53: 4 Ways to Declutter in February – An Experiment for ADHD Brains – Part 2 – Use It or Lose It

Use It or Lose It: A Bathroom Decluttering Experiment

Continuing a month of decluttering experiments, this one is called use it or lose it, and the bathroom is the ideal place to try it, since there’s very little gray area in whether you actually use a given product.

Setting it up

Clear your bathroom countertop completely, shoving everything into drawers or onto the floor temporarily if needed. Grab a sturdy box, a shoebox works well, lid and bottom both useful, and set it on the counter. As you get ready over the next several days, each time you actually reach for and use a product, place it into the box afterward instead of putting it back in its usual spot. Use the lid for small items like makeup, the bottom for larger bottles. Give yourself a few days, maybe even a full week or two, to capture the true range of what you use, including occasional-use items for date nights or special occasions.

Why bathroom clutter is uniquely hard to deal with

There are a few specific reasons bathroom products pile up more than most categories. First, they’re often expensive, so holding onto something that didn’t work out feels like avoiding a loss. But the money’s already spent either way, keeping an unused product doesn’t refund it, it’s just taking up space rent-free. Second, opened bathroom and beauty products generally can’t be donated for health reasons, which makes letting go feel wasteful even though there’s often no real alternative. Third, expiration dates on cosmetics and bath products are notoriously hard to find or track, even though these products genuinely do expire and using them past that point isn’t great for your skin or health. A reasonable rule of thumb: if something has been sitting in your bathroom long enough that you can’t remember when you got it, and you haven’t used it, it’s probably expired regardless of whether the seal is broken.

Evaluating what’s in the box

After a couple of weeks of genuine daily use, step back and look at what actually ended up in the box. Chances are it’s a fairly short, honest list, a basic skincare routine, deodorant, shampoo, a small rotation of makeup, maybe some hair product. If you love experimenting with a wide range of colors and formulas, that’s a legitimate exception worth honoring. But for most of us, it’s genuinely eye-opening to see how little we actually reach for compared to what’s crowding the cabinet.

Clearing out the rest

Once you’re confident in what’s in the box, empty everything else out of your bathroom storage into a separate box, wipe down the now-empty drawers and cabinets, and return only the items you’ve proven you use back into that space, in whatever arrangement feels good to you. Take the box of everything else and move it to a lower-traffic spot nearby, a closet floor, beside a dresser, a guest bathroom counter, somewhere still retrievable if you realize later you genuinely need something from it. If nothing from that box gets retrieved by the end of the following month, it’s safe to let it go entirely.

Your practical, actionable step

Set a box or shoebox on your bathroom counter today, and for the next week or two, place every product you actually use into it as you use it. At the end of that window, clear out everything that never made it into the box, move it to a secondary spot for one more month as a safety net, then let it go if it’s never retrieved.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.