It feels exhilarating to organize your closet and donate six bags of clothing, shoes, and accessories. After that big moment, your day-to-day will be improved: you’ll find items more easily with less stuff to rummage through, deciding what to wear will take less time, you’ll feel more peaceful each moment you peer into your closet, and you’ll get that tax deduction. But you did it to enjoy the sight of the six bags and because some open space in your closet feels so, so good. 

I consider this the “low hanging fruit” of organizing one’s home. It provides the biggest volume impact for the time investment. From a square footage perspective, removing some coats and shoes from each family member in a household is like removing an entire piece of furniture. I see it as the easiest and least important piece of my downsizing work with clients.

So I ask: What’s next? What are the more meaningful changes you can make in your home?

This is the real work: sometimes deep, sometimes tedious. Take a junk drawer, for example. It may seem like the least important spot (and not just for the reasons listed in my junk drawer blogpost) but it’s more than something to superficially sort through. Typical discoveries are: 1) ideas of what you can do with the emptied drawer since these tend to be in areas that are easy to access and drawers are simple to organize, and 2) what you find in junk drawers are items indicative of other problems in your home and its lack of systems. For example: it may highlight the mixing of kid and adult stuff, the duplication of items in different places without a functional reason, the tendency to keep free things or unintentionally acquired items, or a lack of safe places for sensitive items like passports and extra credit cards.

Speaking of credit cards, have you gone through your wallet? Your purse or bag? These are not just small items to organize. They are indicators of other systemic issues in your home and can lead to tremendous improvements to your lifestyle. They relate to how you manage your finances, including decisions about saving coupons and receipts (ex. do you save all or none of them? Do you keep them for a month? Just for big purchases?). It’s also time to confront the number and types of bags you use when leaving your home and to figure out why you tend to forget to take certain items in them, or address outdated items that you forgot were still part of your routine.

There are also meticulous projects that help us look inward, as they are less systems focused. They may involve going through memory boxes: parting with some items, integrating a few into your home, and consolidating and organizing the remaining items into a new box. Or taking the time to accept that all your aspirations regarding baking at home has given way to the fact that … you simply don’t like baking all that much. Or it’s not a priority. Or you’re off carbs. Whatever the case, it may involve pulling out specific baking tools and products from your kitchen you almost never use or that are still brand new. The volume you clear out may not come close to what you cleared from your closet, but it’s cathartic and streamlines your space.

Dealing with one junk drawer or memory box can be more impactful than going through all your clothes and accessories. Addressing the latter is an integral part of downsizing and simplifying your home- I’m not suggesting that you skip it. But these smaller projects are doorways into daily system improvements and force you confront things that are so easily thrown in a drawer or bin. This is where the biggest lifestyle changes occur.