Decluttering At The Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle With Stuff by Dana K. White

Decluttering At The Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle With Stuff by Dana K. White

240 pages

Published February 2018 by Nelson, Thomas Inc. 

Publisher's Summary:

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.

My Thoughts: 

You may well be wondering why someone who has read so many books about decluttering, done 40 Bags In 40 Days so many times, and who follows multiple organizing/simplifying accounts on social media would need to read yet another book about decluttering. Fair enough. Even I wondered why I was checking out another book about decluttering. But Myquillen Smith, the Cozy Minimalist, recommended it and she recommended this one as one of her favorites. So here we are. 

And guess what? 

I learned a different way to view and attack decluttering. Some of what White says goes entirely against what I've learned before but I can certainly see the logic of it, especially for those who are new to decluttering. 

White speaks from experience; while she may not have met the dictionary definition of "hoarder," she started married life in a house that already had too much in it when two complete households merged with no reduction in "stuff." White is a person that can't pass up a good bargain and held on to things because they "might" be useful in the future. Then kids came along, items were inherited, hobbies came and went. She knows how hard it is to start the process and how much it takes to change a mindset. 

Thus was born a desire to reset her life and along the way she has developed a system that worked for her and has now worked for thousands of others. White hosts a podcast, writes a blog, and is the author of three books. She's speaks from her own experience and those of people who have reached out to her. 

Here's what differed in her approach from other approaches I've learned about: 

• She advocates using the Visibility Rule: start with the most visible spaces first. White advises this will ensure the results of efforts will be visible which will inspire readers to keep going and increase decluttering energy. 
• She does not advocate emptying a space, because you might lose steam part way through the process and end up with a bigger mess than you started with or become so overwhelmed that you just stop. 
• She does not, in this book at least, correlate decluttering with organizing. White wants it to be clear that you cannot even think about organizing until after you have completely decluttered and maybe not even then. Perhaps just keeping things decluttered will be enough, using her steps, to keep things relatively organized. 

In every space White recommends readers follow five steps: 

• Step 1: Trash - this one is self-explanatory and the easiest of the steps. Start with the most visible mess and do as much as you can in the time you have. 
• Step 2: Do The Easy Stuff - "Easy stuff is the stuff that has an established home somewhere else." What's different for me in this step is that White advocates taking each thing you find that's out of place to the correct place immediately; she suggests that putting in a box to handle later causes a potential new problem. 
• Step 3: Duh Clutter - these are things that you immediately can see need to be donated. 
• Step 4: Ask the Two Decluttering Questions - 
• #1 - If I needed this item, where would I look for it first? Take it there immediately. 
• #2 - If I needed this item, would it ever occur to me that I already had one? This might be something you use so rarely that you forget you own it and buy another without thinking to look for it. 
• Step 5: Make It Fit - like other decluttering experts, White urges readers to think of their spaces as containers. Your home is a container; each room, each closet, each cupboard, each drawer is a container. First consolidate the things you've been left with after the first four steps and then purge down to the limits of the container. 

White takes readers through each of these steps, room by room, including hobby rooms and storage spaces. She talks about having to declutter dreams (the hobby you'd been so excited to start, the baby clothes when it becomes clear there will be no more children). There is a section on helping others, including friends, children, and spouses (sadly, there was no magic trick to get your spouse on board) and another section on decluttering when you have to do it all (moving, elderly parents). Finally, she talks about how decluttering has to become a lifestyle, that it is something that you will always need to keep doing. Which is just what I needed to hear - I so often feel that I am failing when I am once again decluttering areas that I have decluttered again and again. Some of the advice here is old news to me and some of the steps won't be necessary for me in most spaces. But I'm definitely going to try using this system in some areas that have confounded me over the years. Wish me luck!