This post is part of a series on decluttering tips that take less than 15 minutes

This decluttering tip sounds so simple that it’s easy to underestimate how powerful it really is. It’s particularly aimed at readers working on a big declutter job who are:

• feeling completely overwhelmed
• dealing with extreme clutter situations
• don’t know where to begin
• have limited physical & emotional energy

Today’s decluttering your house tip is to group  like items together in the space you are trying to declutter. Don’t worry about deciding if you need to ‘sort, toss or donate’.  Don’t worry about how neat and tidy your piles look, it’s OK just to toss all the shoes in one corner, or  dump all the photos in a washing basket.  don’t sort anything! Simply group like things together for 15 minutes.

This decluttering tip is about just getting started. You bypass the decision making step, which is usually the hardest step, and the one that slows down our decluttering success. If you do this for 15 minutes every day you’ll begin to create some order out of the chaos.  And then it gets easier to make those decisions.  When you see that you have 15 pairs of scissors or 23 baseball caps, it’s much easier to be able to let go of some of them.

Just try it for one week – this works!

Today’s 15 minute decluttering tip: Group similar items together.