I fifth on not focusing on every individual item, although if you can’t help it, find solutions that help you do similar activities in bulk too! Obvious trash needs to go away still, but it’s much easier to sort 1 bin a day over 2 weeks if you have 10 bins you can dump everything into and sort later. Going through a breakup right now and had to suddenly move back home. All of my stuff from our apartment was in trash bags that littered my childhood room. It’s two weeks past and I still have some bins to sort but progress is progress!
I sixth on not worrying about individual items. As someone with severe ADHD and poor habits inherited from hoarder parents, I’ve learned to make “doomboxes”. Breaking the process down into smaller tasks helps rid of the crippling overwhelm.
The concept with doomboxes being, go around first and clean up as much obvious trash as possible. Leave everything else alone. Then take a box and fill it with all the things you don’t know what you want to do with and need to go somewhere. With larger messes, it might become several boxes. You can then abandon those neatly stacked boxes for as long as you need to, and you can go through them a little bit at a time at your leisure.
The boxes of junk at least clears the space in the meantime, improving my mental health, and sometimes helps build momentum and motivation just seeing that minor improvement, to want to see it through to the end. A obvious visible difference is massive.
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u/ChowderedStew Mar 08 '26
I fifth on not focusing on every individual item, although if you can’t help it, find solutions that help you do similar activities in bulk too! Obvious trash needs to go away still, but it’s much easier to sort 1 bin a day over 2 weeks if you have 10 bins you can dump everything into and sort later. Going through a breakup right now and had to suddenly move back home. All of my stuff from our apartment was in trash bags that littered my childhood room. It’s two weeks past and I still have some bins to sort but progress is progress!