10 ways I find motivation to pick things up (sometimes)
...even when I know the space will get messy again very quickly
One of the top questions I get from people about decluttering is “How can I find the motivation to put things away when I know the space will get messy again almost immediately?”
This is a top issue for a lot of people, but particularly for people with young children. I know I’ve been picking up as my toddler is running around dumping out the bins I just put away!
And before I list a bunch of things that motivate me to pick up anyway, sometimes, I want to clarify that for most of us, the reality of life is that some of the time we don’t pick up.
My official plan is to do a five minute pickup once a day. Things stay pretty under control when I’m doing them regularly! (And if they aren’t stay under control even with regular pickups, I see that as a reminder to declutter more—not to spend more time picking things up.)
But if I’m sick, or really tired, or for whatever reason I really don’t want to do a pick up, when I don’t! And I don’t feel bad about it.
A lot of the time I end up doing them though, and so I wanted to share some of the reasons that work for me.
I get to throw away trash (and recycling). When I’m picking up, anything I put into the trash can is something that I won’t ever have to deal with again. If you want to take this chance to interpret trash generously, and get rid of all sorts of thing that you don’t want and don’t want to donate, more power to you! But there’s a lot of value in throwing out random tissues, broken objects, and Amazon boxes (including ones your dogs have ripped into tiny pieces—or is that just me?)
I get to declutter items that I’m sure don’t want. I didn’t used to think of it this way, but now—every time I touch an object is an opportunity for me to ask myself whether it has become an obvious donation. It’s rare that I pick up the toy room without noticing at least one toy that no one is using and no one is attached to. And as with trash, once it leaves my house, I have made a permanent difference.
Once I’ve cleaned, people get more use out of the space. Sometimes things getting messy right after I’ve cleaned them is kind of the point! If I clean off my kitchen counters and then I mess them up again by making a meal, that’s a win! If I clean up all the toys, and then my kids pull out stuff they had forgotten about and get deeply engaged, I’m happy though some toys around out again.
I can identify items that we do sometimes use, but that aren’t quite worth the maintenance cost, or shelf space. Some of the trickier decluttering decisions I’m regularly confronted with are things that my kids do kind of like, but I really don’t like cleaning up. We haven’t had them for years, but once upon a time brain flakes were in this category. My kids liked them! They are actually cool! But are they “now I’ve spent half an hour picking them up and there are still a bunch under the couch” cool? Really big items also have to be extra worth it to earn their space on the shelf. And while items in this category may be harder to decide to get rid of, every time I do a pickup I get more clarity about whether it’s time to let them go. And when I do, it’s usually a huge relief.
Every time I put something away during a pickup, it makes it a little more likely I’ll remember to put it away when I’m done using it. Same with my kids, even though it tends to be a slow process (for me and for them!) And that’s what most of us want—right? It’s funny how it works, but “I might as well put that way now, since otherwise I’ll ‘have to’ put it way during my next pick up,” can be pretty motivating.
The more I pick up, the easier and more natural it feels to pick up more often. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about how habits work, but it really is usually true that things get easier and more natural feeling the more we do them. We don’t have to think about them as hard, and there’s less wasted motion. (The exceptions tend to be important though—if you’ve done a five minute pickup for three days in a row and it’s starting to feel harder than it did at first, I would say then it’s time to figure out what’s going on. Feel free to drop me a line if you want help debugging what’s going on.)
It’s an opportunity for me to establish homes for new items that have come in, or items that have been floating around for a while. Everybody knows that for a home to be under control, we need “a place for everything”, but in order for that to work, we need a way to establish places for items that don’t have one yet! And I do this by using Dana K. White’s first decluttering question, “If I needed this item, where would I look for it first?” And then, once I get an answer, I take it there now.1
When I clear a surface of objects, I almost always clean the surface. When I clear off my kitchen counters. I usually wipe them. When I pick up the living room floor, I vacuum it. Because it will almost certainly get messy again soon, so I don’t want to miss my chance! I promise you that my life is full of many more fun and fulfilling activities, but I have actually gotten to the point where I think “Now that the floor is clean, I get to vacuum!” Because that layer of dirt, dust, and general grossness is now gone forever. Will there be more soon? Of course. But less than if I hadn’t taken this opportunity.
If I’m doing regular pickups, I can figure out my clutter threshold. If I want my house to be easy to maintain, I need to be living under my clutter threshold, which means that the time I’m willing to clean every day needs to be enough that if I’m doing it every day, things aren’t getting worse and worse. For most people, that means being able to pick everything (in a particular room), or almost everything, up in five minutes. If you love picking things up, you can maybe do more! If you are very busy, or you hate picking things up, then maybe you’d keep less, so you can put it all away in three minutes.
After I pick up, I try to enjoy it for a little while. It’s true that it will likely get messy again, but when I have the right attitude, I still enjoy it when it’s clean, (or cleaner), even if it’s just for a few minutes. I can breathe better. And sometimes, ever though I try not to count on it, it even stays cleaner longer than I would have thought.
There’s a little bit more potential complexity to this, because of course it could be that the place you would take it is full! The short answer to that, is that in that case (in order for your home to be under control), now it’s time to take something else out to make space for the thing you are bringing there. Dana gives a longer answer than I just did around 24 minutes into this podcast, and she goes into it in plenty of depth in Decluttering at the Speed of Life.