What are your favourite decluttering strategies and principles?

I've been slowly decluttering what used to be a terribly organised and overstuffed apartment. I picked up a few strategies and principles along the way and I wanted to share them as well as ask for your own!

The clutter box
My favorite strategy to keep clutter low is less about removing clutter entirely and more about reducing ongoing clutter and preventing the growth of chaos. The clutter box is an easily accessible storage location in each room. The rule is that everything that is not in its proper place can be dumped right into the clutter box, and absolutely nowhere else. It's emptied once a week on Sundays, and everything that is not in its place is put back there, given a designated place, or trashed if it has no purpose.

The biggest advantage is that it becomes effortless to quickly reduce the beginnings of clutter without needing to stop what you're doing and think about where something belongs. Containing all chaos to the clutter box also prevents other drawers from becoming stuffed with the wrong stuff, which spreads chaos fast as their designations become meaningless.

Another great advantage is that it becomes so much easier to find stuff. Is it in its designated home location? No? Then usually all you have to do is look in the nearby clutter box.

Use it or lose it.
The mantra is used to prevent me from coming up with some bizarre possible usage for an old, rusty tin box that has been uselessly sitting in a drawer for years. Anything put on the "use it or lose it" list has to have a purpose and be in active use within a month, or it's off to the recycling park on the next trip. The same goes for old canned food I've never had the inclination to eat. I may not survive the apocalypse, but at least my storage room doesn't look like one.

Don't solve a problem you don't have
I used to have a terrible habit of spotting storage, household items, or Amazon gadgets and envisioning possible purposes or situations where they could be useful, only to find that those situations never happened. And even if they did, I could have just purchased the items when needed instead of letting them gather dust for two years first.

It turns out there are an infinite number of imaginary problems I could encounter someday, but only a limited amount of space to store these impractical solutions to theoretical problems.

So, unless it addresses an issue already on my list of problems when I come across the item, I don't buy that shiny new thing. (after reciting the mantra 25 times and picking it up and putting it down once or twice).

Surface area is precious; wall space is not.
This really helped declutter the kitchen in a way that made it much nicer to cook. Anything that did not pass the Use it or Lose it test and could be moved from the counters to the walls or hanging storage solutions has been relocated. For example, the knives were shifted from a wooden knife block to a magnetic wall strip. The additional counter space for cutting and preparing food is excellent. A decluttered surface is much easier to keep clean with less splatter and no hindrance to your wipe down.

Space efficiency is wildly overrated
Man, did I used to make things difficult for myself by "organizing" my stuff into space-efficient, completely unmaintainable storage solutions. All the Tupperware stacked into each other and the lids in a row from largest to smallest. Guess how long that lasted?

Here is my current system:
Each container has a designation based on how often the contents are used:

• Very frequent use
  • Accessibility is the most important metric. Everything must be visible and accessible without needing to lift or move anything else. If the less frequently used items in the same container obstruct even slightly, they are all moved to a separate container.
  • Example: Tupperware drawer.
    • All the containers are in there with their lids already on them.
    • Only things that fulfil the exact same purpose are stacked (So you can just grab the top one).
    • The ones we don't use as much are moved to a long term storage location for special occasions.
    • Space efficient? No! Maintainable and easy, yes!
• Medium frequency use
  • Visibility is the most important metric. Everything stored should be visible from a single picture taken from where you would most comfortably look at the storage.
  • In the storage room, my racks look almost barren compared to how they used to be stacked. I can take a quick picture from the door and refer to it when making my shopping list in the other room or when I'm in the grocery store. This finally stopped me from buying items I already have all the time.
• Long term storage
  • Anything in long-term storage should have a very good reason to be there or be subjected to "Use it or lose it."
  • Here is the only place where space efficiency actually matters. Because you won't be taking these out often, it's okay for them to not be very visible and a pain to remove.
  • Very important, keep a list of everything in long term storage.
    • I have an iPhone, so when I place something in long-term storage, I say, "Hey Siri, note that the Christmas decorations are in the cupboard above the fridge."
    • Ten months later, I just ask, "Hey Siri, do I have a note about the Christmas decorations?"
  • If it's not worth writing down where it is, it's not worth keeping.