When you finally decide to declutter and organize your home, the initial clearing out and restructuring is important (and so satisfying), but keeping things in order going forward will pose a greater challenge. To lead a more organized and decluttered life over the long haul, focus on three pillars that form the Organizational Triangle.
What is the organizational triangle?
The Organizational Triangle was conceptualized by pro organizer Andrew Mellen, the man behind The Most Organized Man in America's Guide to Moving and Unstuff Your Life: Kick the Clutter Habit and Completely Organize Your Life for Good. While Mellen writes and speaks about all manner of organization and decluttering, he describes the Organizational Triangle as "the foundation" of all of his work. This three-tiered approach provides a simple process for maintaining a clutter-free home:
Every item needs a home
Keep like with like
Use a something in, something out approach
Keep these three tenets in mind during your initial decluttering, and going forward as well, so your place stays neat and won’t require another big clean in a year or so. Here's a deeper look at what each step involves.
Step 1: Every item needs a home
This step is crucial when you’re first starting out. No matter which of the many available cleaning techniques you choose to follow, you’ll almost certainly end up categorizing your possessions by whether you want to keep, throw out, donate, or sell them. When aligning your clearing out with the tenants of the Organizational Triangle, you’ll need to closely assess anything you decide you want to keep.
That's because every item in your home should have its designated space, whether that’s a certain drawer, cabinet, basket, or shelf. If you can’t think of a permanent home for something, you either need to make one or get rid of that thing. Nothing should be floating around, moving from space to space, or otherwise homeless within your home. The reason for this is simple: Anything you want to access should be somewhere you'll know to look for it. It should only ever be in one of two places: in its designated spot, or in your hands. Decluttering is useless if the items that remain end up piled on a table or aren’t easy to find when you actually need them.
Step 2: Keep like with like
The second step is to reorganize your space to keep alike things together, always. For instance, don’t keep some screwdrivers in the garage and others in the kitchen, even though it seems intuitive to imagine that when you need a screwdriver while doing an indoor task, it will be handier to have one closer to you. Don’t keep a basket of batteries in each room; put them all together. Etc.
If you have AA batteries in a drawer in your living room in case you need them for the remote, but all your other batteries in a basket in a kitchen cabinet, you might not remember where to find those AA batteries when the remote for the fan in your bedroom goes out. You’ll go to search the kitchen basket, find nothing, and buy AA batteries from the store, wasting money. Meanwhile, the batteries in the living room will be yet more clutter.
Step 3: Something in, something out
Something in, something out is a tried-and-true organizational method you should only employ once you have finished an initial round of decluttering and are moving forward into a more organized lifestyle. But it's pretty basic: When you get something new, get rid of something old to make space for it. If you’re following the Organizational Triangle’s rules, you know there needs to be a spot for everything, but space is finite. Don’t cram too much into your shelves and drawers or else they’ll end up cluttered, too.
If a lot of items fit into a space, that’s great, but in most cases, you need to be strategic about how much stuff you accumulate. If you can only use one of a thing at a time and you’re committed to following the above rules about putting every item back in its place when you’re done using it, there's no point in having more than one. Accumulating multiples of objects only makes it easier for you to slack on the rule about putting things back where they belong after use. Following a something in, something out rule can also act as a check on your impulse buying habit, since you'll know that buying something new means getting rid of something old.
