Hoarding sucks

For those affected by hoarding (I don't publish messages/rants without permission)

[fnohoarding]

More time passes and nothing changes. My Mom's junk is everywhere. It's spilled over to her car, to the point she can only see forward when she drives. It's spilled over to my sister's house, to the point they took all her stuff and dumped it into a massive pile in the living room and told her to get rid of it. It's still in our house to the point I just scream sometimes.

I hate this so much.

[internetgreatesthits]

[farewell-to-lorien]

[fnohoarding]

Doing some reading and a lot of people say there is no "cure" for hoarding. Yaaaay depressing as hell.

[fnohoarding]

[eggtrolls]

The fact that the cleanliness of one’s home environment affects mental health AND is affected by mental health seems like one of the most bullshit parts of adult life/independent living because ‘there will always be dishes’, etc. and that is true, BUT! what your feverish and depressed mind might struggle to realize is that, by logical extension, cleaning your shit even marginally can give you a +15 boost in energy and stamina after like. six minutes of dedicated effort.

[so-many-ocs]

[on the verge of having a complete breakdown] i need to make some kind of list or perhaps sort things into categories

[ms-demeanor]

Can you offer any advice for avoiding hoarding when part of the problem is that trying to deal with the clutter and garbage and dirt causes paralyzing anxiety? I want my house to be clean and cluttered because it's stuff I like, but instead it's full of trash and stuff that had a place but doesn't seem to fit back in it after being used.

I can absolutely offer advice about that.

Short TL;DR:

Select the room you want to clean and make a map of it.

Divide the room into small segments like "top of desk" or "cabinet under sink" or even "half of junk drawer." SMALL segments.

Designate bags "trash," "donate," and "consider later."

Schedule a time to work on cleaning each segment, don't just assume "i'll do it next week." Write down an assigned day for each area.

Go into your target area and sort things into those bags.

Optionally, create a bag for memento items to put into a specific memento box/book.

Take bags out of the space when they are full to make more room to work and to see progress.

Do the section for the day and stop. Don't get overwhelmed by a ton of stuff, stop when you've done what you planned for the day (unless you've got good momentum built up and continuing will energize you.)

Long TL;DR:

Go someplace where you are not looking at the mess. You want to draw a map of the room, but you do not want to be in the room. Work one room at a time.

Divide the area you want to clean into very small spaces. You aren't cleaning an entire desk, you are cleaning one drawer of a desk.

Take three containers with you for each section: one trash bag, one donation bag, and one bag of stuff to consider later.

Plan out time to work on the space. Don't say "I'll do the whole thing this weekend" or "I'll get to it after the holidays," sit down and write out a schedule. There's a version of this called 40 bags in 40 days that people do for lent (that was the version of this i first found and followed the first time i did it), but you could do it in ten days, or a hundred, just try to stick to working on each segment on the day it's scheduled.

In each space, keep the stuff that's obviously meant to go there in that space, so if you're cleaning a desk drawer and it has a stapler in it, the stapler can stay there but if the staples and paper clips and rubber bands are a mess put that stuff into the "consider later" bin. Same thing with papers; if you've got a bunch of papers and you may need to keep some and may need to trash some, put them in the "consider later"

THERE IS AN OPTIONAL BIN FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO HANG ON TO A MILLION MEMENTOS AND CONCERT TICKETS AND SUCH. I make them by getting gallon freezer bags and filling them up with business cards and concert programs and scraps of wrapping paper and birthday cards. This isn't quite "consider later" because it's probably stuff you know you want to keep, this is "I don't have a home for this thing right now but it's not trash" so this is a temporary home for that category.

Remove stuff from the space as you work. As you fill up a bag of trash or consider later or donate, take it out of the space so you aren't looking at it and you can see the progress you're making on the space.

Do each section as you come to it on your schedule and then call it quits. If you cleaned out the counter next to the sink and that was your area for the day, you don't have to worry about the area under the sink unless you have the energy and enthusiasm for it.

Philosophical musing about why this works

The reason this kind of plan works (for me) is by pre-managing several things. You know you're working with a limited area, you know what you're going to do with the stuff you find in that area (put it in one of your bags or leave it where it is if it belongs in that area), you're working on a limited time so this can't stretch out forever it's just a little chunk, you're thinking about the space as you build your plan so you're visualizing the anxiety inducing thing outside of the space that actually gives you the anxiety which hopefully allows you to detach slightly from the anxiety, and you're getting your steps lined up ahead of time so there's no muddle of "what do i do now, how do I get started" - you get started by grabbing your bags and you go to that day's scheduled section.

The whole thing is constructed to prevent you from getting overwhelmed.

I used to try to clean my room as a kid and I would find something that needed to get put away but I didn't know where it went so I'd spend a bunch of time trying to make a space for it and I'd end up getting lost in the weeds of imagining how I'd use the item and if the new place for it was accessible, and oh look at the items that I found in this other place where I was going to put this item and this method cuts off all of that. Where I am putting the item is in the bag, where it is going is the "consider later" pile and when I've cleared out most of the space I can consider where things go when I've gathered all the uncertain things into one place instead of continually unearthing them and disrupting the process of going through stuff.

What it means to Consider Later

The reason you're working room by room is because you should be isolating the consider later pile by room. If you're cleaning out the bedroom you may end up with stuff that belongs in the kitchen or the office, but you'll end up with a lot of stuff that belongs in the bedroom. When you've worked through all your segments, you can sort the consider later pile and now that you have all the objects together, you can consider whether some of them belong together in a space in the room.

For instance, when I first did this there were a lot of books that needed to go on bookshelves, but my bookshelves weren't accessible in the early parts of the process. So books from the floor and the bed and the nightstand went into the consider later pile and after the whole floor was clear and there was no trash on my desk and all the books I was donating had been pulled from my bookshelves, I was able to organize all of my books at once instead of stumbling across a book every four minutes and trying to shelve it.

That's what spawned the memento bags for me; there was a ton of stuff in my consider later bags that didn't precisely have a place but weren't trash and needed a place made for them. If I'd struggled to find where each item went as I cleaned it would have completely stalled me out.

I kept finding yarn as I went but I didn't have a dedicated yarn spot, so I just put yarn in the consider later pile and at the end I found a basket for it and put it on a shelf in the closet that had been cleared out when I'd donated old clothes. If I had tried to find a spot for the yarn before donating the clothes, I would have had to move it once the better spot opened up, so saving all the consider later stuff for later saved me from having to move stuff several times.

If you're in a small space or if you're living with people and you can't make a pile of stuff in another room for two weeks, at the very least remove the trash and donation bags as you go and designate an area for your consider later pile; maybe a laundry basket or something similar so that you can keep it mobile as you clean.

It's kind of like moving in to a new space. When you move in to an empty room, you have all your stuff in boxes and you need to figure out where it goes and that can take a while, but it's sometimes easier to find a place to put things in a new environment than it is to put things back "where they belong" because maybe you've added a dozen skeins to your collection and they don't belong in the little yarn bag anymore.

What to trash, what to donate, and what to consider later

Trash should be immediately obvious as trash. Anything that is trash goes in the trash bag right away.

If you find yourself thinking "but I might use this plastic fork that came with my value meal," or "this receipt may be important," put it in the consider later pile and don't think about it right now.

The donate bag should be for stuff that will still be useful for someone, but won't be useful for you. Clothes that you don't like, books you hated and won't re-read, toys you don't want to keep, all of that goes in the donate pile. If you think you might want to keep a piece of clothing but you want to make sure it doesn't fit, don't stop to try it on now just put it in the consider later pile and you can sort it into the donate bag later.

"Consider later" is for anything that requires more than thirty seconds of thought or effort to handle. If you're looking at your desk and you've got a keyboard for your computer on your desk that keyboard is staying there and doesn't need to be considered. If there's an empty takeout cup on your desk, that cup is going in the trash and doesn't need to be considered. If there's a receipt for your computer sitting on your desk, you may want to save that for record-keeping purposes but may not have a place to put it, so that is what you consider later.

Some guidelines on what is or is not trash

You might look at a sturdy plastic cup from a gas station and say "that isn't trash, I could use that, that's still good" but unless you have a specific purpose in mind for it right now, that is trash. If you wouldn't put it in a donation box to be used for some ambiguous future purpose, you don't need to keep it.

If you have a specific purpose in mind, like using an old milk jug to make a watering pitcher for your plants, it may not be trash. But only ONE is not trash; more than that is trash.

If you wouldn't need to have a hard copy of a paper and you have an electronic copy, it is trash. This means receipts for most everyday purchases like groceries and fast food. Don't keep receipts for items past their return period, don't keep receipts for items that you have a digital copy of unless that item cost over $1000.

Nice cardboard boxes (or good glass jars, or sturdy plastic takeout boxes, or cleaned food containers) that you don't have a use for are trash (or recycling, depending on where you live, but still in the trash category).

If you know someone who is specifically looking for an item (like maybe the neighbor kids are asking for cardboard tubes for a science project, or you work with a meal delivery group that could use extra packets of takeout utensils, or you have a friend who is into canning and has asked for jars, or if you make your own soup stock and need containers to put it in, or if you have a friend who is moving and needs lots of good cardboard boxes) then these items don't *have* to be trash but if you are just keeping them in your space and not giving them to people who want them or putting them to use yourself, they are just trash in your space and you should throw them away.

Memory Books/Memento Bags

I make memory books out of the little items i collect into one gallon storage bags. They allow me to hang onto the stuff that I want to keep because it brings me good memories without having a pile of random junk and sometimes without having to keep the item, or having to keep the whole item.

If the thing I want to keep because it brings me good memories is bulky, perhaps I can take a put a picture of that item to put in the book. If it is a worn out shirt, perhaps I can cut a patch off the shirt to put it in the book. If it is a card, perhaps I can cut out just the front of the card, or I can almost certainly just throw away the envelope and put the card in the book.

If you have things that do *not* fit into the memory book, like costume jewelry or rocks or a weird toy you got out of a coin machine on a really fun family vacation, you can also make a memory box; I have some of these and they've got a bunch of truly random crap in them, but I *like* having the nametag from the four hours that I worked at Denny's, or the keychain from when my mom took me to the morgue training class. It's fine to like these things, and to keep many of them, but you want to keep them someplace that they won't stress you out; that might be a display case for nice things, but it also might be a pretty velvet bag that you periodically pull out of a drawer and sort through like a magpie, or a wooden box that you painted.

You can also be selective about this stuff. You don't need every piece of costume jewelry your grandmother owned; keep the pieces you really like or the ones you have strong memories of or the ones that are very nice or the ones that are in good shape. But look, my mom was a teacher and she had a wide variety of goofy holiday jewelry that she wore in the classroom and I don't need to hang onto that. I don't need the big plastic ghost earrings that won't fit in my plugs, but I'll hang onto the spider brooch. She collected cheap watches - I don't need all of her four dollar watches, I can keep the nice ones, or the one that she got for ten years at her job. Do the same thing with stuffed animals and baby clothes and magazines and children's books. You don't need to keep all of it, and keeping all of it isn't going to help you remember that time more, or remember that person better.

Do you really want to keep it or do you feel obligated?

Youtuber Caroline Winkler (who has some great videos about home organization that I like a lot, in particular "this is why your home is a mess" - with the caveat that she likes closed storage and my ADHD ass loves open storage) has a really great tip on getting rid of stuff that works a LOT better for me than the Marie Kondo "Does this spark joy?" question and it's the Red Wine Test. Instead of asking if an item sparks joy, you ask yourself "If a bottle of red wine spilled on this (or if it was in some other way damaged) how hard would I try to fix it?" If you wouldn't try very hard, or if you would be *relieved* then you can get rid of that item. If one of the Venom mugs I have on the shelf fell down and broke, I wouldn't try hard to fix it. If my cat stuffed animal from when I was a kid tore open, I would immediately be looking for my sewing kit.

.... I should recycle those cheap teal glasses, actually.

Some general tips that may help to get you started that work for me and my ADHD and may work for you and your anxiety:

Start a timer for a short time. You don't have to clean your whole house, you are just going to pick up for five minutes. Then you can stop, and you only have to face a *little* bit of the anxiety.

5-4-3-2-1-go. Don't overthink it, count down quickly and then get up and do something. Keep going in as long a spurt as you can manage without getting too upset, but cutting down on the time for pre-game fretting might help with the anxiety.

Do the smallest amount possible. You don't have to clean this room, you just have to take one dish to the sink. You don't have to do all the dishes, you can just unload part of the top tray of the dishwasher.

Some general tips on trying to keep a space clean:

First, encouragement: It is a lot easier to maintain a clean space than it is to create one.

If you're thinking that something needs to be done and it can take you under five minutes to do it and it's right in front of you, do it. I do this with my dishwasher. It turns out unloading the dishwasher is the main thing that stalls me on dishes and keeps my sink full, so now when I'm waiting for the kettle or letting my tea steep, I unload whatever I can get done in that time. If I have the vacuum out and I did my living room but the hall and the bedroom could use a quick pass too, I vacuum them while I've got the machine in my hand.

Set success traps. Success traps are things that let you fall into succeeding by front-loading the effort (or executive function) of cleaning with planning. Trash collects in your living space? Put a bunch of little trash cans everywhere. Cleaning your bathroom takes extra time because you have to go get glass cleaner and paper towels from another room? Keep a bottle of glass cleaner and a roll of paper towels under the sink. You never sweep because it is a pain in the ass to get the broom out of the broom closet? Hang the broom from a mount in the kitchen. It takes too long to clean the counter because you have to pick up a bunch of makeup brushes and bottles and soap? Put that shit on a tray and now you only have to move one thing to clean the counter.

And for your specific question, with "things never seem to quite fit back where they came from" sounds like you're playing storage tetris, which is when things have a place and it is a *very specific and exact* place that doesn't have a lot of room around it. You may need to think about downsizing for your space, or, more likely, think about more efficient storage. That Caroline Winkler video I linked has some tips on this ("don't store things in a way that will make you angry like putting your common use objects on an out of reach shelf or you'll never put things back because it's hard to put them back" and "maximize your weirdo spaces" speak to your situation, i think) that I've put into use, particularly in my kitchen. It was hard to keep the counter clear because it was hard to put my stand mixer away because the rack for the stand mixer had a wok and a bunch of cast iron pans and a panini press and a chafing dish on it; I put the panini press and the least-used cast iron and the chafing dish and the wok in a more out-of-the way cabinet (because i basically never use them but they're very useful when I need them) and now that shelf has a little grill, my more commonly used cast iron, and my stand mixer so putting away the stand mixer is a lot less effort so my counter stays clear. I wasn't using the top shelf of my dish cabinet for dishes because it's too high up for daily use, but it's perfect for the rice cooker, waffle maker, and food processor that I use less than my dishes but more than my george forman grill.

And anyway, the TL;DR for all of that:

Work a little bit at a time, be nice to yourself, don't keep things that aren't worth keeping, and configure your storage in a way that works for you (by keeping your lifestyle, the way you use things, and how easy it is to put away into account before deciding that's where something lives).

Good luck!

[ms-demeanor]

I will not invest energy in yelling at the youtube video. Yelling at the youtube video is the mindkiller.

[ms-demeanor]

"There are no messy people, just messy habits - and if it's a habit, you can change it. That's science!"

Ma'am.

[ms-demeanor]

What the youtuber says: "People who live in cluttered environments are likely to have poor sleep hygiene and insomnia."

What the study they're quoting in their own video says:

which means: PEOPLE WITH HOARDING DISORDER ALSO SHOW INDICATORS OF POOR SLEEP, WHICH MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT PEOPLE WITH OCD ARE SIGNIFICANTLY MORE LIKELY THAN CONTROL POPULATIONS TO HAVE CIRCADIAN RHYTHM DISORDERS.

YOU ARE GETTING SHIT EXACTLY BACKWARDS, PEOPLE IN THIS SITUATION DON'T SLEEP POORLY BECAUSE THEY HAVE THE "MESSY" HABIT OF NOT MAKING THE BED AND THEREFORE INCREASING CLUTTER IN THEIR LIVES, THEY HAVE A DISABILITY THAT CAUSES COMPULSIVE HOARDING *AND* FUCKS WITH SLEEP, POSSIBLY *BECAUSE* IT FUCKS WITH THEIR SLEEP.

LITERALLY THIS IS THE CONCLUSION OF THE STUDY SHE'S CITING:

"These findings add to a growing body of literature on insomnia and various forms of psychopathology, as well as research on symptoms related to hoarding. Reducing insomnia symptoms among hoarders may help to reduce hoarding-related behaviors and increase treatment efficacy."

But you know you can change your messy habits because "it's science."

[ms-demeanor]

"This tendency that we have to put off things that might be unpleasant is called the law of least effort, and if you want to learn about the laws of nature and human behavior and psychology and the universe that can help you declutter your home up to eighty percent faster, click this video."

I shan't.

Anybody want to see what this lady's childrens' bedroom looks like?

[ms-demeanor]

This is from a video busting myths about decluttering, the myth she's busting here is "decluttering with kids is impossible." I'm not putting screenshots of the kids in, but I'd say they look like maybe third graders?

[wanderer-chronicles]

...I cannot remember the last time I've seen a kid's room that barren.

[ms-demeanor]

She says in the video that actually it's not a big deal to not have many toys because kids with fewer toys play more creatively.

She also says that if you model this kind of good behavior for your kids they'll eventually get better at decluttering; my guess is that's true right up until they've got a space they're in control of for the first time.

Also gonna point out that living in a house like this as a kid isn't going to give you the experience you might want for, say, tidying up a space that you share with a roommate or a partner who doesn't have the same approach to having no decor beyond hideous copper fans. (looking through their house is really disconcerting because of the sheer lack of decoration; like which kid do you think has the "good" bunk, the one who has a thermostat/outlet thing above the bed and gets to look at some texture on the blank white wall, or the one who has faster access to the single bucket of lego?)

[anxietyproblem]

[keithstack]

[fnohoarding]

We are actually cleaning up now! Mind you it's outside because the city is involved! But progress!

[fnohoarding]

Sitting on the floor (the actual floor!) surrounded by garbage bags. I want to cry, yell, file my nails because they are all broke off now, take a shower, and get in my car and leave it all for her to clean. It's all her crap anyways.

I'm convinced the people who live with hoarders suffer worse than the people who are hoarders.

[unfuckyourhabitat]

Updated Emergency Cleaning List!

As thanks for the warm (and, at times, hilarious) welcome back, here's an updated, significantly less wordy version of my Emergency Cleaning list. The original will be a decade old in a few months, if you can believe it!

You may need to modify or adjust the steps on this list based on your own situation — it's meant as a general guideline for those who need a little help pushing past the "Where the hell am I supposed to start?" feeling. This is also not meant to be a comprehensive "How to clean your house properly and maintain it forever" guide. It's for those moments when you have to quickly half-ass it because someone is going to be in your space soon and it's a disaster. If you can close some doors and cut some steps from the list, even better. Definitely do that.

(This is one of many checklists and downloadables available on my Patreon, if you're into that sort of thing.)

[dollsahoy]

destroy the idea that stashing/hoarding tendencies are unrelated to upbringing and can simply be turned off once a person realizes it’s causing them problems

that’s why KonMari can help, because it’s about acknowledging happiness instead of alleviating guilt, but doesn’t work for everyone

[fairykukla]

This is so true.

I was raised by a Packrat and a Magpie, both of whom were raised by parents who survived the Great Depression with grim determination.

My father is pathologically incapable of throwing anything away if it can be repurposed, reused, or might be important one day. He cut cereal boxes into magazine holders for his subscriptions. He cut milk cartons into boxes with a folding lid to sort all of his nuts and bolts into. He had a collection of washers at one point. He does take scrap steel and aluminum to the recycling places that pay for metals.ost of his wardrobe is older than I am.

My mother, on the other hand, has the “Ooh, Shiny! I must have all of them!” issue. She collects collections. She’s the one who got me into BJDs, and she recently confessed to me that she doesn’t know how many she has, and can’t remember all of their names. She’s also the crafting hoarder. We both discovered, at about the same time, that sometimes hoarding certain kinds of supplies is wasteful because those supplies degrade over time.

So I have all this generational trauma from the great Depression, and my parents’ misaligned coping strategies on top of my own anxiety disorder and ADHD.

But slowly, I’m trying to restructure my hoarding tendencies. I eat the food in the pantry, and when the larder gets thin, I bust out the nice dishes and eat canned peaches with flair. I only aquire crafting supplies if I know I’m going to do that craft in particular in the next 6 months. (I work for a fabric store, so that rule is a hard and fast one now.)

Telling someone that they need to get rid of their junk will only cause them to double down. Teaching someone how to properly curate their collection can be a genuinely healing experience.

[ms-demeanor]

do you have any tips for cleaning a space? I’ve been frozen trying to clean my room for 4-5 months now and just spent 10 hours reading through your adulting blog et al. and most of your tips have been incredibly helpful (despite me being much more on the autistic than ADHD side of the venn diagram)

YES. YES I DO.

Hi. On top of the ADHD I also have some history of OCD, which primarily manifested in being a hoarder. Like. Clinically. Like towers of stuff in my room and piled on my bed so I slept on the couch. In retrospect, cleaning it up was a problem for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons was executive dysfunction and not knowing how to start cleaning.

Long story short the way that I did it was by finding something called "40 bags in 40 days" where the goal is to remove 40 bags of trash/donations from an area in 40 days. 40 bags in 40 days was initially created as a challenge for Lent and a bunch of the people who blog about it do so in a manner that is religious to an extent that I am uncomfortable with, and there's this weird bullet-journal thing where planning ends up becoming aesthetic and there are charts and shit but you can ignore all of that, here are the basics:

Start with a written plan

You are going to try to declutter while you do this

Limit your scope each day so you don't get overwhelmed

Remove things that you won't be keeping in the space immediately; don't leave piles of "throw away" or "to donate" or even "to keep and organize later" stuff in the room you are clearing

Give yourself a firm deadline/number of days to do this project

The written plan: Break the area you are cleaning down into manageable bite-sized chunks. When I was doing this I moved in a pattern for increasing access to the room, because I literally could not get further into the room without cleaning some parts first, so my first chunk was "the space between the door and the bed" and then it was "the surface of the bed" and then it was "the nightstand." People who aren't doing cleanups on quite as catastrophic a mess might focus on even smaller areas (make each drawer of a dresser an area, or a single jewelry box, or one shelf in a bookshelf). But the key is that you have to sit down *outside* of the room that you will be cleaning and make a list of places that you need to clean. Don't stand in the room and look at everything and get overwhelmed because there's so much, don't go in and actually try to clean, just make a list of areas that you think you can do in an hour or two. And make sure to actually write it down so that you can use the list to refocus yourself - it's super easy to drift when you're cleaning and to move into another area because you found something that belongs in that other area, but you need to clean the other area before you can put more stuff in it, but you can't. You are focused on ONLY the area you've written down that day.

Declutter as you go: Do whatever you need to do to sort stuff you're going to keep from stuff you're not going to keep, Konmarie spark joy sort or rainbow label or whatever sorting scheme works for you, but you should have three categories of stuff: keep, donate, throw away. The "bags" in "40 Bags in 40 Days" is supposed to be bags of stuff to donate or throw away, but I actually made another category of bag which was "keep for memory book."

One of my huge problems is that I want to keep tons and tons of little mementos and business cards and stickers and fliers and photos and wristbands from shows and the thing is, if you do that you eventually have a huge pile of what pretty much looks like trash. So what I did was I had gallon storage bags (see-through) and any time I ran into some weird little memento thing that I wanted to keep but that probably seemed like trash, I would put it in the storage bag. Eventually I ended up with ten bags full of that kind of stuff, which I set aside for later, and in the end I put that stuff into three fuck-off huge photo albums with self-stick pages. They aren't organized scrapbooks or anything, they're a bunch of bullshit arrayed together in a displayable form, but it is so much better to have these three huge books than a million tiny piles of paper that I don't know what to do with. I also have a pile of tee-shirts I cut the image off of that is in a bag to become a quilt someday, and I have some small decorative boxes for stuff that I didn't want to get rid of but didn't fit in the albums and that wouldn't really go on display shelves or anything like that.

My "keep for a memory book" bags were more key to decluttering than the trash or donation bags, because a LOT of stuff that I had was stuff that I wanted to keep but didn't have anywhere to put. I *still* make bags like this. I have three or four of them right now, one of which is JUST stuff like wristbands and drink passes and business cards and fliers from shows I did with my band. I just fill up the bags until I've got enough stuff to sit down and work on a memory book for a while, then I go through and stick stuff in the book for a few hours. Having someplace to put all that stuff has been a huge help to prevent me from ending up with the same kind of messy disaster that I had before. This is my personal biggest kind of clutter and isolating it in bags and books has been an enormous quality of life improvement for me.

Limit your scope each day: Cleaning is mentally exhausting, and looking at how much you have left to do or getting distracted by uncovering another area can murder your momentum, so limit the scope to just your area for the day. You aren't cleaning your room, you are cleaning the surface of your desk today. You aren't cleaning your room, you are cleaning the floor of your closet today.

If you're feeling up to it, you may be able to move through several areas on your list in one day - that happened to me a lot, and 40 days ended up becoming more like 15 days - if that happens, and you're up for it, feel free to move on to the next area. But you still should be limiting yourself to the areas in your list, not the room generally. Don't finish cleaning the bottom of the closet and then look up and go "I can clean this whole thing, actually", if you finish cleaning the bottom of your closet and feel like working on cleaning still, move on to the next area on your list instead of randomly attacking everything.

Remove stuff from the space that you're cleaning while you're cleaning it: take any full bag of trash or donations out right away, but also remove stuff that you need to reorganize later. For example: I had books on every surface in my room, but the book shelves were on the wall furthest from the door. Instead of trying to put every book I found on the shelf, I set aside books as I cleaned and took them out of the room so that I could put them on the shelves when I got to them, but wouldn't be tripping over them or dealing with seeing them as distressing visual clutter as I worked on other areas. It helps to have a designated space to do this, so if you live with roommates or family make sure to tell them about the project and designate an area where you will be placing stuff until the project is done; if you can't get that, then have one dedicated box/bin/area in your room that is the 'sort when i get to it' station, and add books/clothes/etc to it as needed.

Give yourself a firm deadline: I know that brains are weird and deadlines are sometimes fake and sometimes motivational, but this deadline is a combination of "promise to your housemates that this pile of stuff won't exist in the entryway forever" and "schedule so that I know that I'm not going to be doing this project for the next seven years." 40 days was the suggested schedule because it was originally a lent thing, but also because that's a reasonable number of chunks to clean up. If your room would work better as 10 chunks, it could be 10 days. I think that more days is probably better because it lets you make smaller areas to focus on, but you know your space best.

Also, be kind to yourself. There have been a number of times that I have gone through all the effort of cleaning and reorganizing a space only to sit down at the end and cry because it's too different and I don't like it. That's not me being unreasonable, that's me being stressed after a stressful process and I am not allowed to beat myself up about it. I'm not allowed to yell at myself for how bad I let my space get, I'm not allowed to call myself names or denigrate myself 'because an adult should be able to keep a tidy space.' Cleaning is stressful and facing your flaws is stressful so the very least that you can do is not add to that stress by topping it off with self-criticism. Other people may be critical of you in this process, and if they are my advice is to let them know that feeling bad about your room isn't going to help it get any cleaner, and that if they want you to keep cleaning they shouldn't make cleaning more of a painful process than it already is by making you feel bad about it.

Good luck! I hope this helps!

[fnohoarding]

I resent her so much. The mess is everywhere. I've lost so much. I couldn't invite friends to my house growing up. It keeps getting worse. We had to leave our house because of the junk. Her solution? Get a storage unit. I'm worried I'll never forgive her.