Did you know that there are 300,000 items in the average American home?! That stat is absolutely wild to me. I don’t even want to know the average number of items in a speech room.
Minimizing will help you thrive because the less stuff you have, the less time you’ll spend cleaning, organizing, looking for things, moving things to find other things, and making useless decisions such as, “Which of my 7 pairs of flip flops will I wear today?”.
Here are some items that I was able to purge several of: water bottles, towels, coffee mugs, pens, t-shirts, pens, random home decor, and jackets.
Right now
Stop and think of 3-5 areas in your house that absolutely need to be purged and gone through. Write them into your planner or set a cell phone reminder for a couple of times to get it done.
If you’ve got some extra time on your hands, do the same for your speech and language materials. Seriously, PURGE and purge hard. If you haven’t used it in a year, get rid of it. If throwing things away is hard for you, box them up and store them. Somewhere on the box, write the date a year from now. If you haven’t opened the box by then, throw it away. Seriously. No excuses.
And stop, stop, stop buying so much stuff. You don’t need more things… you need more time, sanity, and fun. If you just purged 10 coffee mugs and 8 water bottles and 15 t-shirts, stop buying those things no matter how cute the next one you see in the Target dollar section is.
To take action on this, this week, purge at least 3-5 areas of your home. Consider what speech and language materials are just cluttering your space and aren’t being used. Minimize. Start thinking about materials that you can use all year and with a wide range of your students.
My Favorite Decluttering Resources for Inspiration:
Netflix Documentary: Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things
Podcast: Clear the Clutter
Book: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
And in case you need a little extra motivation, this was the scene where I work a year ago when I emptied all of the cabinets and purged bins and bins of OLD materials. Decluttering felt sooo freeing and the cabinets are STILL ORGANIZED!!
You can do it! You’ll be so happy you did when things get busy again. If pretty printables help you stay organized, click here to check out a freebie I made to help you declutter!
Happy cleaning!
PS: This is an email I sent out as part of my SLP Thrive email series. These emails are FREE and are sent to you every Sunday for a year. You can learn more about these emails here.
I keep wanting to do this with my therapy room. I have been a therapist for 18 years now! I can’t believe that number! I love new materials but I also love my old stuff and I think the OCD’ness most of us SLPs have make it difficult to get rid of something that is still so useful.
I’ve started simply by scanning old materials and then trying to get rid of the hard copies. It’s a lot easier to “delete” a file saved on my computer than it is to let go of that cute binder full of paper.
The Marie Kondo book had great ideas and was useful for both home and work decluttering! It was a good read.
Love these ideas! Thanks for sharing your awesome ideas and all the work you do and put out there for those of us who are not so organized with life!!