a personal theory...

...of housecleaning, which has proved to be an effective way of eliminating clutter. First you do all the laundry that needs to be done. This will make you feel very productive. It also provides great deal of satisfaction when everything from all the baskets is clean and hanging in it's proper place in various closets or tucked into appropriate storage.

Then you use all the empty laundry baskets to wipe all the clutter from every horizontal surface where it has accumulated. Clean off all the counter tops in the kitchen where flotsam and jetsam lands when everyone walks in the back door. Remove all the oddments from tops of dressers and chests-of- drawers in the bedroom. Swipe everything that has cluttered the dining table into a basket. Get a dust cloth and wipe the cosmic fallout off, so every flat surface that was covered is now sparkling and spotless.

Now comes the hard part. You have to put half of that stuff in the trash. It's been sitting around for so long, un-looked at, unused, un-needed, it is obvious you don't really want it in your life. So all those pieces of junk mail, wee little screws you find lying on the floor that fell out of who-knows-what, socks with no mate: toss 'em. Or put what you can in your recycle bin.

Yay! you've done a great job, and have the baskets whittled down to manageable.  I'm sure some of what's left is things you need to donate to the Thrift store. Be sure to make a list and get a receipt to take it off your taxes next spring.

Start sorting through what's left and decide if you really need to keep those documents, and file them away in some semblance of order or you will never be able to locate when needed. If you are a tech whiz, smarter than I, you can scan and store in computer, right?   That is going to get rid of the rest of the paper, so you can shred what's still left and use it to compost/mulch in your back yard.

At this point, there should be only about one fourth of the mess you started with. This is, sadly, things you are not yet ready to part with, so you will be forced to find some place to put the remaining stuff until next time. Even so, don't you agree that my Theory of Condensation is working beautifully?

I'm going right now to start emptying the laundry basket sitting in my kitchen. I will not put that stuff back where it came from, so most will likely go to  be donated to the thrift store. And become the property of some other sucker who wants clutter.