Clearing the clutter - the Toothbrush Principle

In my quest for advice and inspiration whilst trying to declutter my house, I came across some useful advice from Sheila Chandra which she calls the Toothbrush Principle. Sheila makes the point that however disorganised and cluttered your house may be, you never loose your toothbrush. The reason that you can find your toothbrush is because you have a very simple system - which is that you store it close to where you need it, and you always put it back there because it is easy to do so. You don't ever have to 'tidy up' your toothbrush because you have an easy, simple system which you automatically use.

So this very simple idea set me thinking. How could I apply the Toothbrush Principle to the places in my house where stuff regularly builds up?

One of the areas that I struggle to keep tidy is my bedroom. Every couple of weeks I have a big sort out and tidy and hoover, and for a day or so everything is beautifully calm and ordered. But within a few days, the clutter starts coming back. So why is this?

Well although in theory I like the idea that my bedroom is a calm relaxing space, the reality is that because it's a lovely big light airy room, I use it for a lot more than just sleeping. In particular, I tend to sit on my bed to read, write, check my finances & use my laptop.  (As I am right now as I type this post.)  So over time, I accumulate a pile of library books, notebooks, magazines etc beside the bed. Every so often I would sort them out & decide they should be somewhere else, but they always came back again. Now that the puppy is chewing everything within reach, stuff on the floor is even more of a problem.

So applying the toothbrush principle to this problem, I worked out what I needed was a small bookcase in the bedroom. I had a rootle through the garage and found the carcase of an old kitchen cabinet which I dusted off and lugged upstairs to serve as a temporary bookcase. Now all my library books and magazines have a place to go. And because it's in the bedroom, it's easy to quickly tidy away stuff when I've finished what I'm doing. 

 Now I know this might sound very simple (and that's the beauty of it) - so why didn't I think of this before? 

Well, I had thought about putting a bookcase in the bedroom before, but I had resisted, because I felt like I shouldn't have lots of books and magazines in the bedroom, as we have a decent size house, so they should be in the study, or the book shelves in the living room. But applying the toothbrush principle worked, because I was being realistic about the way I actually used my bedroom rather than how I felt I should be using my bedroom, and provided storage that was easy to use and close to where it was needed.

Another area that quickly gets cluttered is my desk downstairs where I deal with my paperwork. Again I tried to apply the toothbrush principle and think what would actually help by being simple and easy, rather than implementing a complicated system that I wouldn't keep up. The problem here is that I tend to fling things on the desk that need dealing with when I'm busy, it all piles up and then I become more and more reluctant to deal with it. 

Thinking about this I know that I need to try and tackle the paperwork more regularly, with a little and often approach, but what would help in the interim is to have a clearly defined, LARGE in-tray then smaller trays for action and filing. By providing enough space for incoming stuff, I am now able to keep it separate from stuff that is waiting for action. Previously it was all getting muddled and then I would end up with a big pile to go through every few weeks when I started to get a panicky feeling that there was probably something important in the middle that needed to be dealt with. So I labelled my existing small filing tray to create a section for action within a week, action within a month, and filing, then found a new bigger container to use as an In-tray. I put this new system in place a couple of weeks ago, and although I know I still have a bit of a backlog of stuff to deal with, I no longer feel the important items are getting lost and swamped by the volume of everyday mail, and I have a simple system in place that I am actually using. 

So in the fight against clutter, the Toothbrush Principle is a  useful tool. Be realistic about the way you operate, and use storage that is close to where you use things and easy to use.