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When it comes time to declutter and organize your home, you may be someone who just dives in or someone who follows a more structured routine (which is, frankly, recommended). Maybe watching some TikToks about cleaning or reading up on the best approach works for you. Maybe scheduling time into your calendar every night to tidy up is your thing. For some, though, a more intense, step-by-step process might be necessary. Have you considered workbooks? They function kind of like planners, giving you tasks, instructions, motivation, and space to record how you’re doing. Here are some you can try if you’re having a hard time sticking to the task of decluttering.
Great decluttering workbooks
The Home Edit Workbook: Prompts, Activities, and Gold Stars to Help You Contain the Chaos
If you’re familiar with the Netflix show of the same name, you know The Home Edit is popular, but this book by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin is special for a few reasons of its own: First, it has 52 challenges inside for every room of your home, so you can go at your own pace, but if you even just did one a week, you’d have improvements in a year. Second, it comes with some gold-star stickers, which might seem silly, but if you’re motivated by seeing progress or earning rewards, it’s an easy way to stay hyped up on your task.
Declutter Made Easy Workbook: Step by Step Checklist to Declutter Your Home
In this workbook, Katherine Hay sets out to make the process of decluttering as easy as possible by providing weekly checklists and planners, plus check-in and progress report pages. It’s set up so you can do as little as 10 minutes of cleaning per day and still see results, all without feeling demoralized. In fact, the book encourages you to only spend 10 minutes on each task and gives you enough variety that you don’t get stuck on something repetitive. Once you finish this one, check out the My Purged Home workbook ($12.99) from Chaos Cleared, which uses the same 10-minutes-only structure.
The Declutter Challenge: A Guided Journal for Getting your Home Organized in 30 Quick Steps
If you’re a fan of Cassandra Aarssen’s “clutterbug” methodology, try her workbook to take it to another level. With a focus on mindfulness, it takes you through 30 steps toward decluttering, using open-ended questions throughout to make you think more about why your home is cluttered, why you want to change it, and what you can do to make it happen. Knowing yourself is at the heart of Aarssen’s technique, so the book helps you get there first.
Swedish Death Cleaning Workbook: The 30 Days Challenge to Organize and Simplify Your Life, Declutter Your Home and Keep It Clean
Kelsie Zaria’s workbook guides you through the Swedish death cleaning technique, forcing you to both reckon with your mortality and clean your house. Every day for 30, it asks you to do one 10-minute task, all with the goal of preparing your home for when you’re gone and someone else has to go through your stuff—even if that is a long, long way off. Like Aarssen’s work, it makes you think not only about the task at hand, but the bigger picture of why it’s important to tidy up and adopt a more decluttered lifestyle overall, making this a perfect journal if you have a hard time getting motivated to clean or see it as pointless.
Cleaning Sucks: An Unf*ck Your Habitat Guided Journal for Less Mess, Less Stress, and a Home You Don’t Hate
This workbook from Rachel Hoffman is consistently popular and highly rated—and for good reason. It goes along with her book of the same name, providing a full-color, guided journal meant to help you get to the bottom of why, exactly, you don’t like to clean. Once you figure that out, you can determine what’s stopping you from doing it, then get to work. It’s a pretty reflective workbook, not necessarily one that takes you through any cleaning processes step by step, so pick this one up if you’re stuck in a rut and can’t force yourself to tidy up.
