Episode 91

Why Your Home Keeps Getting Cluttered — and What to Do About It

Tame It Series - Pt. 1

That pile by your front door is not just stuff. Every object in it has a little voice saying, “Do something about me.” The mail contains bills to open, coupons to use, or forms to deal with. The bag you dropped when you walked in has things that need to go somewhere. The jacket that has been hanging over the chair for three days has a place it belongs, and it is probably not the chair.

Every time you walk past that pile, your brain registers all of this. It may not be completely in your face, but there is a low hum of unfinished business in the background. When you have enough of those little voices competing for your attention, the chorus becomes exhausting.

This is the real cost of clutter. The problem isn't simply that your home looks messy. Clutter takes time and mental energy away from things that actually matter to you. At some point, you've probably found yourself digging through a pile of papers in frustration, looking for the form your child needs signed before a field trip or the coupon you wanted to use while your partner waits for you by the door. The time you spend searching is coming directly out of something else you could be doing.

So let's talk about taming clutter. And I deliberately use the word taming because I'm not interested in helping you create a perfectly organized home with color-coded bins and an elaborate filing system that requires you to become a completely different person. If you've tried organizing systems that lasted a week—or perhaps less—you're in good company.

We're going for good enough. We're going for manageable. Most importantly, we're going for systems that work with how your brain actually operates instead of continually pushing against it.

Start by Finding Your Clutter Hotspots

The first thing I want you to do is walk around your home and look for what I call clutter hotspots. These are the places that repeatedly drift into clutter no matter how many times you clear them. You clean off the kitchen island, and a few days later it is covered in papers again. You clear the chair in your bedroom, and somehow it slowly becomes a secondary closet. You organize the top of the dryer, only to discover that it has once again become a landing place for everything no one knows what to do with.

Look at horizontal surfaces in particular: tabletops, counters, desks, the seats of chairs, and the tops of appliances. Look at the floor, too. Walk through your home with a notepad, make a list on your phone, or simply dictate your observations as you go.

This isn't a shame exercise. If your life is full and your time is limited, you're going to have clutter hotspots. Most people will end up with a fairly long list. The purpose of noticing them is not to collect evidence that you're bad at keeping your house organized. You're trying to find patterns.

Once you've made your list, go back to each hotspot and ask yourself one question: Why does this spot keep getting cluttered?

Clutter is almost never random. There is usually a reason a particular pile keeps reappearing, and once you understand the reason, you can begin fixing the actual problem instead of cleaning up the same pile over and over again.

Think About Your Home Like a Kindergarten Classroom

Before we look at the most common reasons clutter accumulates, I want to give you a different way to think about your home. Picture a kindergarten classroom. If you've spent any time in one, you know that everything has a place, but more importantly, every place makes sense for the activities that happen there.

The art supplies are near the art area. Picture books are within reach of the reading corner. Blocks are stored where children build with blocks. The room is arranged so that a five-year-old can get something out and put it back with relatively little effort.

That isn't an accident. Teachers learn to design classrooms around the activities that take place in them, and we can use the same idea in our homes.

Choose a room and ask yourself what activities actually happen there. Then look around and consider whether the things you need for those activities are easy to get to and easy to put away. If getting something requires a trip to another room—or worse, multiple rooms—you have created friction. Every extra step makes it a little less likely that you will put the item away when you're finished with it.

I once lived in a house with almost no kitchen storage. I loved that house, but the kitchen needed serious attention. I vividly remember trying to cook while running down the hall to a linen closet and out to the garage to retrieve pots, pans, and utensils because there simply wasn't enough storage in the kitchen.

Imagine trying to stir-fry this way. I've got the wok. I've got the oil. I've got the ingredients. Oh, where's the knife? Off I go down the hall. I come back and get started again. Where's the soy sauce? Off I go again. Everything took three times as long, I was constantly losing my place, and stir-frying is not exactly an activity that encourages you to wander away from a hot pan.

Having to move between rooms to get the things you need is inconvenient for anyone, but it matters even more if you deal with chronic fatigue or tend to be distractible. If you have ADHD and you need to walk into another room to find scissors for a craft project, there is a very real chance that something will capture your attention along the way. Ten minutes later, you may be doing something completely unrelated and have no idea why you left your project in the first place.

Keeping things together and close to where you actually use them is not laziness. It is designing your space for how your brain works.

As you look at your clutter hotspots, add a second question to your audit: Does this room support the activities that actually happen here? The answer can tell you a lot about why your clutter keeps coming back.

Six Reasons Clutter Keeps Returning

Most clutter hotspots can be traced to a handful of problems. You may recognize two or three of these showing up repeatedly throughout your home.

1. The Objects Don't Have a Clear Home

If an object doesn't have a designated place to live, it will live wherever it lands. Suppose you don't know where the scissors are supposed to go. When you finish using them, any drawer with a little open space becomes a perfectly reasonable place for the scissors. You aren't making a deliberate organizational decision. You're simply trying to get the object out of your hands so you can move on.

The result is that you eventually have three pairs of scissors scattered throughout the house and still can't find a pair when you need one.

When you notice a category of objects repeatedly collecting in a particular hotspot, ask whether those objects actually have a clear home. If they don't, give them one. Ideally, that home should be close to the place where you most often use them. The easier and more obvious the location is, the more likely you are to use it consistently.

2. It's Too Much Hassle to Put Things Away

Sometimes an object technically has a home, but the system for returning it there is annoying. This can be surprisingly difficult to notice because each individual step seems insignificant.

I once saw a photo in a magazine of a beautiful jewelry organizing system. It used small individual containers, each with its own lid, and every necklace had a separate compartment. I bought the supplies, carefully set everything up, and probably felt quite pleased with myself.

The system lasted less than a week.

To put away a necklace, I had to open the larger box, remove the individual container, take off its lid, put the necklace inside, replace the lid, return the container to the box, and close everything again. None of those steps was particularly difficult, but together they created just enough friction that I stopped doing it.

The system was cute, but it wasn't easy. Easy always wins.

Look at the systems you're currently ignoring. How many steps does it take to put something away? Do you have to remove a lid, move three other objects, open a container, and then put everything back together? If so, the problem may not be your ability to stay organized. The system may simply be asking too much of you.

3. There Are Too Many Objects for the Space

When a drawer is packed so tightly that getting something in or out requires a Herculean effort, you will eventually stop putting things away. Of course you will. Getting dressed shouldn't involve wrestling with a dresser drawer.

You take off a shirt at the end of the day and think about putting it away. Then you remember that you'll have to rearrange the entire drawer and shove it closed with your hip. Suddenly, setting the shirt on the chair seems like a very reasonable decision.

If objects are constantly overflowing from their designated homes, you may simply have too many objects for the available space. That doesn't mean you need to become a minimalist or get rid of half of everything you own. It does mean that a storage space needs enough breathing room to function. Putting something away should be easier than leaving it out.

4. Putting Things Away Feels Like It Takes Too Much Time

This problem is related to hassle, but it is slightly different. The issue isn't necessarily the physical effort required. It's your perception that tidying is going to turn into a big, time-consuming project.

The dishes have finished drip-drying in the dish rack. You see them and think, “Ugh, I don't have time to deal with the kitchen right now.” So they stay there.

But the actual task isn't “deal with the kitchen.” The task is to put the dishes in the cupboard, and that may take two minutes.

We often mentally enlarge small tasks by grouping them into much bigger projects. “Put away the dishes” becomes “clean the kitchen.” Hanging up a few shirts becomes “organize the bedroom.” Sorting today's mail becomes “deal with all the paperwork.”

When you catch yourself avoiding a hotspot because you don't have time, get very specific about the next physical action. You may discover that the task you've been resisting is much smaller than the project your brain has created.

5. There's a Project in Progress

Projects create their own kind of clutter because putting everything away can feel like losing momentum. Maybe you're working on a craft, sorting paperwork, or repairing something in the house. You're in the middle of it, and you know that if you pack everything away, getting started again will require additional time and effort.

So you leave the project out. Then a few unrelated objects get placed beside it. The pile expands, and eventually the project becomes difficult to distinguish from the general clutter surrounding it.

If this happens frequently, you may need a designated space for work in progress. A basket, tray, rolling cart, or defined section of a table can allow you to preserve your place without letting the project gradually consume the entire room. The goal isn't to pretend you never have unfinished projects. It's to give unfinished work a way to exist in your home without creating constant visual chaos.

6. You're Afraid You'll Forget About Something If You Put It Away

This is especially common if you have ADHD or tend to be visually oriented. You genuinely worry that if something is out of sight, it will also be out of mind. Keeping an object visible feels safer because seeing it acts as a reminder.

This is where we get the “Don't touch my piles; I know where everything is” system.

The problem is that piles tend to attract other objects. Someone else in the household adds a piece of mail. You put something unrelated on top because you're in a hurry. One pile becomes two or three, and eventually the visual reminder you were trying to preserve disappears into the clutter.

If visibility helps you remember, don't force yourself into an elaborate closed-storage system that hides everything behind matching cabinet doors. Instead, look for ways to create structured visibility. Open shelves, transparent containers, labeled trays, vertical files, or a clearly designated action area can keep important things visible without allowing them to spread across every horizontal surface.

The goal is not to organize your home according to someone else's brain. It's to build a system that supports yours.

Your Clutter Is Giving You Information

As you work through your hotspot audit, pay attention to the patterns you find. If bags always land by the front door, there is probably a reason. You can spend years telling everyone to carry their bags upstairs, or you can consider whether the bags need an easy home near the place where people naturally put them down.

If paperwork always ends up on the kitchen island, ask what is happening there. Is that where you open the mail? Is it where your children hand you school forms? Is it the central gathering place in your home? The clutter may be telling you that the system you've created doesn't match the way your family actually moves through the house.

This is why repeatedly clearing a surface often doesn't solve the problem. You've removed the clutter without addressing the reason it landed there. If the underlying activity and the storage system remain the same, the pile will come back.

Instead of asking, “Why can't I keep this counter clean?” try asking, “What keeps landing here, and what does that tell me about what we need in this space?”

That's a much more useful question.

Start With One Hotspot

You do not need to overhaul your entire home this weekend. In fact, please don't. Choose one hotspot from your list and spend a little time figuring out why it keeps collecting clutter.

Do the objects have a clear home? Is their current home too far from where you use them? Is the storage system annoying? Is the space simply too full? Are you keeping things visible because you're worried you'll forget about them? Is there an unfinished project that needs a designated place to live?

Once you understand the reason, make one change. Move the basket. Add a hook. Create a tray for papers that require action. Clear enough space in a drawer that you can put clothes away without wrestling with it. Put the scissors where you actually use the scissors.

The goal isn't to become a person who loves organizing. The goal is to stop spending your limited time and mental energy managing the same piles over and over again.

Your home should support the life you actually live. It should make the things you do regularly a little easier and require as few unnecessary steps as possible. When you design your space around your activities and the way your brain actually works, putting things away becomes less of a battle.

Find one hotspot. Figure out why it's there. Then make the easy choice a little easier.

That's how you begin to tame the clutter.

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The information contained and documents referenced in the podcast “Your Priority Centered Life” are for entertainment, educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, professional medical or health treatment, diagnosis, or advice. We strongly encourage listeners to consult with medical providers or qualified mental health providers with issues and questions regarding any physical and/or mental health symptoms or concerns that they may have. Furthermore, the opinions and views expressed by podcast guests, partners and/or affiliates are not necessarily those of the podcast host. Dr. Alise Murray’s opinions and views are expressed in her individual capacity and are not to be construed as those of any of her podcast guests, partners and/or affiliates.