A video from the account spatialawareness____ opens with a confession a lot of people will recognize: “When I first started my decluttering journey, I read Marie Kondo, I watched the Netflix show, I was ALL. IN.” Following the famous method to the letter, she pulled everything out onto her bed all at once, exactly as the book instructs. Within a quarter of the way through, she says, decision fatigue had taken over completely and she lost all steam. The clip pulled in 3,443 likes and nearly 10,000 comments from people who clearly knew that exact feeling.
What actually worked, she says, had nothing to do with piling everything in one spot. She calls it the “snowball effect,” and borrows the name on purpose: it’s the same strategy financial personality Dave Ramsey teaches for getting out of debt, where a person lists every balance from smallest to largest and pays off the smallest one first, then rolls that payment into the next smallest, building momentum one quick win at a time rather than attacking the biggest, scariest number first. She says her family used exactly that method to pay off $20,000 in debt, and realized afterward that the same logic applies just as well to a cluttered house.
Applied to decluttering, the method means breaking the entire house down into small, specific jobs rather than one giant task called “organize the house,” and then tackling those jobs in order from easiest to hardest. A junk drawer comes before a garage. A single bathroom cabinet comes before an entire basement. The underlying principle, she argues, is the same whether the overwhelming thing is debt or stuff: any task that feels too big to start should be broken into pieces small enough that starting doesn’t feel like a fight. She says this is how she decluttered her entire house in a few weeks without losing momentum or giving up halfway through, which is exactly where the all-at-once method had failed her before.
Once items are actually sorted into a donate pile using a method like this, there’s a practical financial piece worth knowing. The IRS allows taxpayers who itemize deductions to deduct the fair market value of household items and clothing given to a qualified charity, but only if those items are in good used condition or better; a trash-bag donation of genuinely worn-out goods generally doesn’t qualify for a deduction at all. Donors should get a receipt from the charity for any drop-off, and donations of items (or groups of similar items) valued over $500 require filling out IRS Form 8283 and attaching it to the tax return. Keeping a simple list of what was donated and a reasonable estimate of its value, ideally with photos, makes tax time considerably less painful than trying to reconstruct a donation from memory months later.
The smallest-to-largest ordering also solves a problem that rarely gets named directly: most decluttering advice assumes a burst of motivation that most people don’t reliably have on command. Starting with the easiest win, rather than the hardest room, means the first session produces visible progress almost immediately, and that early win is what makes the second session happen. It’s a small shift in sequencing, but it’s the difference between a decluttering plan that survives past the first weekend and one that ends up back on the bed in a pile, exactly where it started.
More from Decluttering Mom
- Homeowner Clearing the Hoarded Condo She Inherited From Her Late Dad Says She Was Punished as a Child for Throwing Things Away and Stopped Visiting to Keep Them Close
- Former New Orleans Homeowner Says She Sold 99 Percent of Everything She Owned in 2007, Left With a Backpack and Has Lived in Studio Apartments for Almost 20 Years Since
- Mom of Two Opens Her Three Car Garage on a Doom Pile of Boxes, Finds Diapers From a Subscription Still Running and a Sauna Boxed for a Year, Then Clears Enough to Park Inside