Decluttering

At a recent family meeting, I brought up the subject of Jordan's desk: What does he want to use it for? Because currently, it is basically a large shelf piled high with stuff. He said he really wants to use it as an actual desk, where he could sit to do homework or work on a project, but he doesn't know where to put all the things that have piled up there. The current storage areas are full of .... well, we don't even know what. Time for decluttering! The kids had not heard this word before but they like it quite a bit. We made a list of places full of mystery objects: not only the desk but also storage bins under the bed, shelves in their closet, and a couple of zones in the playroom upstairs.



Decluttering is effortful so we are making it more fun with incentives. First of all they get equal Minecraft time for time spent decluttering; that is a major incentive right there. But Aaron said, "Jordan and I really want to play Minecraft, so we might go slow to get more time." Therefore we added another incentive: For every bag of stuff that goes in the trash or out to the Goodwill, they get homemade lemonade or hot cocoa. (This was their choice of reward and they practically went through the ceiling when I said yes -- apparently these drinks are very motivating!) Finally, I promised to accompany their decluttering with a new genre of music every time, one they haven't heard of before. Jordan was fascinated by this idea.

We have had two sessions so far, less than half an hour each, and the boys are great at this! They save a few things and ditch the rest. They stay pretty well focused. They are amused by the music (Celtic yesterday, Bollywood today). They use me to help them organize what they're keeping (e.g., "let's make this box be for musical instruments and this box be for plastic animals"). They enjoy looking at a toy and thinking "I am not really interested in this anymore, but some other kid might be really excited about it!" We accomplished the entire under-the-bed zone, which was awesome. Aaron especially was blown away by how good he felt, both to get the boxes cleaned out and to make all these great donations.

Now that we have emptied some boxes, I'm hoping we'll see what to do with the stuff on the desk!