Decluttering Your Decision Fatigue

Sometimes I find myself reflecting on the fact that clutter is just a collection of unmade decisions. Whether to keep that gadget you don’t use, where to put away the random item that has no home, how to tell your mom you don’t want her wedding china…all decisions we keep kicking down the road.

When you hit midlife, you have several decades-worth of decisions to make and the thought is more than daunting. It’s paralyzing because of the decision fatigue you know is coming. Decision fatigue is a real thing. It’s an energy-sapping, mind-numbing, soul-crushing thing. So how to avoid it?

Why It Happens

Decision Fatigue emerges when you have a lot of decisions to make and you’re making them in isolation. It’s like you’re giving your brain a 25lb weight to lift and asking for 50 reps in a row: the first few go okay but then you start to get tired. Once your brain is fatigued you either A) start making bad decisions or B) give up entirely. And to add insult to injury, you now have a negative association with decluttering firmly entrenched in your psyche.

What you need to avoid this pattern is a good decision-making process. (A good timer helps as well – I love this one)  You don’t want each of your decluttering decisions to require an isolated decision-tree. And the fatigue-free way forward means putting filters on your decisions.

Decision Filters

What are decision filters? They are lenses for prioritizing what’s important. Spending some time before you declutter thinking about the kinds of things you want to prioritize will save you many decision-making reps when you are actually decluttering. If you reduce reps you lessen the decision fatigue. Here are a couple of examples.

If you are decluttering birthday and holiday cards from your loved ones your priority may be keeping only the ones with meaningful inscriptions inside. That becomes the filter you put in place before you begin decluttering your cards. Once you’ve done that it’s much easier to quickly flip through the cards and identify the ones with longer inscriptions. And it’s much better than reading every card in isolation.

Say you’re decluttering the boxes of stuff you brought home when your mom died. Instead of considering each item individually, decide ahead of time that you are going to keep no more than 10 things of hers that remind you of her and make you smile. That’s 3 priorities you’ve identified that are now the filters you use to quickly go through those boxes. 

1. No more than 10
2. Reminds me of mom
3. Makes me smile

When you identify your priorities prior to decluttering you save your brain from working overtime on the decision-making because A) you’re actually making less decisions and B) the decisions themselves are easier to make.

However, if you truly have a mountain of stuff to declutter, reducing reps may not be enough. In those cases there is another approach to help you avoid decision fatigue.

Inside Out Decluttering

When the decluttering project staging you down is overwhelming in its size and scope, an inside-out approach will help you avoid decision fatigue. When you flip the process on its head you can make even the most daunting project feel manageable. How does inside-out decluttering work? By pulling out only items that fit your priorities and getting rid of the rest of the stuff without actually going through it.

In inside-out decluttering the beforehand prioritizing is even more important because it’s going to help you pinpoint and extract the things you want to keep instead of the things you want to get rid of.

I’ll use a recent client example. We were working to declutter this client’s closet and she had 3 large drawers’ worth of bras. During our session she confessed that she only wears about 5 of them. So instead of the grueling process of pulling out every bra for consideration we pulled out her 5 favorites. They were easily identifiable because she wears them often. The rest of the bras went to donation. We didn’t even open two of the drawers!What started as a totally overwhelming project that my client was dreading turned into a 10 minute exercise that was completely painless.

I have to say, I use the inside-out approach a lot – even when the job is not staggeringly large. It’s very efficient and keeps a sharp spotlight on what matters!

Don’t let decision fatigue defeat you if you’ve got decluttering to do. It’s one of the most sinister of the bogeymen you’ll encounter on your journey (the other is emotional clutter, but I just launched an amazing course to help you defeat that one!) You can make life much easier on yourself if you are aware of the concept of decision fatigue going into your project and take some preventative steps to minimize it. You’ve got this!