My DeClutter Project 2011

As you may know from my Nov 30th post (read it here), one of my goals for 2011 is to be free of clutter in my home by my 50th birthday on Nov. 28, 2011.  As a result, I have put together a decluttering project for myself.  It goes like this:

I have divided my apartment into 5 zones:

1. Kitchen
2. Hall
3. Bedroom
4. Office
5. Dining Room/Living Room

and made a list of every area within those zones that currently needs to be de-cluttered.  As you may have heard, anyone can eat an elephant, you just have to do it one bite at a time.  Translation: any big job can be accomplished if you break it down into manageable (bite-sized) pieces.

I ended up with a list of 25 areas to be done.  11 of those are bigger jobs that will take more time than the other 14.  Here's what my list looks like:

Then I grabbed the 2011 Recycling Calendar for the City of Toronto (which I thought was an appropriate theme for this project) and counted the number of days and weekends I have available to work on this project between now and when we open the cottage in May, which turned out to be 22 days. 

This weekend, for example, I have the day off on Friday (Dec 31st) and we get Monday Jan 3rd as a holiday so that's 4 full days that can be devoted to this undertaking (which I thought would be a good way to kick off the project).  Most of the following weekends count as one day each, as I figure I will also need to allow myself some fun time as well (all decluttering and no play would leave me a very cranky girl, no matter how much progress I was making!).  Some of my 25 tasks will not take a whole day or weekend to accomplish either, so depending on my mood and energy level, I can do more than one task on some days, thus making my way through the 25 tasks in the 22 days/weekends.

I wrote out all the jobs on small pieces of paper:

folded them up and put them in this tin, which is my equivalent of the "honey do" or job jar:

The blue pieces of paper are the jobs that I expect will take more time, i.e. possibly most of 2 days one weekend.  Depending on my schedule, I can select a task by the colour of the paper (clever, eh?). Such as tidying my bead bookcase, which currently looks like this:

To hold myself accountable and on track, I'll be reporting my progress every Monday here on this blog and showing you before and after photos. 

Hopefully, by mid-May, I shall have a more organized, less cluttered home.  Wish me luck!!