So today we're going to talk about what is clutter? I've been a professional organizer for over five years when I can tell you is that clutter is different for every single person. clutter is a personal perception. And it differs among people. So what I define is clutter is very different from what you might define clutter as. And it's very easy sometimes for people to feel judged based on how they keep their spaces.

Because you know what, when you look at a messy desk, people look at it and they say, that's, that's full of clutter, but maybe that person is really great at retrieving whatever it is in that mess. So don't be too quick to judge and know that clutter is different for every single person. Okay? There's a couple of ways that you can help identify whether or not you have clutter. Answering a simple question of are you storing things for someone else in your home and it's preventing or taking up space in your home? That could be a sign that you have someone else's clutter in your space.

It could be identifying things that don't necessarily fit in your space. So we've all probably been in one of those situations where you are setting up your office for the first time and you've got that desk that you've had for years, but you've moved into a new apartment, and it just doesn't seem to fit, right. You want it to work, but it's just not working in the space, that item might have become clutter because it's no longer the Wrights product for that space. So that's a way of identifying clutter. Sometimes we just define clutter as anything that's preventing you from using a space the way you intended to use it. So for example, if you have a collection of library books or books that you store in the home and you've got them all in the shower, if you're not able to have a shower because you are storing books in the shower, that is clutter, because it's preventing you from being able to use the space for its intended purpose.

Okay, if you have five showers, you can go ahead and use the bathtub as a storage space if you need to. Another way of looking at clutter is It's anything that bugs you, do you ever walk into one of your rooms and say, ah, and because you've seen a pile of something, or, you know, maybe there's something piling up on a shared common space. And that's something that can drive you a bit crazy. That could be something that you define as clutter. But clutter is anonymous has a really great quote that we often share with anybody in our workshops. And that is that clutter is anything that we don't need or want or use, that takes our time, energy, and that feeling of calm.

So anything like that really kind of you can define that as being cluttered. But how do we communicate? How can I go in as a professional organizer and say, This person has clutter, this person doesn't have clutter. We don't really define it like that. We use what's called the clutter image rating scale. And what that is, is a series of photos that you can see in the different examples that we're providing for you that in each image, the room starts off with pretty simple for me Pretty simple items.

And then over the course of the nine images, slowly items are added into that space. So that if you walk into a room, you can use the clutter image rating scale and say, right, this room looks closest to a number five, or this room looks closest to a number two. And that way we can say this person has about a clutter image rating scale of three, or four, and you will understand what I'm talking about, even though we don't need to necessarily describe everything in that room. So it's a really great tool that you can use to help start to change your mindset about what clutter is, but also be able to come to some common ground with people about what is clutter. So join us in the next video and keep learning