060. 4 Decluttering & Organizing Myths You Need to Stop Believing

Summer is here—and it’s the perfect time to declutter! But before you start pulling everything out of your closets and kitchen drawers, let’s bust the 4 biggest myths about organizing that might be sabotaging your efforts before you even begin.

In this episode of Organizing for Beautiful Living, I’ll walk you through the often-heard myths that keep so many smart, motivated women stuck in clutter, even when they’re ready to change.

You’ll learn:

• Why going fast or slow with decluttering can both be overwhelming
• How to rethink the idea that organized homes are always tidy
• Why perfectly matching bins and rainbow sorting aren’t actually required
• What to consider before trying to sell your stuff online
• The mindset shift that helped one of my clients finally let go for good

💡 Get practical tips and compassionate insight to start (or restart!) your organizing journey with confidence this summer.

🎁 FREE CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT!
Join my upcoming class: “3 Simple Steps to Painlessly Declutter Your Kitchen in Just a Weekend (and So The Clutter Doesn’t Come Back)”
🎯 This is a fast-decluttering class, perfect for motivated women ready to make real change.
🔗 Join the list at https://fireflybridge.com/update

Get on the wait list for my FREE class: 3 Steps to Painlessly Declutter your Kitchen in just a Weekend! This is how you get no-cry mornings and calm evenings in your kitchen. And I'll show you how you can do it in just a weekend without overwhelm and without getting stuck. And, of course, you'll learn how to make sure the clutter doesn't come back with minimal effort. Go to https://fireflybridge.com/update and get on the wait list!

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Call or text me: 305-563-2292

Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

OK, so Memorial Day just passed, and it really feels like summer now, doesn’t it?
If it weren’t for the mugginess outside here, the heat would be pretty nice. 
There are some things other than how hot it is that signal ‘summer’ in my mind, and maybe these are similar for you where you are.
For me, it’s less local traffic because the school zones are all clear. And sometimes, if I’m driving out mid-morning, I might only see a handful of cars until I reach the main road. It’s really great!
I also see more neighbors out doing yard work, or or doing some sort of outdoor repair or planting stuff.
And of course I hear more kids outside playing, mostly in the evenings just because of how hot it can be during the day.
In general, it’s just quieter, simpler, life feels a little lighter in the summer, at least until we start getting ready for a trip or summer camps, and then yeah the activity picks up again.
I think summer is a great time to declutter because, because of this lightness, even though you’re working. Maybe you have summer Friday hours or maybe Mondays don’t feel as heavy as during the rest of the year. 
And it’s really nice that the days are longer, so by the time you get home, you know you still have hours of daylight left, and you can do more than just get dinner ready and put the kids to bed.
So yeah, summer’s a great time to declutter, and if you’d like to do that, well I want to debunk 4 big organizing myths that might get in the way of you feeling like you successfully accomplished some amount of decluttering this summer, ok? So keep listening.
Hey, welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living, the podcast for working moms and entrepreneur moms that provides sustainable organizing tips for your home, work and life.

I’m Zee Siman, Professional Organizer and Productivity Consultant, and I’m here to share simple ideas that don’t take a lot of time so you can love your home, excel at work, and have the time to enjoy both without stress or overwhelm. 

Ready to get beautifully organized? Let’s make it happen!


A lot of our clutter is emotionally based. It’s really hard for us to get rid of the things we don’t need anymore. We just can’t manage to let go of these things for a number of reasons - it could be a result of how you grew up, it could be a scarcity mindset, or grief about moving from one season of your life into another, guilt about spending family money on something that you just don’t like anymore, sadness about letting something go that belonged to a loved one who’s passed away - lots and lots of emotional reasons we hang on to things.
Beyond decluttering, we have questions about where and how to place stuff in our homes. Our homes are all different sizes, some kitchens don’t have pantries, some don’t have garages or basements.

Well we are smart women, so we look for solutions to our clutter. We look at what our family and friends are doing, and of course we look online, right?

And we see all the advice. A lot of it is conflicting - one person says to touch every single item and check how it makes you feel, one says to put everything in rainbow order, another says to get rid of stuff you haven’t used in 3 months, another says 6 months! 

Which of all this advice are myths, and which are worth following? 

Well let me clear up 4 major myths that might be stopping you from even starting - or even from trying to start decluttering and organizing.


The first myth is that you should declutter by going slowly, a little at a time, or that you should declutter fast and get it done already.

The myth here, I think, is the word “should”. You should declutter slowly a bit at a time, or you should declutter quickly. The truth is that both ways, both can be overwhelming. This might sound cliché, but you’ll only have success decluttering when you choose how fast you want to go based on what’s happening in your life right now, your current mindset, and your ability to make decisions, focus and stay on task.

We all want to get it done, right? So going fast makes sense. Going fast can definitely work when you’re motivated by excitement and possibilities and by drastic changes to your systems and routines and habits. 

But be careful, because if your motivation is actually coming from fear or anger or grief, you might end up making emotional decisions about what to get rid of, and that may hurt you later on.

Going fast can be right at certain points in your life. Moving to a new home tends to motivate some people to declutter and get organized really fast. If you’ve ever moved, have you ever started unpacking at your new house and you found a little garbage bin with the garbage still in it? Well you’re not alone! I’ve seen it more than once. Moving one can of garbage isn’t a big deal, but moving roomfuls of clutter is. You end up not only with the same clutter in your new home that you have to find room for now, but you’re also spending a lot of money with moving supplies and a moving truck and all that to move your clutter with you. 

We - and this is a side story here for a minute - in one of our moves, I remember the movers bringing in uh the boxes into our new house, and I recognized 5 small book boxes where the tape had yellowed because it was so old. We hadn’t unpacked these 5 boxes from the time my husband and I had gotten married and moved into our first apartment. And here we were, years and years and years later, and I did the same thing as I had done for the last 3 or 4 moves before that: I pushed those boxes just as they were into a hallway closet, and I organized stuff around them. I knew what was in them; I just didn’t know what to do with those things. I was delaying making a decision about them.

Moves are overwhelming! We have so much stuff! You really don’t realize how much stuff you have until you have to pack it all.

Those 5 boxes were things we hadn’t looked at in about a decade. But we kept paying to move them from city to city, country to country.

So yes, I wish I had known then how to declutter fast, in a way that works for me and my family, so that our moves could have been less stressful and probably would have cost us less. Because moving with 3 small children to entirely new places where you don’t know anyone is already difficult, right? And the fact that I had stuff in every box it seemed like, that I didn’t know where to place in our new house because the layouts are different, the room and closet sizes are different, that made it even more difficult. 

I remember one day we invited some people over to our new house, and one person came in and said, “Oh! Did you just move in?” I laughed because we’d been in the house for over 5 months, and the living room still had 5 big boxes in it.

But anyway, other times when decluttering fast may work in your favor: 

So let’s say you’re welcoming one of your parents to live with you, and your guest bedroom has been a thorn in your side for a long time. Well, needing that room to be cleared out fast is a great motivator. It provides you with a deadline, and it will allow you to drastically change your family’s systems, routines and habits especially if you’ve been using that room as a catch-all for things that don’t really have a home, or things that you’ve delayed making a decision about, so they just end up in that room.

Also, if you already have the mindset of keeping only what you need or love, and using all of what you have, then decluttering fast fits right into that. You already have your decision criteria when it comes to deciding what to keep and what not to. Maybe all you need, then, is time and a structure to follow to get it done.

All right. What else? Your kids leaving for college or moving into their own place might be a good time for fast decluttering so that they take what they need from home as much as possible so they’re not wasting money buying duplicates. But also, you get a chance to go through their closets and their bookcases and all their drawers, and they’ll probably be ready to get rid of clothes from middle school or notebooks and textbooks they’ve been holding on to.

Now, going fast means you need structure to get it done. Going into your guest bedroom and pulling everything out and throwing stuff around is a recipe for burnout, so guidance and structure is key. I’m going to toot my own horn for a second here, but this is why working with me works, because I have the experience to gauge how ready you may be to go fast. Joining my group program to do it together also works because this decision of how fast or how slow you should go is one of the first things that we do.

When might it be way too overwhelming to go fast with decluttering? When you’ve just lost a loved one, and you’re grieving or angry. When you’ve gone through a divorce and you’re also grieving and angry. When you’re so stressed by your work and your life that you can’t sit for a moment and make a clear, structured plan about decluttering, and when you have a scarcity mindset, so getting rid of practically anything feels like it might be a disastrous decision that you’ll regret later.

Going slowly can be just as overwhelming as going fast.
You hear that decluttering and organizing 10 minutes at a time is a great approach, so you try it. Well, that can fizzle about 3 days in because progress is slow, yes, decision-making is slow, and if there’s no deadline, there’s no end point.

Now I’m not saying that there’s an end point to organizing, that one day, you won’t ever declutter or organize ever again. No, we will declutter and organize as we transition through the phases of our lives, that’s inevitable. But there is a point where you have to be able to live in your home, enjoy your home, be present with your family, your friends, your hobbies and not constantly have decluttering and organizing projects in front of you.

So that’s what I see sometimes when people call me and say yes, I’ve tried organizing by starting small and doing 10 minutes at a time, but I feel like I’m getting nowhere. They get overwhelmed and discouraged.

But going slowly works, it absolutely does, when you have a structure and a deadline. And accountability is a big deal. It’s not that you need to be accountable to anyone else - you’re not getting graded if you don’t finish something by a certain date, no. It’s about having someone help you to be accountable to yourself, to remind you of what you’re working towards, and how far you’ve come. Tooting my own horn again, because I help women with this whether they live here in Miami, or they live across the world, and we work online to create this guidance and accountability.

And of course it helps to have a deadline - a move can be a big one, but even something like an August vacation coming up can help you to slowly declutter your closet, or a new baby coming gives you a loose deadline to declutter the kids’ toys and check on the status of your baby gear.

In both cases, going fast or going slow, the common thread is having a good, simple maintenance plan that doesn’t feel like a full time job apart from your real full time job! A good maintenance plan involves your systems, routines and habits. And micro-decluttering and decluttering during your life transitions, like I mentioned, are habits that you develop and integrate naturally into your daily life so that you’re not living with a never-ending string of organizing projects. That’s how you keep the clutter from coming back, and you keep whatever you’ve organized in good shape.

The second myth is that your decluttered and organized home shouldn’t ever be messy.
My home is messy. Right now on the table in front of me are some snack bowls, a cup of water, there are dog toys all over the family room floor, my sneakers from my workout this morning aren’t back in my closet, there are some papers on the kitchen counter.

I live with other people. We have kids and a dog. There is not a chance that my house will be pristine with nothing out of place at any moment of the day.

Your home is meant to be lived in, so it will get messy! When you invite friends for dinner, you expect a spill or two, you expect a pile of dirty dishes. That doesn’t magically go away.

Being organized for beautiful living, though, means that you’re living your beautiful life in a home you love with the people you love. But it’s not without structure. You are organized for the beautiful living. So everything has a home, meaning that you can be not stressed out about the mess because you know that everything has a spot to be put away.

All the dishes, once they’re clean, they have a spot in your cabinets and your drawers. All the dog’s toys have a home in a basket in the family room. My sneakers have a spot waiting for them in my closet. The kids’ toys all have a space to be put away.

Having that clarity in your mind, knowing that everything has a place to go when you’re ready to put it away, is what keeps you organized for beautiful living.

It’s when things enter your home and you don’t have a home for them, you don’t have a space for them, that’s when clutter creeps in, and a messy house will remain messy and disorganized.

The third myth is that your home storage should be matching, minimalist, and expensive.
I don’t know if anyone actually says that out loud, but it’s definitely implied by the Instagram, Pinterest and TikToks out there, right?

Arranging in rainbow order, decanting all your grains and cereals and coffees and teas into matching containers with matching vinyl labels, every single surface is 100% clear all the time - all of these things are choices and preferences, not rules. They’re certainly not necessary in order for you and your home to be organized.

Half my spice jars don’t match. I have non-matching mason jars and I sometimes label my jars with blue painter’s tape. What??

When I begin working with a client, the first thing we start with is Clarify, it’s the 1st step of my 5-step CLEAR5 framework. Again, a structure. The CLEAR5 Framework is a  structure and we need some structure. It’s why I always do a Home Clutter Audit consultation for about 15 minutes with everyone to chat with you, understand where you are in your life and what’s happening in your home so I can see how best to help you.

But this Clarify step is all about understanding your choices, your preferences and your desires. What does that mean? Well those are your values. That’s where I understand what your values are.

One of my values is sustainability. I want to live a more sustainable life, I want to teach my kids how to live more sustainable lives, but bit by bit. I’m never going to go off the grid and I don’t think I’ll own chickens, though I love to see friends raise chickens and harvest eggs and all that. But that’s not me. So I will declutter and organize my house with sustainability as a primary value, in a way that fits into the way I live, a way I know I can stick with or keep up with.

But I also prefer clear countertops and clear surfaces. I’m really affected by stuff on surfaces, and I can’t work well without starting with a clear surface. So I value having a space to store most of our kitchen stuff, a space to store all the things in my office so only the bare necessities, like my computer and my notebook, these you know 2 drawings that my daughter made, you know the necessities, are on my desk when I start working. In the kitchen, I always tend to put things away before I start cooking or preparing lunch boxes or whatever. I need it to be clear so I can focus better on what I’m doing.

So for me, hidden storage, like having most things behind doors or drawers, is better. It’s my preference. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I keep my toaster, my toaster oven, the blender and stand mixer all in lower cabinets behind closed doors. I’m very picky about what I allow to live on top of my counters. I try to have a home to put everything away.

But it doesn’t all have to be matching, it doesn’t all have to be custom. For me, simply having things put away makes me feel like my house is clean, my mind is clear, and that makes me happy! I don’t mind much if my cookies stay in their crazy-colored containers, as long as they can be put away in the snacks cabinet and the door can close.

You might be totally different. You might love having your salt and pepper shaker and a pretty candle on a beautiful tray on your kitchen island. You might enjoy having your matching canisters of coffee and tea and sugar out next to your coffee maker. That’s fine. Of course you can do that, and these objects might have meaning for you. If that’s your assigned home for these things because they make you happy to see them there and they make it easier for you to get stuff done, perfect.

A minimalist look isn’t for everyone, and lots of people love to have decorative things on every surface, and there are ways to do it and have it look good, not cluttered like there’s no rhyme or reason for each of these things. And I’ll be doing an episode on this coming up. 

But you don’t have to get caught up in the labels. Like minimalist and maximalist, those mean different things to different people, right? Everything is relative. We work to find your “right amount” and “right style” for you.


And the fourth myth is that your stuff is worth money.
This hurts. It really does, because real, hard-earned money was spent on nearly every item in your house. You spent some of it, and that’s your family’ money, right? So there’s guilt tied up in these items that you’ve bought. But there’s also the things you’ve maybe inherited, or things that someone gave you. Sets of china, silver, a stamp collection, old books, or Lladro collections. Or you have vintage clothing in your closet. 

And it all could be worth good money, right?

Not only the old, rare stuff, but also the leather sofa you bought, the Pottery Barn huge decorative jars and vases that you bought.

It’s all worth something, sure, but so is your time, so is your energy. The first thing you need to do is truly to research. What has this exact thing sold for recently on auction sites or on Ebay? Have you checked Facebook Marketplace to see what things have sold for? For rarer or high-end items, you need to have an appraiser take a look at what you have and tell you realistically what the market looks like for those items. Only when you do the research can you really know what you can expect if you think you’d like to sell things that you don’t want to keep, and that maybe other family members don’t want either.

That’s how you don’t get frustrated that things are sitting on online sites and not selling for weeks or months, and that you don’t waste your time and energy preparing, photographing and listing and tracking those online sales on these online resale sites.

High-end or rare items could be well worth it to sell. 

But for other items in your house, there are other options. You could try consignment, where you just give all these items to a consigner and they will take a percentage of what they’re able to resell your stuff for. You can use online marketplaces yourself of course, and be prepared for the amount of time it takes to list, track and sell things, especially when potential buyers pass on the sale at the last minute. You can donate to organizations and ask for a donation receipt you can use when you file your taxes. You can use your buy nothing groups, and give these things to people who want them, no strings attached. But here you know your things are being taken by families who want them.

You can work with your neighbors and have a neighborhood garage sale, if you like the work involved in doing this, and you have a plan to dispose of whatever’s left over.

All of these things can work, and it can be fulfilling and rewarding to do them if you’re realistic about the monetary value of your stuff. Otherwise, it could be a huge disappointment, which could stop your decluttering in its tracks. Disappointment hurts, and it messes with our motivation.

All right, so don’t let these big 4 organizing and decluttering myths stop you before you even start.

Remember, decluttering slowly or decluttering quickly can both be overwhelming, so you need to choose which is best for you based on your current situation, your mindset, and what your motivations are.

Your decluttered and organized home will be messy at times because you are living your beautiful life in it! But that mess won’t stress you if you know you have specific homes for everything, and you can tidy up relatively quickly.

Your home storage doesn’t have to be minimalistic, expensive or matching to be organized and decluttered. These things are based on preference and choice alone, and you can minimize the visual clutter by opting for hidden storage, meaning behind doors or drawers.

And remember that just because you spent money on all the stuff in your home doesn’t mean that you can recoup that money. Do your homework to research what the market will bear for your things.

I had a client a few years ago who is also a good friend now, and she often tells me that what clicked for her one day when she was part of a group program I did and I said at some point that all the stuff in our house was money at some point. But that money is spent. That money’s gone. For things you spent your money on that increase with value over time, you may get that money back if you want. But for the rest? You need to decide how much of a burden you’re going to allow that spent money to have over you. How much of a burden you’re allowing those things, those items in your house, to have on you.

Because owning stuff IS a burden! You have to find space to keep it, you have to clean it, you have to protect it. So if you’re not using it or you don’t love it, why are you spending your energy and limited space in your house to keep and protect it? You can make the choice to let it go, in whatever way is most comfortable for you.


I’m going to be giving a free class coming up to show you how to Painlessly Declutter Your Kitchen in Just a Weekend (and So The Clutter Doesn’t Come Back). This is a declutter-fast class, so it’s not for everyone, but if you think it might be for you, go to fireflybridge.com/update and you’ll be on the waiting list for it. It’s a free class. I’ll put the link into the show notes for you. It’s fireflybridge.com/update. You can also email me at support@fireflybridge.com or DM me on Instagram @fireflybridgeorganizing if you have any doubts whether it’s for you or not. We can chat about it real quick and I’ll let you know.
 
Thank you for spending time with me. Have a beautifully organized week, and I’ll see you on the next episode!