Home Organizing Expert Reveals How To Declutter With 3 Second Rule

It might be time for many of us to get started on the daunting task of spring cleaning, which can be an intimidating prospect, but it's all worth it once you're done and your home is fresh and clean again, and most importantly free of clutter.

It is estimated that approximately three in four Americans engage in spring cleaning every year, according to a 2022 Ipsos survey of 1,005 adults.

A 2019 survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, from selling app Mercari, found American households have more than 5 billion items that are no longer used. that's on average 42 items per household. In 2017, the Boston Globe reported that each home contained on average 300,000 items, from spoons to sofas.

'The Emotional Connection We Have With Our Items Is The Culprit'

Home organizing expert, Kayleen Kelly, founder of Kayleen Kelly Home Organizing & Redesign—based in Florida—who specializes in chronic clutter, told Newsweek that there can be a number of reasons behind cluttering, including emotional attachment to our items as well as past childhood trauma.

"We are very emotionally connected to our items, our physical items hold a lot of emotional weight," she said. "In America, the more the merrier, the bigger the better, it's all part of our culture and our society, and so beginning that process of letting go of these things that are way more than just stuck to us emotionally, can be very, very challenging.

"It may be that we're just not ready, but there can be more. The emotional connection we have with our items is beyond the biggest culprit of clutter, and it can stem from our childhoods. Did we not have a lot as children? Did we have too much?"

But according to Kelly, even though it can be hard, there is a specific technique that can make this task a whole lot easier, and that is her viral "three-second decluttering rule."

1. If You're Not Ready to Let Go Within 3 Seconds, Keep It

The three-second decluttering rule is very simple. It works by simply giving yourself three seconds to decide on whether or not to keep an item. If you're still unsure after the time has passed, then keep it because you're still not ready to let go of it.

Kelly said that while trying to declutter their homes, many people end up overthinking what to do with each item, and some even give up on the task. But giving them a three-second time frame to make a decision on an item allows them to make a choice from their gut, without having to overthink the whole process. Making it an automatic no if you hesitate eliminates the guilt associated with throwing away an item that you're not ready to give up yet.

"It's either, hey 100 percent I'm ready to let it go of it, or I don't know, so I'm just going to go ahead and keep it, removing that 'punishment,'" she said. "This technique has proved to work very, very well. It allows people to focus on the things they are ready to get rid of, which a lot of the time is a big portion of our clutter and the piles that we collect."

2. Take One Room at a Time

In order for this trick to work, there are some specific instructions you need to follow, and one of these is taking one room at a time, rather than trying to do it all at once.

"There are four steps, the first one is to clear out. Let's say we are organizing your kitchen. The first step is to remove any trash or things that don't belong in the kitchen. So if there's a nail file and some socks on the kitchen counter, we're going to pull that out. We're going to throw away the trash and we're going to clear out the space," she said.

Doing one room at a time allows you to focus on all the items you have, and how many of those you can keep, to avoid cramping the space again.

3. Categorize Your Items

"This leads us to step two, categorize. That's when we're going to work one category at a time, we're going to pull out all those coffee mugs, collect all the glasses, and do one thing at a time. So if I'm taking you through your closet, I'm going to show you all of your T-shirts at once, and then you're gonna look at each T-shirt, and once you're done with one category, you go to the next one." Kelly said.

She suggested creating two piles, one on the floor for items you've decided not to keep, which you can later bag up for a donation, and one on the bed for the items you are going to keep and fit back into your closet.

"And then that leads us to step three," she added. "Cut out, using the three-second rule, and we're gonna do rounds on all of the categories within the room, before going to the next room."

You can do multiple rounds if needed, according to Kelly, though typically, it's only one round: "We coach the client to assess how much they have, versus how much storage they have, and help them gauge how much they need to declutter in order for it to fit functionally, but if you're doing it on your own, you may need a few rounds to coach yourself through it."

The fourth and last step is containing, which means putting back everything you decided to keep in a functional way, leaving your house clear of extra, displaced items hanging around, making sure each item is safely stored.