Jump Start January: Week 2: Day 1

It’s Declutter Week for Jump Start January. Oh yes. Time to have a good old tidy up, get organised and generally streamline your life.

Today we’ll be starting you off reasonably gently with a very quick and easy activity, and you’ll start feeling the benefits pretty much right away. It’s time to declutter your work bag.

Here’s the declutter – and it shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes:

• Empty all the contents of the bag out onto a table.

• Clean the bag. Take it outside and shake it if you need to. Then, depending on the type of bag, wipe it with a damp cloth / use leather cleaner / put it into the wash.

• WORKING QUICKLY – sort the bag contents out into ‘keep’, ‘put away somewhere else’, and ‘get rid’ piles.

• Take rubbish straight out to the dustbin or recycling bin. Put anything saleable or for charity into a marked box.

• Put away everything that belongs somewhere else (i.e. not in this bag).

• Clean ‘keep’ items and return them to the bag.

• Make a shopping list of useful missing things that you need for your bag.

• Before the end of the week, put any unwanted items up for sale or give them to charity, and buy your new useful items.

I’ve managed to declutter my handbag in 5 minutes, mainly because it’s fairly new and I gave it a good clean out a few weeks ago. I cleared out my purse at the weekend too, as part of doing my receipts on Day 6 of Week 1 of the Jump Start. The only task that remains is to let my makeup bag dry out (it’s in the wash right now), then refill it with some severely edited makeup.

My shopping list has two things on it: a new business card holder, and some new concealer. Better get them bought before Tenner Week, eh?

How did you get on with the declutter? What did you put on your ‘useful items’ list?

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