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[quote=Anonymous]The key to decluttering is psychological, it amounts to coming to two realizations: 
1. Clutter is anything that doesn't have a place.
2. If you want a decluttered house, the amount of stuff you can have in your house is limited by the places you have to put it.

It means changing your mindset from "do I need this?" to "does this object rate the amount of storage space it requires, given that the space I have is limited?"

It helps to be aware of some of the underlying psychology, such as the sunk cost fallacy -- that what you paid for something in the past matters now -- or the endowment effect, which causes you value something you possess simply because it's yours. When you assess the value of something, you shouldn't think about what you paid for it, you should think, "If I were walking down the street and this was on the curb with a sign that said 'Free,' would I pick it up?"

Sorting through a lot of stuff requires making a lot of decisions, and decision fatigue is real. One way to stay focused is to limit the scope of decisions. Go through a room or even a closet and make a simple binary decision: Does this object belong in this room?  If not, put it outside and deal with it later.

Later, you can go through the pile and sort it three ways: keep, give away, throw away.

If in this process you find that an object moves from room to room without ever finding a home that's a sign that it needs to leave the house. [/quote]

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