Exorcizing the Clutter

You lie awake at night, and it whispers to you. The ghost continues to bemoan their unfinished business as you toss and turn. After a sleepless night, you haul yourself out of bed, determined that today you will confront what it is that haunts you most. You wander down the hallway, dimly lit by the sunset peeking through the windows. The voice gets louder as you approach, almost deafening in your ears. You face the closet, take a deep breath, and open the folding doors. There it is: your ghost.

The clutter and junk of the hallway closet come crashing down on top of you, swallowing you up, and you sigh as you realize, there is no way I’ll ever conquer this.

We all have places like that in our homes – ones that I often refer to as “stash and dash” spots. It began innocently enough, with quickly throwing things in a closet on a day guests were coming over. But then you put other things there that you didn’t know what to do with. Then a few more. Now it’s a spot that you can’t even face because it’s filled with too many odds and ends to make sense of.

Sure, you could pull it all out at once and end up wishing you had just moved rather than start this project. You could hire a professional organizer to clean up your own mess. You might even consider hiring an exorcist depending on how bad it is.

Or you could start a Streak. Because here’s the thing: Your closet didn’t get like that overnight, so expecting yourself to sort through it all in an afternoon is equally as unrealistic. Instead, tackle one small step at a time. Make it so laughably simple that you have no choice but to work on it little by little. Your streak might be: Make a decision about one item in the closet daily. While it doesn’t sound like much, you’ll find that some days you handle five items. Or ten. Even if you only make one decision each day, you’re still staying ahead of the clutter. After 50 days or 100 days, you’ll find that you can actually open the closet without anything falling out. Maybe you’ll even enjoy looking at it for once.

We might not have actual skeletons in our closest, but sometimes it feels like it. The beauty of Streaking is that nothing gets accomplished in one day, but any day can be Day One. We all start with small, consistent steps that lead to big changes. 

Ready to conquer your clutter? Download The Streaking App to get started!