The Clutter Fairy Weekly

Creating a home that supports the life you love is what organizing is all about! But if you’re working to clear a backlog and cultivate habits to reduce future clutter, it can be hard to find the time and energy for much else. In episode #110 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, suggests strategies to balance the compe...

Sometimes the work of organizing is too overwhelming for one person to tackle, so we ask for help. But helpers who aren’t sensitive to our goals, priorities, and emotional needs can create more problems than they solve. In episode #109 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, offers guidance on asking for help with your de...

Do you have an office that doubles as a guest room, a Zoom studio, a library, a craft room, and a gift-wrapping room? How about a closet that doubles as a pantry, or maybe a spare bedroom that doubles as an overflow closet? In episode #108 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, examines the organizing issues of multi-fun...

Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, welcomes Ellen Delap of the Attention Deficit Disorders Association–Southern Region to share information about “ADHD Across the Lifespan,” a symposium for anyone interested in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, including those with ADHD, parents, partners and spouses, caregivers, educators, counselors, a...

“Sandwich Generation” refers to middle-aged people who shoulder the responsibility for both their own children and aging parents, while still trying to enjoy a life of their own. In episode #107 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, explores the unique clutter challenges facing the Sandwich Generation and suggests strat...

More often than not, the stories that people who struggle with clutter tell start with the words “I feel….” Even emotions with little clear connection to our stuff can muddle our decision-making and impede progress. In episode #106 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, examines negative feelings that complicate declutte...

January was Get Organized month—a time when many people embark on new decluttering goals or try to revive projects where they’ve gotten stuck. If you’re not sure where to start—or restart—we’ve got you covered. In episode #105 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, offers pointers to set yourself up for decluttering succ...

Not everyone has the resources to install custom storage solutions, field a team of professional helpers, or make unlimited supply runs to expensive stores. But a modest budget shouldn’t stand between you and the organized life you want to live! In episode #104 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, shares a collection o...

The world of decluttering can be a confusing realm of competing philosophies, methods, strategies, books, courses, webcasts, podcasts, and apps. But how do we cut through the “decluttering clutter” to find an approach that works for us ? In episode #103 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, explores several popular appr...

Are some things objectively clutter, or is calling something “clutter” just a personal judgment? It’s hard to solve a problem that isn’t clearly defined, so it’s important to get clear about what we mean by clutter. In episode #102 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, examines several definitions we can use to identify...

As New Year’s Eve approaches, we spend moments of self-reflection and inspiration coming up with lofty goals for next year. We set them…and then promptly forget them. In episode #101 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, explains reasons why New Year’s resolutions fail more often than they succeed and suggests more effe...

Season’s greetings from The Clutter Fairy family to you and yours! In episode #100 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, thanks our clients, patrons, friends, family, viewers, and listeners for your generous support this year and wishes you a joyous and peaceful holiday season filled with love and light! The text of thi...

Sometimes the pressure of other activities and priorities means that we have to put organizing projects on hold—or at least in slow motion—and it can be hard to keep enthusiasm and momentum when the time comes to restart. In episode #99 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, offers strategies for keeping focus and commit...

It’s easy to get confused as you navigate the blurry borders between decluttering, organizing, and ticking off your routine cleaning and maintenance chores. In episode #98 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, clarifies the distinctions between clearing clutter, organizing, and tangential household tasks and offers stra...

Stuff becomes clutter when it stands in the way of our vision for what we want and need in our homes: relationships, fulfillment, comfort, peace of mind, and so on. In episode #97 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, explains how to turn clutter obstacles into the starting points and motivation for setting concrete goa...

We’ve talked about how your home’s functions, the people who live there, and your most-loved belongings can contribute to a vision for a home that supports the life you want. In episode #96 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, integrates your values, dreams, and aspirations into the process of shaping a vision to clari...

Our homes tend to fill up with the artifacts and debris of our busy lives as much as by conscious choices that we’ve made, so they can come to represent a distorted view of our lives and our tastes. In episode #95 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, suggests designing a vision for your home to guide your decluttering...

The rise of fast fashion, the ease of online shopping, and the popularity of retail therapy have left many of us with closets and dressers stuffed to overflowing—sometimes with clothes that we’ve never even gotten around to wearing. In episode #94 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, discusses fresh ways to think about...

For most people, a clutter problem doesn’t spring up overnight—it’s the result of long-term habits of delaying decisions, ignoring minor messes, and accumulating new stuff faster than you eliminate old stuff. In episode #93 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, talks about how to stem the flow of clutter at the source b...

Some of us love to shop, and stores and online retailers with stuff to sell know how to push our buttons to make the sale. But it’s easy for our spaces to get out of balance if we bring home more than we’re using up, giving away, or getting rid of. In episode #92 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, talks about the eff...

Sooner or later, most of us find ourselves dealing with stuff left behind by loved ones, and inherited clutter presents some big, prickly emotional challenges. In episode #91 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, shares stories from the estate-clutter trenches and suggests ways to make the clearing process easier for yo...

Halloween is right around the corner, and before you can say Boo! , it’ll be time to run the annual rat race from Thanksgiving to New Year. In episode #90 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, focuses on streamlining the holiday season for you and your loved ones and offers simpler, less stressful, less-cluttered approa...

A lot of conflicting factors compete in our heads as we weigh whether to keep or let go of stuff. Thoughts and feelings about price, value, beauty, and sentiment struggle against harsh realities of space limitations, dust, time, and mobility. In episode #89 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, examines mental models th...

We’re getting a break from summer heat—time to get outdoors! For those of us who struggle with clutter, outside spaces can become blocked with junk instead of supporting our outdoor aspirations. In episode #88 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, talks about the kinds of clutter that spill out of our homes and into our...

When we talk about collecting, we usually mean the deliberate accumulation of items in a narrow category, like shot glasses, postcards, or Beanie Babies. But sometimes we end up with a “collection” without even trying: a cupboard full of coffee mugs, 17 kinds of body wash, or enough wrapping paper to last the next 20 Decembers. In episode #87 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professiona...