In this segment of LIVE with Kelly and Ryan, professional organizer and author Tisha Morris shares practical decluttering strategies for a spring clean. She starts with the closet, recommending a "2‑year rule"—donate any clothing older than two years, especially sentimental items that keep you stuck in the past. She then tackles paper clutter, advising to discard junk mail and keep a single "inbox" stack for items that need immediate attention, filing or tossing everything else. For media, she suggests keeping beloved physical items (like a favorite DVD) but streaming or digitizing the rest, including home movies that can be saved on a thumb drive and given as gifts. In the bathroom, she urges a purge of unused or mismatched bath products, recycling them to avoid turning cabinets into a landfill. Finally, she addresses inherited items, noting the emotional overload they cause; she recommends processing the feelings, finding charitable homes that resonate personally, and allowing time rather than rushing the decision. Throughout, she emphasizes that decluttering reduces mental clutter, improves wellbeing, and ties the advice to her book, The Clutter Intervention: How Your Stuff Is Keeping You Stuck.
Chapters
Welcome back. Spring has sprung, and decluttering your home is a great start to major spring cleaning. Please welcome the woman who literally wrote the book about it, but then she threw it away because she didn't want to have clutter. Tisha Morris, everybody. Here she is.
Tisha, welcome.
Good to see you, Tisha. All right. This looks familiar. All this looks familiar.
So— So actually, I love starting with the clothing closet first.
Oh, OK. Should we go to clothes first?
Yeah, it's very consistent.
Oh, I didn't know—
here. It's right there.
Why don't you go in the closet?
So it's the space that's most personal to us, and so therefore you can have the quickest change. So anything that's over 2 years old, 2 years old.
I'm gonna be naked, Tish.
So anything that's older than that, I recommend donating it to charitable organizations. And it's those sweatshirts from college, the party dress from college that really get us stuck, but they represent the past. So we wanna be here in 2019.
Here's my problem. I always go, what if it comes back and then I'm sorry I got rid of it because—
I kinda like this one.
Well, that's your excuse to go shopping.
Yeah, okay, good point.
Do you mind if I keep that? I kinda like this one.
He's gonna re-clutter.
All right, next.
So papers. They cause so much anxiety and there's actually lots of research now that shows that a cluttered space leads to clutter mind. So you can immediately cut it down by tossing junk mail.
Junk mail.
Yeah, and just keep one stack, even in your kitchen, of just your inbox. And those are the things you need to tend to. Anything else either gets tossed or gets filed away outside of your everyday spaces.
Okay.
All right?
No one is throwing away my favorite movie ever. We'll save this one. Under the Tuscan Sun. Under the Tuscan Sun, I love this.
You can keep your favorites, all right? But anything else you can stream.
But nobody's really watching these, right? Right. It's all—
It's all streamed.
Right.
And then home movies. Digitize. That way you can keep your favorite ones. You can get it put on a thumb drive. Give it away for Christmas gifts.
Oh my gosh, that's great.
Eraser, please, I'm holding that too.
He's gonna, he's literally rebuilding his nest right now.
So I know this is the, actually sometimes when decluttering you can find some of your favorite things that you forgot about. So bath products, they clog our cabinets. It causes stress that you don't need in the morning. And so we have lots of unused products. Maybe they're the wrong color, the wrong, maybe they made your hair frizzy. So, pour them out, recycle, it's Earth Day, so great time to, you know, don't wanna make your cabinets its own landfill.
Yeah, correct.
That's true. Smart.
All right, very smart. Okay, good.
What's over there?
Inherited items. These cause a lot of overwhelm for people, and it's really about an overwhelm of emotion. And so once you realize why you're holding onto things, it makes it a lot easier. And a lot of times with these items, it's finding a good home for them. Okay, so maybe you find a charitable organization that's really near and dear to your heart. That way you feel a lot better. And there's also no rush in getting rid of these items because they take time and we want to process them.
Right. It's such— you're right, it does clear your head when you can clear your things.
His book is great, by the way. Tisha's book, The Clutter Intervention: How Your Stuff Is Keeping You Stuck, is available everywhere books are sold. Tisha Morris, everybody.
