it becoming a dumping zone.

Organizing your wardrobe can be a two-part process: (1) a good purge on the day you feel motivated to do so, followed by (2) a month or two of follow up for those pieces you are on the fence about. Do this using the hanger method. Turn all of your hangers backwards. As you wear an article of clothing and return it to the closet, place the hanger correctly facing forward. At the end of the month or two, reassess the items that still have backward hangers to decide if they are still keepers.

Once your space has been decluttered, you may find yourself making tweaks as you test out your organization systems or make room for new items. So if space allows, consider designating a small labelled box or basket in an out-of-the-way, discreet location for corralling donation items as time goes on, since you are not doing any active full-scale purges. This will help keep them organized and out of sight until you have enough to bring in. The same premise could be used for items you have listed for sale.

This may seem like a silly one, but educating and involving your household members in the organization systems you have taken the time to put into place is essential for them working correctly and efficiently. What's the point of putting in all that effort to have your family or housemates inadvertently undo it due to lack of understanding or involvement? Working through the decluttering process and ongoing expectations together can help ensure everyone stays on the same wonderfully organized page.