62: 4 Ways to Declutter in February – An Experiment for ADHD Brains – Part 5 – The Wrap Up

Four Decluttering Experiments: What I Learned

Over the past month, I ran four completely different decluttering experiments and gathered feedback from the community on what actually worked, what didn’t, and why. Here’s the honest wrap-up.

Little by little

This one involved setting a five-minute timer daily to declutter something small, a phone’s worth of texts, junk emails, excess photos, before allowing yourself to scroll. It was easy enough to fit into daily life, but just as easy to forget entirely, especially with something like a phone where there’s no visible physical reminder nudging you along. A recurring alarm or a habit tied to an existing routine would likely make this one stick better. The lesson: highly doable, but needs an external trigger to actually happen consistently.

Use it or lose it

Here, you place a box in a space like a bathroom, and as you use items during the week, you set them in the box instead of putting them back. At week’s end, whatever never made it into the box gets cleared out, since it wasn’t genuinely in regular use. This worked well for a single-user, dedicated space, but became more disruptive in a shared space, other people naturally have questions about a mysterious box appearing on the counter. A better version of this experiment might shrink the window down to a single getting-ready session rather than stretching it across a full week, giving more immediate feedback with less ongoing disruption.

Favorites first

This was the clear favorite, likely because it was quick, contained, and immediately useful. Empty a single dresser drawer onto the bed, then pull your genuine go-to favorites back in first, your favorite shirt, then the next favorite, and so on, stopping the moment the drawer starts to feel crowded again. Whatever’s left gets bagged and removed. Since most of us really do live in a fraction of what we own, this method skips the exhausting process of evaluating every single item individually and instead builds outward from what you already know you reach for. The whole exercise can take as little as fifteen minutes per drawer, and it’s easy to repeat across multiple drawers once you’re on a roll.

Remove and replace

This one applied the same logic to a kitchen utensil crock: empty it into a nearby box, and only put items back into the crock once they’ve actually been used and washed during the test period. At the end, whatever never got pulled from the box gets removed, aside from a few deliberate specialty items used only occasionally, like holiday cooking tools. This was the most disruptive of the four, since it temporarily removes functional, regularly needed items from easy reach, and it can trigger real anxiety about accidentally getting rid of something you’ll need later for an occasional recipe. It’s effective, but it asks you to get a little uncomfortable before things improve.

The real lesson: accountability, not ability

When I checked in with the community about which experiments people actually tried, more people listened than took action. That’s not a knock on anyone’s intelligence or capability. ADHD brains aren’t incapable of organizing or decluttering, and this isn’t a knowledge gap. It’s almost always an accountability gap, the missing piece between knowing what to do and actually doing it. I’ll admit I hadn’t completed all four experiments myself either, by the time I did this wrap-up, which only reinforced the point.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick whichever of these four methods sounds most appealing to your current situation, favorites first if you want something fast and low-disruption, use it or lose it if you have a single-user space to test it in, and build in a real accountability trigger, a timer, a check-in with a friend, a shared goal, rather than relying on willpower alone to remember to follow through.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.