The average person who wrote me believes they would have to get rid of HALF of what’s in their room before they could breathe in it.

That’s a lot of work. No wonder you haven’t “gotten organized” yet. 

Nobody wakes up on a Saturday and thinks, “You know what sounds fun? Removing HALF of my belongings.” That’s not a task, that’s a demolition project.  

So, the room stays exactly as it is. You walk past the door, go down a shame spiral, and another year goes by. 

And guess what…that number isn’t wrong. 

If anything, most people are underestimating. The reason you haven’t done it isn’t laziness, and it isn’t that you need to organize more. It’s that there are things in the room you can’t let go of…yet.

And that “yet” takes more than a simple decision to say goodbye.  

Something that surprised me was that some of you didn’t answer my question. You pushed back against it (which I loved!)… 

“0-10% let go. 90-100% put away. My issue is not really too much, but the habit of not putting things away when I’m busy or focused on other things.” 

“Maybe 20% actually needs to go. The rest of the ‘clutter’ isn’t ‘too much stuff’ as much as it is ‘stuff needing a place to call home.’ I have empty shelves and dressers, so there’s still space.” 

“25-30%. Or a bigger room.” 

And my favorite response of the entire experiment: 

“I feel like this is a trick question. I don’t want to let go of ANY of it, which is why it’s still there. So that answer is 0%. But if the question is how much of the clutter needs to be removed from that room so I feel good in there, then the answer is 95%. And therein lies the rub.” 

That, right there, is the monster in the closet. She found it herself, in one paragraph. 

So, what does YOUR number mean?  

Here’s my take, based on what you all told me, and based on what I’ve witnessed in the past 20+ years: 

If you said 0-25% 

You don’t have a clutter problem. Decluttering will barely move the needle for you. Maybe you love your stuff, and that stuff doesn’t have a home. So, it lives on the counter, the floor, or in Trader Joe’s bags. Or, you need systems for organizing things in a way that works better for you. What you need is a system that matches how your brain actually works.

If you said 26-60% 

You’re the biggest group, and you’re the hardest to diagnose from the outside. Some of your 50% genuinely needs to go. Some of it just needs a home. Some of it is being kept because there’s something bigger going on under the piles. You might need an outside perspective to help you figure out which is which, because guessing is what’s keeping you circling this room over and over again.  

If you said 61-100% 

If you’re in this category, you’re not just measuring stuff. You’re also measuring how overwhelmed it makes you feel. Almost everyone who gave me a number over 80% described a room with more than one job…the bedroom that’s also the dumping ground + office area, the office that’s also a craft room + storage room. Here’s the thing: when a room is asked to do four jobs, it collects four rooms’ worth of stuff. That’s how you get to 90%. So the answer isn’t only “let go of more.” It’s deciding what that room is actually for, and then letting everything that doesn’t belong to that purpose go live somewhere else.