Spring officially begins on Sunday, March 20th. that means it's time to think spring cleaning.

While spring cleaning is certainly a great effort, our tendency to accumulate clutter makes it far worse. It's one thing to take all the books off the shelf, dust the books, dust the shelf, and put everything back. It's worse when the shelves are overburdened and there are three stacks of books in front of the bookcase along with 2 file folders and miscellaneous stuff on the shelves.

So, the first step in spring cleaning should be a good de-clutter. Once you finish your taxes, you can file all that paperwork where it belongs and discard duplicates (you don't need 3 forms of acknowledgment that you made a donation). As you switch out your winter clothes for summer clothes, you can discard or donate clothes that are in bad shape or that no longer fit or that you just don't wear. You can donate that stack of books and magazines you read when you were inside all winter. Give away or store the things you don't use. If you have lots of items that you really like and want to keep, you can rotate them seasonally. But if you forget they are in the attic from one season to the next, do you really need them.

You can de-clutter a bit at a time — maybe one closet or area a day. Slow but steady will get you through.

Then you can turn to spring cleaning. You can do this one of two ways: thoroughly clean each room as it's de-cluttered or wait until the end and do it all at once. Both have their positives and negatives. Doing it one room at a time spaces out the work and let's you see progress to motivate you, but you don't have the whole house clean at once, Doing it all at once gets you a few days in tidy bliss, but it's hard to stay motivated and a long weekend of deep cleaning is a workout. Do what works for you.

The next post will outline your spring cleaning tasks.