The One Thing You Should Have in Every Room in Your Home

If you find yourself surrounded by seemingly endless piles of clutter all the time — from old magazines, to empty envelopes to the recycling and more — you might be in need of a shortcut to help you cut the clutter out of your life. This simple solution might not seem like much, but it could be the trick you’ve needed to fit your lifestyle.

That might seem like a lot of trashcans, perhaps even unnecessarily so, but hear me out. Maybe decluttering and keeping your life free of unneeded things is more about making the process as uncomplicated and friction-less as possible. Maybe you let clutter stack up around the house too much because you simply can’t get into the habit of bring stuff to the recycling bin or trashcan. (Or maybe if you get distracted on your way to toss things out). Maybe you skip getting to tasks you need to get to because you’ve got to get over the tossing out hump first.

Not trash or recycling that’s cluttering up your life? Then, you can translate this simple shortcut idea to have back-home baskets in each room (containers in each room that you toss items that don’t belong in the space to be brought back to their real homes later). Or, if your clutter goal is to reduce the amount of stuff you have, period, this idea would work with outboxes (boxes where you stash items you don’t need that you want to donate or give away) too!

The trick for making this work (and to avoid the containers becoming clutter piles themselves) is scheduling a consistent time each week to deal with each bin, back-home basket or outbox.

Re-edited from a post originally published 2.10.16-NT

This post originally appeared on Apartment Therapy. See it there: One Simple Shortcut to Cut the Clutter