heather (00:00.782)
Hello, untanglers, and welcome back to another episode of Decluttering Untangled with me, your host, Heather Tingle. Today, I want to talk about a mistake that I see all the time, and it's a mistake so many people make when decluttering and organizing their homes, which causes so many problems later. And it's quite sneaky because it feels like a real solution in the moment. It feels like progress. It feels like you're getting all organized, but actually it makes everything harder later down the line.
I am talking about splitting or extending a category. And I want to give you a bit example of what I mean. So you're decluttering a space, let's say your kitchen, your kitchen cupboards are overflowing. You know, you got to the point where things are like stacking up and you can't close the door properly. So you start pulling things out and you get to a point where you start to panic a bit, like there's stuff you know you should let go of. And I hate the word should because we really need to rethink what it's saying when we say that.
but you are looking at all the things that you want to keep and you're realising if you put them all back, they either weirdly now won't fit or it's gonna be a real struggle. So what you do, instead of making a really tough decision and still minimising it, you find a workaround and it makes sense. So what you do is you take some of it and you put it somewhere else. So a back stock cupboard in the garage, for example, a shelf in the cellar or a box under the stairs.
And in that moment, it kind of feels brilliant. Like you are on top of this organisation. The kitchen cupboard closes properly again. Problem solved. Aren't you amazing? Aren't you wonderful? You've had a full afternoon, really, really busy and it's now all neatly organised. Except the problem isn't solved. What you've actually done is just move it and split it and cause more of a problem. But you don't notice it in the moment. Now...
Splitting a category is completely understandable. It makes sense. It's response to overwhelm. So when a decision feels too big, too emotional, too difficult, our brains look for like the fastest way to reduce that pressure. So moving stuff to another room reduces that pressure. Right there, right there, and it's a solution. Your brain's doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is find like a painless solution. The problem is it's not actually painless because three things happen later on. So first of all,
heather (02:23.863)
this is like an immediate problem. You've now got two homes for one category. Now you may have been really clever organizing these categories into two kind of distinct ones, but what happens then is every single time you go to put something away or you need to find something, you've got to stop and think, is this a kitchen one or a garage one? And that tiny decision multiplied across every single item every single time is knackering.
And that's decision fatigue. And it makes it so much harder to put things away and also to find them in the first place because your brain isn't automatically going to that one place because that's the obvious thing for it. It's now got to try and figure out, is it this one or is it this one? That's an extra decision to make every single time. The second problem is that the second location usually isn't the right home for it because the first location was. So that back stock in the garage or the cellar or whatever,
It's not really somewhere you go to every day. It wasn't going to be the place where the extra can of the beans live. So things get forgotten about. You buy doubles because you don't remember what was already down there or you don't really want to bother going down there to check every single time you go shopping. Or the opposite happens. You do remember, you go get it and then once you've got it, you can't face carrying it all the way back down again to put it away. So it ends up like just sat on the kitchen side anyway, which just meant the kitchen's just...
carried on going but in a more visual space now, which means the original clutter problem in the kitchen just kind of came back in a different form. And thirdly, what it does is it quietly creates a new mess in room two. So that garage or cellar wasn't necessarily clutter free before you added another category to it, but now we've got an extra thing of things to think about that you've added to it.
that it wasn't really designed for, it wasn't when you were zoning, it wasn't like the activity that you were gonna do in that room. So now that space feels overwhelming as well. You haven't really solved a problem, what you've done is just spread it across two rooms instead of one or two spaces instead of one. I wanna give you a few more examples of this, because I know when we've got concepts, I know for me with my autistic brain, unless I've got more concrete examples that kind of work for me, it's really hard to kind of work it out.
heather (04:45.196)
because it is so common, once you figure it out, you'll see loads of them. So the obvious one that I've already talked about in previous episode is the summer and winter clothing. So you put your winter clothes in a way in summer somewhere else, and then in summer, you've got your summer clothes in the wardrobe and your winter clothing somewhere else and vice versa, you change it in the seasons. But there's so many other ones. And once you notice this pattern, you'll start to go, that's what I did. So books, books are a classic one.
Someone's got books in the living room, books in the bedroom, books in the spare room, books in the kitchen, books stacked on the stairs, in the hallway. But when you ask them, where do you actually read and where was the place that you actually wanted the books, the answer's always like, really one place, maybe two. Like, I'll allow you to have a kitchen, like, section for kitchen books if you actually do use cookbooks and rather just have them in a cupboard and you don't normally Google, which is what I do. So...
You might have got like one armchair, one side of bed. That's where books should be. Everywhere else, book six is kind of like splitting the category. And it means that you finish a book, there's no obvious home for it to go to, so it just stays where it gets left. Or what happens and generally did happen with me, I'd end up with temporary piles of books that I were gonna read at some point, but they never quite made it. Children's toys are another big one.
So toys in the living room, toys in the playroom, toys upstairs in the bedroom. And you think, right, I'm going to go all in and only ever have them in my living room because that's where they actually play with them. And because they then don't fit into the toy box that you bought. Like, oh, well, I'll put like some of these in the bedroom because they're more bedroomy type ones. Your child is going to get so confused because when you put them away, working out which category a toy belongs to, that is such a lot to ask of anyone.
including you, but a child, that's even harder. So what do you do instead? The fix is hard. This is not easy. If decluttering was simple and was easy and didn't cause short circuits in your brain to try and figure out what's going on, then I would be out of a job. So picking that one home based on where that category makes sense with the strategy and the...
heather (07:07.958)
systems that make sense for you and your household sticking with that place. It makes sense and then you reduce what you have until it fits in there. Or you reduce another category in that same space so that, for example, whatever is next to it, you can then reduce that even more and then you've got more room and space for your original category. That is hard to do, but it...
makes such a massive difference to your life when you get it right. So if you choose one home for your kitchen items and everything still doesn't fit, splitting it will creep back in because the overwhelm hasn't gone anywhere, you've just moved it. The category needs to be small enough to live in one place comfortably with room to put things away without a fight or some kind of weird organisational jenga where they only fit in if you put things a certain way and then you got to close the door really quickly.
make sure you have room, 75, 80 % space, 20 % ideally, room to grow. So it's easy to put away. So for books that might mean picking a reading spot and asking, actually, how many books do I actually read? How many can I actually read in my lifetime really? And want to read again or really still want to enjoy again? It may be that you get rid of the worthy ones.
that you're never going to read but they just look good or you think, maybe one day, but you're not really excited about it. And you keep the ones that maybe are a bit embarrassing, bit trashy, but you really love them and you'll read them all the time. Maybe using a library to swap books rather than housing them all in your own home. For toys, it might mean choosing one main toy home and having a really full on call, which seems really terrifying. And I think it's even harder when it's your children's stuff if you've got children because
there's a lot of extra guilt and worry involved in that because it's kind of not your stuff, it's theirs as well, but you're responsible for it and you don't want to like traumatise your child. And it's hard when you first start decuttering because you've not really got used to the positives of living with so much less and you can be really fearful of letting go of volume. It can feel really scary and really wasteful.
heather (09:30.22)
And it also can make you feel like you're going backwards in life, like owning so little. But even if you let go of loads, you've probably still got an awful lot. And you will let go of more later when you see the benefit of it. Like you'll do your house properly, declutter like totally, you'll declutter it properly. And then maybe a year down the line, as you start maintaining, you will be so much more ruthless and get rid of so much more, because you'll realise that you've still got lots.
and you've not missed any of what's gone and life's a lot easier now. So if you're listening to this and thinking, no, I've got like four categories of stuff that I've done this to, that's normal. Like don't worry, splitting a category is the compromise we kind of reach for when a decision feels really hard in the moment. Like you're not bad at it, don't worry. You just didn't know any difference. So now we're analysing it, we know what we've done and we know what we can do to adjust it. It just means you've not decluttered properly that makes it easy to maintain yet.
What you've probably done, which everybody always does to start with, is you've probably just done blitzes where you've blitzed, decluttered, which haven't ever solved the problem properly. And it's just given you a quick reprieve from it and you don't understand why it's gone back to like nightmare again. So those categories that need one proper decision, not two half decisions, work out what they are. See if you can look at one. So this week, have a look round.
See if you can spot a split category. Ask yourself, where do I actually use this? Where makes sense? Like what are the strategies that I need to work with to make it work for our home and our lives? Did you just split it and extend the problem and extend the space? Can you instead amalgamate it all back into one space and let a bit more of it go? So that's it for today's episode. As always, thank you for listening. I do appreciate you.
And thank you for those of you that have either left me review or you've sent me a message because I do read them all. I do appreciate it. I don't always remember to reply back immediately, but at some point I promise I will. So until next time, remember you're not alone. Be kind to yourself and keep untangling.
