I like keeping my subject knowledge up to date (edit: I’m a bit of a geek who’s borderline obsessed with decluttering and organising) and when I stumbled across this alternative approach called ‘Reverse decluttering’ last month, I just had to know more and give it a try.
The concept is simple:
rather than identifying items to remove from a space (whether for decluttering or returning to its home in another place), you remove everything from that space. Once you have a blank canvas, you look at the group of items you removed and select your most necessary and cherished to put back and keep.
This sounds a little like choosing the items that ‘spark joy’ (the basis of the Kon Mari method) but the difference is that you also consider what the purpose of the space is and which items you need most accessible, putting the items that you select to keep in the prime real estate locations to simplify your everyday use of them and therefore your routines.
The idea is that you only tackle the size space that you can manage in one go, so this can vary from a drawer to a whole room. While I can see the necessities of this method if you are going through a renovation project and therefore have no choice but to empty your space for the work to take place, I can’t help feeling that emptying an entire room just for the purpose of this method would be a tad overwhelming. What if you can’t complete the project all in one go because something comes up? And where do all those items from the room go? Surely this is more suited to a smaller space, such as a cupboard or a drawer. I have certainly used this approach before for clients (and myself) without knowing that it was called ‘reverse decluttering’, but only when I felt that was the appropriate method for their situation and energy levels.
So who would benefit from this method and which spaces could it work in?
After some consideration, I decided to test the reverse decluttering method on a primary school aged child in my family (I wasn’t brave enough to test it on a client!). She has a lovely upcycled desk and shelving area in her bedroom that she uses regularly but easily becomes cluttered. She likes to keep her favourite items and books on the shelving and uses her desk for her writing and drawing. However, the desk area also attracts items that she comes home with that are ‘special’ and has become an extension of the shelving. The shelving for special items keeps being added to without any sort of rotation / removal and therefore looks cluttered and overwhelming (and I would question whether some of the items are special to her anymore!). It’s a classic case of:
If everything is special, then nothing is special.
She vehemently disagrees that her room is too busy, but I would argue when she stops using her desk for writing and drawing projects because there’s no space, it must be the case:
So, what would she think about reverse decluttering?
Well, I managed to sell the concept to her and she agreed to be my guinea pig! Maybe this could be the method she needs for the maintenance of her desk space…
Together we emptied all the items that we could see in the area (we left the drawers for the time being as they have clear categories and systems that are working so it wasn’t necessary) and laid them all out for her to evaluate and select her favourites. I took this opportunity to dust (a clear benefit of this approach – not having to lift each item to dust underneath!) while she was deciding on her top 5 (an arbitrary number set by me, but I wanted to know the most special of the special). We displayed those temporarily and then talked about how she wanted to use the space and what would be the most useful to have to hand. Motivated, I suggested she chose her next 5 special items, and so on. Then came the golden moment…
‘Actually, there are some things here that aren’t special to me and I don’t want them anymore.’
Hurrah! We decluttered a huge pile of things that she would NEVER have picked out if everything had stayed on the desk and shelves, and if any family members had gently suggested she think about those exact same items, she would have clung on to them as though her life depended on it. We were then on a roll.
When looking at the rest of the items, I asked questions such as:
What would you be sad about if you lost?
Which of these items would you put on your birthday wish list if you didn’t already have it?
Which of these items would make more sense somewhere else?
Which of these items do you no longer want / need?
Which items to you use often and need to be able to reach?
This helped her hone her decision making and we could then place items in their ‘real estate’ locations, i.e. drawing and craft items on the desk space, books within reach, etc. Cue the birth of an organised and functional desk and shelving space!
I have to say though, we tackled her books on a separate day as she only has so much stamina (and time!). We followed the same process, with her choosing favourite books to put back until the space was full. Everything left over, we donated.
Throughout the process she kept commenting on how ‘tidy’ and ‘lovely’ her desk space looked and this kept her motivated to keep it this way, both during the decision making and afterwards maintaining it. A very worthwhile (but exhausting!) experiment, I say!
My key takeaways about reverse decluttering:
It’s only suited to a smaller space that you have time and energy to finish in one sitting, for example a junk drawer, a shelf, a cupboard. I probably wouldn’t repeat it for an area this size again.
It’s not for the faint hearted. Looking at the piles of stuff around your room once you’ve emptied everything can be overwhelming!
It requires space around you to place things, so if you already have cluttered floors and surfaces, it will just add to this and become too much.
It’s useful for evaluating the items you love/need and want to be able to see/reach every day.
It’s great for being able to deep clean an area!
I think my go-to will remain as more of a ‘one-touch’ approach – taking items out of a space one at a time and deciding there and then whether it will stay, be relocated, donated or thrown away so that if decision-fatigue hits, you aren’t left with a chaotic mess. However, there may well be times in the future when having this method up my sleeve will come in very handy indeed!
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