94: Quick Tip Tuesday – Stage & Store – Decluttering for ADHD

Stage and Store: A Simple Decluttering Technique

Quick tips are wonderful for ADHD brains, they’re easy to absorb, they take almost no steps, and that low barrier makes you far more likely to actually try them. But quick tips also tend to get presented as universally applicable, and when one doesn’t work for you, it can feel like a personal failure rather than what it actually is, a tip that just wasn’t right for your brain. So try this one with that in mind. If it works, wonderful. If it doesn’t, that’s useful information, not failure.

Where this idea came from

This technique was inspired by an interior designer’s observation about one of the biggest design mistakes he sees: people using a surface purely for utilitarian storage without ever considering it as a style decision too, a media cabinet shelf, for instance, crammed with function and nothing else. I wanted to see how that same idea could work for decluttering, not just design.

Step one: stage it

Pick a surface that keeps bugging you because it’s constantly overrun with stuff, a coffee table, a shelf on a media cabinet, anywhere in a living room tends to work well. Clear it off completely, give it a quick dusting while you’re there, and then put back only the things that are genuinely pleasant to look at. This is the “stage” part, styling the space the way you’d want it to feel.

Step two: sort what’s left into two piles

Once the space is staged, you’re left with a pile of stuff that didn’t make the cut for looking nice out in the open. That pile splits into two real categories. First, ask whether something is important enough that you’d genuinely miss it or need it in regular use. Sometimes something feels important precisely because you’d already forgotten you had it, tucked away and clutter-blind, when really it needs an actual dedicated spot where it will get used the way it was meant to.

Step three: store the utilitarian stuff smartly

The second category is things you’ll use again but don’t need visible every day, batteries, band-aids, first aid odds and ends. These don’t need to sit out as visual clutter, out of sight really is fine for items like this. The key question, borrowed from Dana K. White of A Slob Comes Clean, isn’t where you should store something, it’s where you’ll actually think to look for it. When you need a band-aid, where’s your gut instinct to go check first? Store it there.

Step four: let go of what’s left

After sorting through both of those questions, whatever remains is the stuff you can’t call important enough to display, and can’t call useful enough to store somewhere memorable. If something survives a gauntlet of questions like that and still doesn’t earn a place, it’s safe to let it go.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick one small, bothersome surface today, style it so it feels genuinely pleasant, then sort what’s left into important-and-needs-a-real-home, useful-but-fine-out-of-sight, and ready-to-let-go. This whole process should take well under fifteen minutes.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.