Some thoughts:
- I think that the decluttering has to continue until there is _empty_ space - a fair bit of empty space - in every storage area. You can't just get to the point where everything fits perfectly, because that gives you no slack.
For example, if everything fits perfectly and you buy a new pair of shoes, you'd have to get an old pair of shoes out of the house, immediately, the day you come home with the new pair, or there would be a misplaced pair of shoes cluttering the place. And no one is going to get rid of the old pair the day that the new pair comes home.
If you have empty space big enough for, say, two more pairs of shoes, then you can put the new shoes away where they belong, without making clutter, and make a note that some time in the next few weeks, you need to take time to get a pair out of the house.
Similarly, if everything fits perfectly, you have to find the _one_ empty slot in one bookshelf to put a book away. If every shelf has ten or twenty percent empty space, putting books away, and rearranging them as your book-using habits change, is easy.
- In addition to empty space for regular storage, you need empty space for temporary storage. The library books need a place to sit when they're in your home, without cluttering up a table or chair somewhere. The rented videos, same thing. Same thing for the incoming mail, the "to be filed" papers, the papers that need to go to school with the kids or work with you, the dry cleaning that's on its way out or on its way back in, the magazine that you're still reading.
I call this all "pending stuff".
As another example, I go back to those shoes - if the kids or the cat come making demands when you got home, you're not even going to get to the bedroom closet to put the shoebox in one of those two spare slots that I discussed above. You're going to put it down, still in its bag, somewhere near the front door. So, there should be a place where it can sit, out of the way, for a day or so until you get around to putting it away. A place that you keep clear for just this sort of thing - the "incoming packages cubby" or whatever you call it.
Now, you don't need a _specific_ place for each of your categories of "pending stuff", but you need some places where the stuff belongs, so that it doesn't have to sit on a chair or on the floor.
We have, for example, a bookshelf where library books and new magazines and rental videos and the books that we're in the middle of reading and small packages, and all other booklike or small "pending" objects, go. It's a long shelf - six feet, I think? The shelf above it and below it are regular storage, but that shelf is temporary storage.
When the house is perfect, that shelf would be empty. (I don't know if that's ever happened.) When we've been busy, it gets fuller and fuller. I know that when it's half full, I need to make a point of finding time to get it to less than a quarter full, sometime in the next week, or it will get all full and the stuff will spill over to other spaces. But meanwhile, all that stuff is on a shelf, all reasonably neat and tidy.
So I think that two important tools are:
- Empty space in permanent storage.
- Convenient temporary storage in clutter hot spots.
Both of these assume that you regularly patrol these areas - keeping the empty space empty and clearing out the temporary storage. But you never have to do that _immediately_, and I think that's essential. Any housekeeping strategy that forbids you to postpone a task to a more convenient time is, IMO, doomed to failure.
Crayfish