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Looking for some tips for decluttering your home? I always love discovering new decluttering secrets and sharing them with you. Here are some of the best ideas for decluttering and organizing I’ve discovered lately. You can use these strategies for organizing throughout your home!

1. Make use of chalkboard paint. Not sure what belongs where? Not sure which shelves you should use for plates and which ones are supposed to hold cups and bowls? One cool idea I saw recently is to cover the walls behind your shelves in chalkboard paint. Then simply write the names of the dishes (or whatever else) belongs on the shelves over their proper places. That way you and everyone else in the house knows exactly where everything belongs.

2. Compartmentalize. It’s a classic, but it bears repeating: compartmentalizing your storage is a good idea. Put small plastic boxes in your drawers to break up the space. You can even paint the bottoms of the boxes with chalkboard paint and label the boxes so you remember where everything goes! This is a very cute method, and it is really easy to do. Never again will you be tempted to put something in the wrong place. Just keep in mind that you can erase the writing on chalkboard paint, so it may be better to write on painted cards, position those on the bottom of your drawer, and put the clear plastic boxes on top of the cards. That way they will not get smudged.

3. Think functionally. Resist the urge to think of decluttering as nothing more than sorting things into piles and freeing up space. Decluttering and organizing are not just about consolidating messes, they are about getting rid of them. You can do this by coming up with a functional strategy. Do not move an object from one spot to another just to free up space; do it because it makes sense to have it in that particular spot. It should be there because it is easy to reach, out of the way, or next to related objects, or so on.

4. Try not to be a perfectionist. When you declutter and organize your home, it is all too easy to set a ridiculously high standard. You might look at houses you have seen in catalogs and think your house should look like that. Or you might read blogs for home organization tips and think your rooms should look just as tidy as the ones you see in those photographs. Remember, though, many of those people either make a living related to their organizational activities, or they do them for fun. You cannot expect to achieve the same results, nor should you hold yourself to that standard. Once an area is “good enough,” call it good and move on to the next spot in your home.

Decluttering and getting organized are challenging tasks for most people. Any one of these strategies should be able to help you along. If you use all four of them, you should make ample progress toward your decluttering goals.