357 - 2020 Declutter Hot Spots

Organize 365 Podcast

Lisa Woodruff

Lisawoodruff, Education, Self-improvement, Entrepreneurship, Business

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2020

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s podcast, I want to inspire you to take quick action to address the clutter hotspots in your home. A hotspot is anywhere that paper or physical stuff accumulates. As our lives change, we often use our homes in ways that are different from the organizational systems we have already set up. This leads to stuff sitting out and making hotspots. There are three major reasons a clutter hotspot develops:

You have not made a decision about an item.
You have a project you are deferring (not taking action on right now).
You have brought new items into your living space that need to be given a home.

In the podcast, I will walk you through several different hotspots that have popped up in my own home during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how I was able to declutter them. I bought some food items but did not have a plan to actually prepare them for a specific meal, so they were left out. Some hotspots were from aspirational purchases where I purchased things I thought I wanted to do (breaking my own 24-hour rule), and left the items out in our living space. Another hotspot was from purchasing new kinds of supplies for the pandemic (gloves, masks, hand sanitizer) without a place to store them or a sense of how many we needed to store in our home.

I want you to take some time and look around your home for your hotspots. Which of the reasons above are these items sitting out randomly around the house? What can you do with your items? What can you donate? What can you work on right away? What can you finish up?

As you look for solutions, think about the Sunday Basket® has helped to eliminate your paper clutter hotspots from your kitchen counter. You know where to put items while you make a decision, you have a place to store your paper that is supporting deferred projects, and you have a home for every piece of paper that enters your home!

Make your home function for the way you use it every day, the way your family lives right now in the present moment. I want you to know that if you need it, you have #permissiongranted to choose functional organizing for your actual daily life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Organized 365 Podcast. I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert and motivational speaker Lisa Woodruff.
0:15.8	This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting functional
0:21.5	organizing in your home. I have so much to share with you so
0:25.7	let's get started. Today I want to talk about decluttering hot spots. Do you know what a hotspot is? So a hotspot is basically
0:37.2	anywhere that paper things accumulate. I have a friend who when our kids were a little she had a lot of
0:46.1	hot spots and she was getting ready to move and she said in the new house I move
0:49.8	into all of the tops of everything are going to be at an angle so that if you go to
0:55.0	set anything down it's going to fall right on the floor so that there can't possibly
0:58.5	be any hot spots because I won't have any flat surfaces in my entire house and I laughed but I think about that often.
1:06.2	She also said she was going to make her bathrooms out of Teflon so that toothpaste didn't stick to anything. She's a brilliant friend. That's all I have to say
1:14.7	about that. Hot spots. The top of your dresser, the bathroom counter, the kitchen counter, wherever
1:21.6	you drop everything when you come in.
1:23.9	The laundrom, the garage, your bedroom.
1:28.0	Places where little piles of it,
1:29.9	you get the room clean and organized.
1:32.0	And the next thing you know, there's just one or two things there and then 15 and then 50 and then you can't even see anymore.
1:37.0	Like just things just naturally tend to accumulate there.
1:41.0	How do we declutter hot spots? So again we are going to create a
1:46.2	rule and we're going to think about how these hot spots get to be. Almost
1:51.0	every hot spot that you have is because you haven't made a decision yet about the item and you don't know where to put it while you're deciding which is why we have the Sunday basket. That's where you put all the small things
2:04.5	and all the little papers. But these are things that don't fit in the Sunday basket, so you
2:08.2	haven't made a decision. And the other thing is, you have not changed your space to accommodate your daily life.
	...

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