Pure and Clutter Madness

With spring comes spring cleaning, a tradition rigorously engaged by some and rigorously avoided by others. If you’re anything like me, then you’re probably in the latter category. You probably also have been saving your movie ticket stubs since 1995.  And you have a collection of random objects that you found in the street, including a wooden rabbit and a motorcycle spark plug. And you consider the space under your bed as good a place as any to keep your dirty dishes. Okay, you’re probably not like me.

But for hoarders and non-hoarders alike, purging excess junk is a good idea, and for most households it’s a constant priority. It seems no matter how much you discard, junk has a way of multiplying and seizing new territory.  

Best-selling author and professional organizer Jamie Novak spoke at Monmouth County Library Monday night with tips on how to stop clutter from taking over our homes and our lives.

Novak combined humor and anecdotes to make her solutions relatable. From the onset, the audience connected to her presentation with laughter and murmurs of acknowledgement. Novak presented herself not as a detached outsider, but as one intimate with the troubles of over-accumulation.

“Perfectionists have more clutter than the rest of us because we want to get it just right,” Novak said.

She began by addressing the problem of paper piles, which tend to accumulate on kitchen tables and threaten to topple in a papery deluge. These usually include a mixture of bills, event flyers, shopping catalogues, and greeting cards. She recommended transferring these stacks to a desk top filing system. All this requires is a medium-sized box with an open top to store papers and sticky pad notes to label them.

“I’m not a fan of filing cabinets,” Novak said. “They tend to accumulate a lot of stuff.”

Novak’s solutions stress using what you have available at home instead of investing in storage equipment. For example, she suggests storing macaroni art work made by toddlers in an unused pizza box, which can be requested with any pizza delivery. Plastic bags fit easily into an empty tissue box. Salad tongs can be put in a paper towel roll so they don’t spring open and jam your utensil drawer.

Novak emphasized getting organized in small, manageable steps; otherwise, clean-up projects can become overwhelming and are easily abandoned. She proposed choosing an area that’s cluttered and devoting eighteen minutes to it a day.

“We’ve identified where we’re going to work, we’ve got eighteen minutes on the clock and we’re going in. We’re not making piles, we’re making decisions. Decide what needs to be done with the object and take the action,” Novak said.

The object can be kept, donated, recycled, thrown away, or obliterated. The important thing is to decide its fate, see it carried out, and move on. Assigning each object to a new location will only make the mess more complicated. You want to eliminate clutter, not shuffle it around.

Perhaps most important to Novak’s method is knowing why you have to get organized. The reason could be as simple as you want to see the red oak finish on your kitchen table again. Once you have a reason it will be easier to motivate yourself to see the project through, and you’ll feel more fulfilled when it’s accomplished.

“We want to set you up to succeed and how that happens is working successfully in bite-sized increments,” Novak said.

Novak will be speaking at Johnson Public Library in Hackensack, NJ on Monday, May 23, and has more tour dates in June. Her books Stop Throwing Money Away and The Get Organized Answer Book are available for purchase from Novak’s Web site .

As for me, I’ve got eighteen minutes to spare. I’m going to go sort through my old Genesis records. Happy spring cleaning!