Closing Loops

Three months ago, for reasons I won’t get into, I found myself suddenly taking care of my two sons by myself. More recently I became unemployed. You’ve heard of Dual Income, No Kids? I’m doing Dual Kids, No Income.

As a result of these sudden changes I’ve had to establish some new habits and routines to keep everything afloat without being completely overwhelmed.

Around the time all this started, I went down a YouTube rabbit hole of decluttering videos. One thing that really resonated with me was the idea of “closing loops.”

Closing loops is all about finishing unfinished tasks that tend to nag at the back of your mind and cause stress. For example, that dirty dish sitting on the counter, or that load of laundry that’s been in the dryer for two days. No judgement here, we all have those little things that slip our minds or that we put off until later. But all of those small things can add up until you feel like it’s unmanageable.

The solution is fairly simple:

1. Make a list of all the things that are unfinished that are stressing you out. That form you’re supposed to fill out for your kid’s school. The oil change you’ve been putting off. That phone call you’ve been meaning to make. This gets them out of your head and into one place where you can start to chip away at them.
2. Knock out anything that takes less than two minutes. Put that dish in the dishwasher. Respond to that email. These are the quick wins that can make you feel like you’re making progress. After you’ve established a routine of closing loops, you’ll find it easier to extend the window for longer tasks.
3. Break down larger projects into smaller tasks. For me, one of these seemingly insurmountable tasks was cleaning my sons’ room. I’ll talk more about how I tackled this in a bit.
4. Let go. Drop any low-priority tasks or get rid of things you don’t need that require constant maintenance.

Embracing minimalism

Because I moved around a lot when I was younger, I was forced to become somewhat of a minimalist. But being married and living in the same house for 11+ years, I came to accumulate a lot of stuff. And as a parent, I’m constantly adding new clothes, toys, books, and stuffed animals to an already untenable collection.

Here’s a few ideas that helped me start to get things back under control.

Swedish death cleaning

I love this concept because it reframes your decluttering from yourself to your loved ones. The idea is that you are getting rid of as much as possible to reduce the burden on your family, who will have to deal with all your stuff when you die. If you’ve ever experienced the loss of a loved one and had to figure out what to do with their things, it’s extremely taxing. Removed from the sentimentality of each item, it all just looks like “stuff”. Stepping outside yourself can be a useful way to purge your belongings.

“Do I need this?” vs. “Am I using this?”

A useful question to ask when decluttering is not do I need this? but am I using this? “Do I need this” will often lead you to keeping things that might be useful someday — that outfit you wear once every couple of years — that just take up room waiting to be used. Instead, asking “am I using this” will weed out a surprising amount of stuff. Try this on the junk drawer in your kitchen. You’ll be shocked how little of it you actually keep.

The $20 or less rule

It’s really common to find yourself saying “this is a perfectly good ____” when decluttering. But if it’s something you rarely use and it costs less than $20, donate it or throw it away. You can always buy a new one if you need it again someday.

Like with like

Something I’ve always done when trying to organize is to just make a bunch of piles of the same kind of stuff. Here’s all my cables, here’s all my random pieces of mail, etc. This was especially helpful in organizing the boys’ stuff. I put different types of toys in gallon freezer bags. This helps you visualize all of the stuff you have in one place and eliminate duplicates. Do I really need seven bottle openers? Probably not.

Airbnb life

I’ve been thinking about what I want my house to feel like and I thought about how freeing it feels to be on vacation in an Airbnb, which has all the comforts of home but with just the necessary basics to function for a week or two. Keeping this in the back of my mind has really helped me purge as much as possible.

Putting ideas into action

Over the last two months I’ve tackled the kitchen, the bathrooms, and my bedroom using these techniques and purged a fair amount of stuff. By far the biggest thing that was causing me stress was the sheer amount of stuff my sons have accumulated over the last seven years. And it was in every room of the house!

The first step was to set up a staging area in the den where I could put all of their stuff and try and “like with like” to the best of my ability. Anything that was broken or missing parts or that came in a Happy Meal was unilaterally disposed of or donated.

Just getting everything in one room was extremely helpful. It freed me up to organize all of the common areas of the house and deep clean the boys’ bedroom without having to worry about piles of stuff everywhere.

Next I washed all the boys’ clothes and put them in one place. Together we went through each individual item and decided if it was something they wanted to actually wear or get rid of. They did a surprisingly good job of whittling things down without being overly sentimental about any of the clothes. We ended up taking three trunk-loads of clothing to be donated between the three of us. I was finally able to fit all of their clothes in their dresser!

The draft

I had this brilliant idea to do a draft to pare down the boys’ things. Like a sports league drafting new players each year, I had the boys take turns picking things like books, stuffed animals and toys (three separate drafts) until we didn’t have anywhere to put things. They could work together to strategize and picking an item didn’t necessarily mean it belonged to them. I pointed out that picking a HUGE stuffed animal would take up a lot of room that could be used for multiple smaller stuffed animals, so they kept this in mind as they made their picks.

We were able to pare down the books and stuffed animals to fit in their storage areas and had a ton of stuff left over to donate. Having all the toys in another room made them more selective about what they were playing with and surfaced some toys they had assumed had been long lost. With so much less stuff, everything now has a place and the floor is clear enough to have space to actually play with the things they do enjoy.

Wrapping up

Probably the biggest challenge was the bottleneck of trash collection. I was generating considerably more trash than my bin could accommodate. This forced me to pace things a little slower than I would have liked. At the same time though, it made it feel a little less insurmountable. I was able to tackle a room at a time, and with each room that I finished I felt so much lighter, and I could tell the boys did too. We still have a ways to go but things already feel much more manageable.

The most eye-opening realization I had in this process was that I always assumed that procrastination was my nature. (I once bought a book about overcoming procrastination but I kept putting off reading it.) What I noticed once I finally closed a bunch of loops was that I was no longer overwhelmed by the amount of unfinished tasks, so it was much easier to keep the loops closed and I wasn’t putting things off until later. With a hard reset, nearly everything that needs to be done falls under the two minute rule.

What are your favorite decluttering tips? I’d love to hear them.

About Mike

Hello! I'm Mike Aparicio. I've been making websites for over 30 years and have found a niche at the intersection of design and engineering — building CSS-based design systems where engineers don't have to write CSS and helping product teams develop a shared language for building on the web. I run a design system consultancy called Triangle.

I write about design systems and CSS, as well as video games, movies, television, and parenting. If you enjoyed this article, consider supporting me on Kofi.