Tough Truths About Time
BREAKING OLD AND MAKING NEW HABITS TAKES TIME
To Clear your Clutter Forever, so you never again have to spend time going through backlog clutter, you must break old automatic bad habits and make new automatic good habits.
Only then will you be able to control and maintain a Clutter Free Home with minimum time and effort.
If you know anyone who has a clutter free home and you ask them how they do it, they’ll probably tell you they don’t know, or it just comes naturally, they just ‘know’ what to do, or they don’t really do anything and they don’t know what all the fuss is about.
Come to think of it, that’s what a lot of the ‘experts’ you see on the TV programmes say…..
What they’re actually telling us when they say these things is that they have automatic habits they don’t even realise they’ve got that enable them to maintain a clutter free home.
For example, if you’re a driver and you’ve been driving for years or decades, you probably don’t consciously think about ‘how’ to drive – you just get in the car and drive. It’s an automatic habit.
When you leave your home, do you consciously lock your front door? It’s probably an automatic habit. Perhaps like me you’ve had that experience where later in the day you wonder if you did lock the front door, and only when you consciously think about it do you start to question yourself.
‘Naturally’ clutter free people just have automatic habits that mean, for example, they put things back where they belong in their home, and make decisions quickly about whether they need or will use something in the near future.
By comaprison, we have automatic habits of putting things where there’s space because we don’t have a clearly defined home forhtem, and we make decisions on impulse.
You will NEVER successfully clear your clutter and STAY clutter free forever by having a blitz, because not only do you have to be AWARE of what automatic bad habits you have, you also have to consciously do the OPPOSITE thing to break the bad habit and create the new, Clutter Controlling habit that all these other people have. T
That takes time.
Furthermore, you have to consciously NOT do your automatic bad habit between 66 and 254 times to break it. The bad news is, the older you get the more you have to repeat it and the closer to the 254 times you have to do it to make it a new habit.
The good news is, people over the age of 55 who decide to break an old habit and make a new habits are more successful at achieving it than those under the age of 55 – probably because they have enough life experience by that age to know which habits are helping or hindering them in their life, and therefore which are going to be worth their limited time, energy, effort and frustration to break and make.
Find Out What Your Bad Habits Are
- Ask your partner, friends or family (if they live in the same home as you) what your bad habits are. Tell them you want to break some bad habits that are causing the clutter. Explain that you’ve learnt that you’re going to have to consciously NOT do that bad habit for 254 days to break it – this will manage their expectations that you’re not going to do this over night.
- Find a role model – a friend, a family member, someone on a TV programme, anyone who is clutter free and makes it look effortless. Take some time to study them. What do they do that you don’t do? It may be the smallest thing, like picking up the post/mail every day and immediatley putting the junk mail in the recycling box. Write down everything they do, and honestly ask yourself if you do those things.
How to Break a Bad Habit and Create a Good Habit
- Pick just one bad habit and decide what the new GOOD habit you want or need instead is. Trying to change more than 1 at a time is unrealistic and you’re setting yourself up to fail if you try more.
- Write the new habit you want on a piece of paper and put it somewhere you’ll see every day e.g. fridge, the back of your front door etc.
- In your Success / Gratitude Journal, every day you do that new habit, list it as a success.
- At the top of each Journal page, record the total number of time’s you’ve repeated that new habit. Notice as the total goes from single to double digets, then to tripple digets.
When you get to triple digits, pick another new habit to start building alongside this one.
7 Habits we need to BREAK and MAKE if we want to become Clutter Free FOREVER
| HABIT, YOU NEED TO BREAK | HABIT, YOU NEED TO MAKE | |
| 1 | Giving Up (trying to clear our clutter) | Getting the regular support you need to get through the bad days and tough weeks we ALL have on our Journey |
| 2 | Shopping without a list which means we impulse buy extras or what we THINK we need rather than what we actually need and use | Doing a weekly meal plan, creating a shopping list around what that meal plan, and only buying what’s on the list |
| 3 | Keeping paper versions of information ‘just in case’ or for ‘reference’ | Thinking about WHEN you’re likely to need it and if you really do NEED to keep that information, scanning or photographing it instead of keeping the paper copy |
| 4 | Impulse buying things because of how they make us FEEL rather than because we NEED them and will use them quickly | Not watching the TV shopping channels, unsubscribing from e-mails, doing the weekly Shopping Challenge and meal plan |
| 5 | Putting things down where there’s space | Thinking about whether we WILL actually use things – and if not let go of it |
| 6 | Wanting to buy or receive physical things as gifts | Asking for experiences and people’s time as gifts instead of physical things |
| 7 | Only checking your bank account for how much is in there NOW (only showing the past) | Doing a weekly Paperwork Clutter Clearing Session (to plan for the future) |
If you need help to break and make your Clutter habits, come and join some other people who are breaking and making habits in the Social Gatherings: https://www.clutterclearing.net/private-support/
