Strategies for Maintaining Clear Surfaces

This is an IHRT podcast Guaranteed Human . The kids really love that playhouse, huh? Yeah, it's not just a child's playhouse, it's a rental property. Kids. Off Gary's roof. Someone lives in there, lives, works, and thrives. Your WiFi reaches all the way to the playhouse? We're galenaires. It reaches everywhere. Can I check it out? Sorry. But solid, but the treehouse just opened up. Live without limits. Get home internet from AT and T and cover your whole house. Even your playhouse turned rental property . AT extended WiF covered service required, limited availability. Visit AT. com forward slash internet to learn more. Welcome to Before Breakfast , a production of I Heart Radio . Good morning . This is Laura . Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast . Today's tip is to limit the stacks of stuff . Often a small stack turns into a big stack , but a stack won't start where there isn't one . This insight can help you make any space look more orderly. My family moved into a new house about two and a half years ago . We threw out or donated a lot of stuff before moving , but plenty of things still made it into the boxes . As we were unpacking , we found stuff that didn't have homes or still needed to be donated . So I put some donation boxes in the upstairs hallway . That's also where I stored some boxes of things that didn't have a home or needed to be put away sometime . And there those boxes sat quite a while . Curiously , they began to attract other random items . The piles in the hallways stayed there, slowly growing , and just generally , looking like a mess . Then, a little over a year ago, we took the donations where they needed to go and found homes for things and dumped everything else . The empty boxes went out with the recycling . The hallway was suddenly clear . And then a funny thing happened No one has stacked anything in the hallway since then. Since everything got put away , everything stayed put away . No one leaves a random item sitting on the floor in the hallway. If they did, it would probably look sos out of place on a completely clear floor that I or somebody else would put it somewhere else immediately . While stacks of stuff attract more stuff , an empty surface tends to stay pretty empty . Maybe it is related to the broken windows theory of crime . The idea is that if people see broken windows and the windows don't get fixed , they figure no one cares no one is watching. More vandalism happens . Whereas if the windows get fixed, people wind up behaving better . They know that order is expected . Now I don't know if the evidence is completely clear clut on that as a matter of police policy , but I do know that in my house the existence of a big pile of stuff indicates that people don't really care if the stuff piles up . So people put more stuff there , rather than taking the extra few seconds to find things real homes . The pile gets bigger, whereas if the surface is clear , people think twice putting a random sock or a broken toy or a piece of trash there . Someone is going to wonder there is a broken toy sitting right there in the middle of the hallway . It gets noticed , in a way that it doesn't when it is merely thrown on top of a box of random donations or items with no homes . So if you would like a space to look more orderly try clearing off stacks of stuff as much as possible . Maybe just put the stacks in a box and put the box in a closet. It doesn't really solve the problem , but people will think twice about creating a new stack. You might even combine small stacks into one stack , so more sp ace is clear and so it is harder to stack stuff on top of the taller stack . I have done this with mail and magazines . If people see piles all over the counter they just add to it . But a single stack that's bit more precarious in height invites a pause . Do I want to add to this and risk the whole stack toppling? That moment of pause isn't a bad thing. Now, to be sure , this doesn't always work. I try my best to keep certain kitchen counters clear , but certain members of my family will see the empty counter as an invitation to throw their stuff completely across it . As if six other people don't live in the house with them . But the evidence from my hallway suggests that removing the stacks does have something of a positive effect from a clutter perspective . So it might be worth a shot . In the meantime , this is Laura . Thanks for listening , and here's to making the most of our time