Here’s a clutter challenge – spend 15 minutes today cleaning up one cluttered area in your home. Look for ways to make it happen (commercials, anyone?).

Pick one drawer, or one shelf, or your purse, or the door of your freezer, or the crisper of your fridge, or the corner of your desk, or that table by the door, or your nightstand. Yeah, we could go on, but you get the idea.

You may think all the stuff sitting around your house isn’t really hurting anything. But, really, it kind of is.

Clutter wastes your time. Spending time looking for the important things buried in the not-so-important and unorganized stacks and boxes. Did you know that 15 minutes a day looking for misplaced items adds up to 90 wasted hours in one year? That’s a lot of time to do something fun.

Clutter wastes money. When you can’t find the important and useful things, you (well, we) go out and replace them with new ones. Or if you lose receipts, you can’t return the things you don’t want. That’s money that could be spent on something fun.

Clutter wastes energy, both physical and emotional. You have to move, clean, and work around your stacks and piles – not fun and not easy. Then there’s the emotional drain of not having a clean, quiet living space. If you are not comfortable in your own home, where can you be comfortable at all?

Clutter is dangerous. Clutter can cause household accidents and injuries. Old boxes in a dank basement can become a breeding ground for mold, and cardboard and paper clutter is a possible fire hazard. Let’s not even think about the hazardous waste clutter that’s probably in the garage.

Fifteen minutes a day makes a big difference in cleaning up the clutter. Challenge yourself to take it on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 9:59 am and is filed under Home, Organizational tips for home and life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.