Clutter is on the rise. On social media, “doom rooms” and “depression piles” abound as people overwhelmed with commitments, stress, and fatigue struggle to stay organized. 

“Our attention is being hijacked by social media, competing family demands, personal agendas and workplaces. We are distracted out of the ability to complete tasks as we once could,” says Jenny Albertini, A02, author of the recent book Decluttered: Mindful Organizing for Health, Home, and Beyond and one of the first professional organizers trained by Marie Kondo.

While many younger adults want to learn to sustain homes and workplaces that foster calm, creativity, and joy, they often “did not learn how to declutter and maintain a tidy home growing up,” Albertini says—and their elders might want them to take longtime belongings as they age and downsize. 

Poor mental health can be both a cause of clutter—hoarding disorder is up among older American adults—and a result, with studies linking messy homes with higher stress, lower focus, worse relationships, unhealthy eating behaviors, and lower life satisfaction.

How can we corral the chaos? Not only with simple home organization tips, according to Albertini. Her first book, Decluttered, isn’t “the type of book that tells you how to style a shelf, or where to fold your socks, and which drawer to put things in,” she explains. 

Instead, she offers expertise from a master’s degree and career in public health, including work at PEPFAR, the global HIV program headquartered at the U.S. State Department. “When I started off as a professional organizer, I thought that I was really letting go of all of that,” she says. “But the more I spent time with clients, the more I realized how public health plays into everyday life, like dealing with clutter.”

The book also includes techniques from Marie Kondo, author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. In 2016, Albertini used its principles to help a colleague in D.C. sort through her things, which made her wish that were her actual job. “And within about a week or two, Marie Kondo announced that she was going to train people in her method,” she says.”And that was a lightbulb moment to me, because it said, ‘Oh, wait. I had no idea that being a professional organizer was a career.’”

After quitting full-time government work to become a KonMari-certified organizer, Albertini now has her own business, Decluttered by Jenny, and eight-plus years as a professional organizer. She brings that wisdom and experience, as well as her public health background and a mindfulness-based approach, to her work today.

Ominous as they may sound, “doom rooms” and “depression piles” are “just catchy names and labels for people squirreling away big quantities of things when they can't quite decide on where to put them,” Albertini says—and they can be addressed. “I think that an organized and decluttered environment is where more people can thrive and do what they want in life,” Albertini says. “And that’s the ultimate goal, to me.”

Whether navigating intergenerational tensions over belongings, mental health, or other clutter causes, she strives to do so with sensitivity and in a way that reduces shame around hoarding and clutter. 

Albertini recently shared her organizing tips with Tufts Now.

Eight Steps for Organizing Your Life

1. Seek treatment if needed. 

Albertini’s approach to clutter considers three distinct public health influences: biological, behavioral, and structural. Biological factors include diagnoses such as ADHD, PTSD, and depression, all of which can diminish executive functioning. “When people have untreated or under-treated biological conditions, they can result in clutter or a volume of items at home that feels unmanageable,” Albertini says. At the same time, clutter exacerbates conditions like PTSD and depression, so when appropriate, she talks with clients about getting the treatment they need.

2. Manage household habits. 

Looking at behaviors “comes from the work I did on HIV and AIDS programming around behavior change practices,” Albertini says. In that work, developing behaviors for safer sex was the goal. “In a clutter context, we want people to learn to protect the amount of things in their space, or only have what they really want,” she explains. That includes talking about family members whose buying or giving habits add to household clutter, and how to adjust or manage those habits.

3. Address your environment. 

Structural conditions are things in our environment or society that affect our daily lives, such as Medicaid coverage for treating hoarding disorder, or a landlord who doesn’t address toxins in their building, “which is making you sick, making it harder to do everything,” she explains.

4. Be mindful. 

Before dealing with clients’ clutter, Albertini encourages them to shift into a calm, mindful frame of mind by meditating, going for a walk, or something similar. True to her organizing origins, Albertini also applies the KonMari method with clients. “We sort by category, have a time frame to complete tasks, and really go one item at a time,” she says. 

5. Make a date. 

“Set aside time to work on clutter and treat that time like an appointment with yourself,” she says. “It doesn't have to be all day every Sunday, but it does have to be a regular, manageable experience to get through all the categories of your home.” 

6. What brings you joy? 

Albertini also suggests, in keeping with the KonMari method, that people understand their vision of a joyful home. “Then we use that vision to help people decide what to keep and what to let go of.” 

7. Find support. 

“Very often, I recommend having an accountability buddy,” Albertini says. This buddy can declutter with you in person or offer support remotely.

8. Break the cycle. 

By living with an eye on surplus and the habits that create it, and by developing practices to keep our spaces organized, “We can raise the next generation to be more mindful about consumption and be less attached to keeping things,” Albertini says. “And we can prevent the rise in hoarding from continuing.”