• Getting rid of just five things a day can make decluttering feel much more manageable.
• Small daily efforts add up, helping clear crowded drawers and surfaces over time.
• The key is consistency, not trying to organize your entire home in one weekend.

The holidays are around the corner, and soon the chaos of hosting and travel will start. If tidying the house and reducing your clutter are things you thought you'd get to this year, let's take the pressure off and do it as gently as possible, before it ends.

I help my clients get rid of clutter year-round. Here are a few strategies to make a tough task easier.

Be realistic

One thing that can derail your decluttering project is false optimism. Have you ever said, "We'll clear out the garage on Saturday and w'll do something fun Sunday!"? Taking care of stuff that has resisted management for years won't be done in an afternoon. There are so many choices to make when you're trying to get rid of things, and that's where confusion and exhaustion make a seemingly simple process into one that's hard to face.

But don't despair — you can make progress and get things tidied up before next year. Imagine not having this task on your list when spring's optimism returns.

Slow and steady is key

You remember the tortoise and the hare? Slow and steady wins the race, and it will also get your home feeling more spacious and tidy. Try the five-a-day (or three-a-day, or two-a-day) method. Put a cardboard box in your back hall, garage, or other staging area. Choose five (or three or two) things every day and toss them in the box — or the trash.

These items can be anything; on a challenging day, you might get rid of an old dried-up glue stick, a charging cord that doesn't match your current phone, and a stack of expired coupons. When you wake up one day feeling motivated, you might look for five pairs of unworn shoes and also choose five books you don't want anymore.

It might feel like these small movements won't make a dent in the problem, but they will. After a couple of months, you'll find that drawers are less crowded and you can start to see surfaces again. Just keep at it.

Do not fear the garbage can. Recycling is important, but at a certain point, things do become trash. Holding on to them because you feel guilty about the landfill isn't helping the planet. If you want to make a difference, try buying less.

Schedule the hard stuff

Maybe you've got a broken lawnmower. Is there a place in your community that recycles old equipment? Maybe there's a high school shop class that would take it. Maybe a handy neighbor can fix it up. Spend a little time doing your research, then choose a day to take the lawnmower to its next home.

Getting those challenging items out of the house is a huge help. Accept that it might take a little ingenuity, time, and energy; if you don't expect it to be simple and instantaneous, you won't be so easily discouraged.

Maybe it makes sense to hire someone to haul away the unwieldy stuff. Great! Just do it.

Gamify decluttering

Waiting for the coffee to brew? Look around the kitchen. Surely there is one thing that can be thrown away. Waiting for the shower water to heat up? Find one thing in the bathroom you can do without. Try getting rid of one thing in every room in the house. Then do it again tomorrow.

Make a bet with your partner, roommate, or kid. Who can get rid of the most stuff in a day or a week? Initiate challenges! Hand out prizes! Turn home management into a game instead of a chore.

Tidy in phases

Maybe it's not just clutter making your life difficult. Look, you're tired, life is challenging. If your house is consistently untidy, try this: stand up and put 10 things back where they belong. Glass in the dishwasher, shoes in the closet, magazine in the recycle bin, etc. Set an alarm for a half hour, then get up and do it again.

Call it lazy or call it realistic; if the work gets done, it's done, whether you did it in an hour or five. Who lives in a perfectly tidy house, anyway? Don't let those TikTok feeds fool you; very few of us enjoy curated spaces with zero clutter or dust. We're living in our homes, and life is inherently messy.

Do yourself a favor; spend as much time actually managing your stuff as you do berating yourself for not doing it. You'll improve your mental health and your house will feel better.

• My husband and I have different approaches to investing.
• He's risk-tolerant, and I'm a bit more risk-averse.
• Still, we've managed to talk through financial decisions and find a common ground.

The conversation started because of a windfall: it was the first month that we didn't have the preschool tuition payment because my son was starting kindergarten. "I'd love for this money not to just disappear into the monthly budget," I said to my husband.

He nodded, and immediately had a suggestion. "What if we used it to start up a brokerage account? It'd be good to have some investments that are accessible without penalty before retirement."

Our approaches to investing differ

I knew, deep down, that this was a reasonable response to my point: we both already were on board with the idea of paying ourselves first, where we commit to an amount ahead of time for savings and retirement investments and then live on whatever we earn above that. This strategy served us well, and I wasn't opposed… exactly.

"I was actually hoping to use some of it to add to our emergency fund," I told him slowly. "And maybe getting some additional solar panels I've been looking at."

We have recently lived through instability that made me really appreciate the kinds of standard comforts that are currently easily accessible. Our family experienced the impact of a major hurricane only two years ago (Hurricane Helene), and when water, electricity, and telecommunications were interrupted for days and then weeks, I realized that a relatively modest amount of money and supplies would have made weathering a period of instability easier.

This is the place where my husband and I diverge: I tend to see things somewhat pessimistically, believing there's a good chance supply chains will be interrupted more than a few times during our lifetimes due to a variety of factors.

My husband has a generally optimistic, risk-tolerant approach to life. He knows we've made a solid plan for retirement, so he sees that a brokerage account offers promising returns (not guaranteed, but based on historical data) on funds that we've worked hard to earn. I'm sometimes fearful of the possibility of losing everything in a stock market crash.

I don't think either of us is truly at odds with the other person: my husband witnessed Helene and set to work setting up a battery backup system for our solar panels, an impressive feat and investment that falls more in line with my own risk-averse nature.

And I've never squashed his goals of investing for both short and long-term stability, even if, deep down, I want all our savings in high-yield savings accounts with FDIC protection.

We've learned how to figure out what's right for us

In order to make these conversations civil and positive, we tend to follow three steps.

First, we each get to make the case for why this investment, and why right now.

I think some of the way that we both get over our anxieties about spending or saving well is that we want to be heard, so he hears me out when I want to construct an expensive greenhouse on our property to grow more food, and I hear him out when he identifies that our current ages merit a somewhat risk-tolerant strategy so that we can reap the benefits when the market jumps higher.

Frequently, this process of hearing each other out helps us find an in-between pretty organically, and finding an in-between is the second step. Sometimes, we realize that, for instance, we are too busy to take full advantage of a greenhouse right now and should table it for a year or two. However, maybe this is a good year to invest in a higher-speed home charger for our electric car. Because many of his goals are "invest as much as possible," it's usually possible to buy some portion of the physical items I want while still contributing to our investments.

When I'm advocating for a deeper emergency fund, housed in a high-yield savings account rather than a market-invested brokerage account, I typically ask that we contribute in a percentage-based way. If I ask, for instance, for a windfall to be split 30/70, he gets to invest 70% of the money toward higher yields, and I get 30% in a very secure account. It's not exactly what either of us would like, but it ultimately gives us some benefits of both risk-averse and risk-tolerant strategies.

Finally, any time we find a split that really feels aligned for us, we see if we can make it a rule for the future, the third step. No one loves having to reinvent the wheel every time new money conversations come up. When that 70/30 split worked well for us once, I've returned to it for later money decisions, and while it sometimes needs to be adapted, it lets us balance each of our needs without a long discussion. My husband, famously of few words, likes when we can keep the conversations a little shorter and get back to playing a board game or watching a silly TV show to relax.

When we hear each other out, find a useful middle ground, and operationalize the result for future use, we find ways to invest in both a more secure and a more growth-focused future, favoring methods that work well for both our risk tolerance levels.