You don't have to live overwhelmed by stuff—you can get rid of clutter for good! Decluttering expert Dana White identifies the emotional challenges that make it difficult to declutter and provides workable solutions to break through and make progress. While the world seems to be in love with the idea of tiny houses and minimalism, many of us simply can't purge it all and start from nothing. Yet a home with too much stuff is difficult to maintain, so where do we begin? Add in paralyzing emotional attachments and constant life challenges, and it can feel almost impossible to make real decluttering progress. In Decluttering at the Speed of Life, decluttering expert and author Dana White identifies the mindsets and emotional challenges that make it difficult to declutter. In her signature humorous approach, she provides workable solutions to break through these struggles and get clutter out—for good! Not only does Dana provide strategies, but she dives deep into how to implement them, no matter the reader's clutter level or emotional resistance to decluttering. She helps identify procrasticlutter—the stuff that will get done eventually so it doesn't seem urgent—as well as how to make progress when there's no time to declutter. In Decluttering at the Speed of Life, Dana’s chapters cover: Why You Need This Book (You Know Why) Your Unique Home Decluttering in the Midst of Real Life Change Your Mind, Change Your Home Breaking Through Your Decluttering Delusions Working It Out Room by Room Helping Others Declutter As long as we're living and breathing, new clutter will appear. The good news is that by following Dana’s advice, decluttering will get easier, become more natural, and require significantly fewer hours, less emotional bandwidth, and little to no sweat to keep going. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780718080600 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Nelson Thomas Inc. Publication Date: 02-27-2018 Pages: 240 Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)About the Author Dana K. White is a blogger, podcaster, speaker, and (much to her own surprise) a decluttering expert. She taught both English and theatre arts before leaving her job to make her family her life’s work. In an attempt to get her home under control, Dana started blogging as “Nony” (short for anonymous) at A Slob Comes Clean. Dana soon realized she was not alone in her housekeeping struggles and in her feelings of shame. Today, Dana shares realistic home management strategies with her signature humor and a message of hope for the hopelessly messy through her blog, weekly podcasts, and videos. Dana lives with her husband and three kids just outside of Dallas, Texas.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt CHAPTER 1 WHAT DECLUTTERING IS AND ISN'T Decluttering is stuff you don't need leaving your house. And that's really all it is. If five things leave or five hundred things leave, you've succeeded. Decluttering isn't Stuff Shifting. It isn't rearranging or buying a new shelving unit or sorting into slots or drawers or baskets. Decluttering isn't organizing. When I realized decluttering and organizing were two different things and that it was okay to just declutter, I felt a weight lift off my soul. I no longer slumped my shoulders in defeat before I even started, knowing from experience that whatever "solution" I might create would surely fail like all the others had. Instead, I purged. I focused solely on getting things we didn't need out of our house. When I did that, a weight lifted off my home as well. As things left, life was easier, and my home functioned better than it had after any of my attempts at organizing, just because there was less. Eventually, I understood that is what decluttering actually is: achieving less. But before we jump in, I want to go over some key terms. Through my own decluttering escapades I've come up with ways of explaining things to myself. Those of you who already know me and my made-up decluttering language will nod along. But if you are new to my style of decluttering, don't get overwhelmed. We're going to apply these concepts to each area of your home. If anything makes you say, "Wha ...? I don't get that ..." I promise you'll get it as you read the book. We'll go step by step through your home and your hang-ups. My favorite made-up word is deslobification. It's what I call the process through which I improved my own home from a constant state of oh-my-word-what-is-wrong-with-me to I-can-totally-do-this-even-though-it's-never-going-to-be-perfect. Going from a worse-than-bad home to a livable one is how I learned these strategies and principles, and how I found a way to translate concepts that other people seemed to be born knowing into words that make sense to me and a lot of other people. I definitely didn't make up the word clutter, but I did make up a definition for it that helped me get it out of my house. I define clutter as anything I can't keep under control. If a space in my home consistently gets out of control, I have too much stuff in that space. I have clutter. Once I defined clutter this way, I finally understood why my friend and I can buy the same décor, and her house looks like a magazine but mine looks like a thrift store. I have a Clutter Threshold, and it's unique to me. My Clutter Threshold is the point at which stuff becomes clutter in my home. When I'm living above my Clutter Threshold, there's more stuff in my home than I can handle, and my house is consistently out of control. Living under my Clutter Threshold helps my home stay more naturally under control. I found mine (and you'll find yours) through decluttering. But it wasn't easy. I suffered from Decluttering Paralysis, a real phenomenon that makes me unable to move when facing an overwhelming mess. I cured it by moving. By starting with the easy stuff. And strangely, every time I did something easy, the space looked better, and I was less overwhelmed. Not that I don't make mistakes. I totally do. But I've accepted that while Decluttering Regret (the realization that I need something after I declutter it) isn't fun, I've survived every time. And the peace I feel over a home that's easier to manage outweighs the frustration I feel over having to write "medium-sized cutting board" on my shopping list. I accepted that people with homes that are consistently under control prefer living with regret over living with clutter. I want to be one of those people. But even though Decluttering Paralysis and Decluttering Regret are terms that make me sigh, this one gives me hope: Decluttering Momentum. It's a real phenomenon. By starting with easy stuff and working through the steps I'm sharing in this book, I saw visible, measurable improvement in my home. As my home changed, I changed. And decluttering got easier and easier. I'm so excited for you to experience that too. CHAPTER 2 MY CLUTTER HISTORY I had to develop decluttering strategies out of necessity. I couldn't go on living the way I'd been living, with stuff (quite literally) spilling out of every cabinet door, covering every surface, and taking up every last available space in my home. I had to dig my way out, and it was the most unnatural thing I'd ever done. If I'm left to my natural tendencies, clutter builds, and clutter stays. I didn't know it was clutter. I thought it was all amazingly useful stuff. I just needed a moment to remember why I'd considered it useful in the moment I brought it through my front (or side or back) door. And that totally logical thinking was how I ended up in a place where I couldn't function in my own home. I couldn't even use my second largest room, and the rooms I could use were difficult to use because I had to work around all sorts of extra and unnecessary things, even though I didn't realize they were extra and unnecessary. You want proof I know what it's like to deal with clutter? When my husband and I got married, he was thirty-two and I was twenty-five. We'd each lived alone and had whatever we needed to live alone. Our marriage meant moving into one apartment that was, honestly, pretty large for a newly married couple just starting out. If I remember correctly, it was 960 square feet. In that 960 square feet we had three dining tables. One formal dining table was in the dining area. Another formal dining table was awkwardly shoved in the teeny-tiny breakfast nook. And the small table (the one that actually made sense for a newlywed couple to have) was in the room we used for storage. The room that had boxes piled to the ceiling. Eighteen years later I see the ridiculousness of our table situation, but at the time it didn't seem even a little bit strange. The apartment wasn't our "real" house. It was temporary. Who knew what kind of home or dining-area situation our future would bring? Why in the world wouldn't I keep all three tables until we knew what we needed in our real house? We were ready for the future and all the possibilities it could possibly bring. Even the dining area (that fit one of the full-sized formal dining tables) was cramped. The walls were stacked waist high (at least) with more storage boxes full of totally-useful-in-the-future stuff. Or at least I assumed they were full of useful-in-the-future stuff. I didn't remember what was inside them. Then we moved, and the house we moved into was a real house. As we left that first apartment, my parents hired professional movers as a gift to us. I was about four months pregnant with our first child, and I appreciated their thoughtfulness so much. Those movers had no idea what they were getting into when they agreed to pack up and move our stuff. One of the men spent the entire day in my kitchen. My teeny-tiny kitchen in the apartment where exactly zero formal dinner parties had been held. All day. Just packing dishes. We moved into our 1,752-square-foot real home from the 960-square-foot apartment and purged huge amounts of excess that we'd never needed. And we still ended up with more stuff than