Staci Summers - Clutter-Less! How to Declutter Your Life and Become Stress Free Forever

Declare War on Clutter!

Hi, my name is Staci and I am the author of this book. For many years I was the messy person in the house. My husband and kids always called me sock monster because I would constantly le ave my socks around the house.

The fact is, I have been a messy person my whole life. When I was growing up, my room was always messy. When I went to college, none of my friends wanted to be roommates beca use they knew how messy I was.

I wasnt only disorganized in my living area, I was disorganized with my finances and personal life too. That all changed one day in 201 0 when I decided to Declutter my life...

Most People Have a Problem with Clutter

Since you are reading this introduction, I would take a guess that you have some clutter you want to get rid of.

But the truth is , most people have a clutter problem in one way or another.

Did you ever walk into someones house and think Wow, this is a really nice place and very organized only to catch a glimpse of their garage with things stacked on top of each other.
Most of us have clutter in our life or our home, in one form or another.

The Good News for Dealing with Clutter

The good news is that all of this clutter can be fixed! It doesnt matter if you have never been organized with anything in your life, you can declare war on clutter on your own terms!

Its not very difficult, and you will feel a whole lot better once you have some ord er in your home and your life. I conquered clutter, and you can too! I wrote this book to help everyone become less stressed or more organized!

Start Conquering Clutter Today!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Meet Sarah

It starts with just a small stack of papers on the desk in the home office. Not too bad; not anything to be concerned about. Sarah is sure shell get to the stack over the next weekend. But the weekend comes and goes, and the stack is still there Monday morning; and is still there on Monday morning two months later, having grown considerably taller and messier.

On Monday morning, while making pancakes for family breakfast, Sarah cant find the baking powder. Its not where it belongs. While looking for it, she also notices several other pantry items out of place. Not cool on a school and work morning when every minute counts.

When putting on her shoes, Sarah trips over a stack of clothes that she had intended to take to the thrift store last week, and drops her coffee mug. Coffee splashes all over the front of her blouse and she has to change her clothes. She is already feeling the pressure of running later than she should be. (She had used precious getting dressed time to wrap a co-workers birthday gift, and had had to hurry over to the neighbors to borrow tape for the wrapping.) She knows the carpet will be stained if she doesnt clean up the mess right away, and blouse will be ruined if she doesnt pre-treat it for the laundry. She takes care of the carpet, but leaves the blouse on the floor untreated.

After she drops her children off at school, Sarah looks at her watch and realizes she has only ten minutes to make her twenty-minute commute to work. She breaks the no-phone while driving law and calls her supervisor to say she will be late for the staff meeting. She knows this is the third time in the past couple of months that she has been late for a meeting, and it does not sit well with her superiors. Fighting back the tears at the thought of losing a promotion over tardiness, Sarah realizes that she has been living in chaos and clutter at home, and something needs to change.

If this scenario seems familiar to you, youll be glad to know that, in very little time, you can declutter your home and enjoy it again. While decluttering your home wont solve all of your problems, it can solve some of them. 50 Tips for Decluttering Your Home brings you simple ways to clean out and organize the key areas of your home for convenient, efficient living that allows you to find things when you need them, feel at peace when relaxing, and stay on top of your game when youre working. 50 Tips for Decluttering Your Home will save you time and money, cut down on mental fatigue and chaos, and help you keep your sanity. Read on, and youll be amazed at how easy it is to live clutter-free!

As mysterious and complicated as we try to make it, to a large extent, decluttering is simply about getting rid of stuff that you dont need or want, and effectively using the space you have to store what you do need and want, with easy access to it. Ideally, the storage looks nice, matches dcor, and brings a sense of organization and peace to the room or area.

Adopting a few simple principles or rules for those who like a stricter word, will help you declutter your home, and keep it that way.

One of the first tactics in winning the war against clutter is to wield your sword against procrastination. Until youre able to stop procrastinating, clutter will sneak up on you like the stealth dust bunny that you never saw coming. Procrastination is what clutter thrives on. Stop feeding the clutter monster with procrastination, and you really can live clutter-free.

True, avoiding procrastination is easier said than done. But here are some simple tips you can use to help send procrastination running. Start implementing these steps today , not tomorrow and youre on your way to decluttering your home.

- Put the task into perspective . In most cases, people dont really hate doing the things necessary for keeping the clutter at bay, but they over-think the task and blow it way out of proportion. Instead of a simple task, in your mind it becomes a monumental task that you just cant tackle and will do anything to avoid. The longer you avoid the task, the bigger it grows in your mind. Take the time to think realistically about the task. Look at it for what it really is, not as the monster youve turned it into. If you decide you honestly cant tackle the task, hire someone to tackle it, but dont continue to put it off.

- Set aside the time . Determine how much time it will actually take you to accomplish the task, and set aside that time at the earliest possible date. Dont allow yourself to do anything else in that dedicated time slot, and dont trick yourself into thinking you can do it in half the time that it will actually take or that you can magically slip in the time, when you know you cant. Make a quality decision about when you will accomplish the task, and stick to it. Just knowing that the task will require a finite amount of time to be completed and then youll be done with it, can bring relief from that nagging feeling that the task will never get done and forever be hanging over your head.

- Tackle the hard jobs first. Dale Carnegie once said, Do the hard jobs first. The easy ones will take care of themselves. Its like when you were a kid and you made yourself eat your green peas first so you could really enjoy the mashed potatoes without thinking about the stinking peas. Think about how free you will feel when you get the hard jobs done! The not-so-hard jobs will be a piece of cake, and youll wonder why you put them off for so long.

- Eat the elephant one bite at a time. Some larger tasks can seem overwhelming if they are looked at from start to finish and as one big task. But the same task seems much more manageable when broken down into manageable portions. If you walk into the garage and see a huge disorganized mess, you may be tempted to run back into the house and put off cleaning the garage for another month or so. But if you look at one section of the garage at a time and say, I can organize this section this Saturday, that section next Saturday your garage will be completely cleaned and organized before you know it. When you divide a task into sections, make sure you set a specific time for each section so you dont get one section done and procrastinate on getting the other sections done.