The Decluttering Advice Every Ostrich Homebird Needs To Hear Right Now

If decluttering feels pretty impossible before it’s even started, you’re probably an Ostrich Homebird Type (one of the 4 types from the free ‘What Homebird Are You?’ quiz ). As such, here’s exactly why decluttering feels the way it does for you – and the approach that will actually work for you (finally!).

You mean to do it. You genuinely, sincerely mean to do it.

The plan was always to tackle the clutter…

• At the weekend…
• Or after this particularly busy period at work finishes…
• Or when the kids break up, because then there’ll be more time…

…except something filled the time, and somehow a full weekend passes and not one area has been tackled.

Again.

So you find yourself walking through your house and looking at it, feeling – not motivated – just tired. And slightly guilty. And then you close as many doors as possible because looking at it all is a constant reminder of the fact you still haven’t done it.

If that sounds familiar, there’s a very good chance you’re an Ostrich.

The Ostrich is one of 4 Homebird types that we can all be at some stage or another during our lives.

This is the stage when everything feels like too much, where ‘stuff’ has accumulated past what feels manageable, and where the gap between where things are and where you want them to be feels so wide that starting seems pointless.

Because there’s so much to do, you don’t start on anything.

You protect yourself by not looking at it as much as possible (just as the Ostrich hides its head in the sand…).

And that? It’s not laziness. It’s actually a very sensible nervous system response to overwhelm.

You’re protecting yourself.

Unfortunately though, what it means is that your home stays the way it is, and you stay stuck rather than moving on…

So what’s the answer?

Here’s why decluttering feels the way it does for an Ostrich – and the approach that actually works.

Psst…. If you don’t know your Homebird Type yet, you can discover it HERE

Why decluttering feels so hard for the Ostrich

The standard decluttering advice – to ‘set aside a day, put on some music, and just get started’ – is ideal for someone who isn’t an Ostrich.

Someone for whom starting is the hardest part, but once started, the momentum carries them through.

Someone for whom the clutter feels manageable – whether in one session or in chunks.

For the Ostrich, it’s more complicated than that.

The home isn’t just a bit cluttered. It’s likely accumulated over months or years and is now past the point where the usual amount of effort produces the usual amount of progress.

Note: This stage can happen at any time in life. It usually comes about due to something like an illness, having a baby, starting a business, helping elderly parents, helping out someone for a while, or just life in general taking attention away from the house (and your usual routine) for a while.

And however you’ve come to be in this stage, the result is the same.

Effort doesn’t product visible results quickly enough

Because there’s so much to tackle, you can spend two hours on a room and it looks on the outside to be in a pretty similar state to when you started.

You may have been busy decluttering and feel that you’ve made progress, you may have filled three bags in the time – and yet when you look around you get disheartened because the visual is telling you that that nothing has really changed.

And when effort doesn’t produce visible results, the brain stops volunteering effort.

Not to mention the decision fatigue…

Because decluttering isn’t just physical – it’s a continuous stream of small decisions that need to be made:

• Keep or donate?
• This pile or that pile?
• Where does this even go?
• Will I miss it / need it one day?
• Will I feel bad for letting it go?
• etc…

For someone who’s already tired and overwhelmed, adding several hundred additional decisions to the day is a significant ask.

It’s no wonder the spare room door stays closed.

And then, how about the guilt layer on top of it all?

The feeling that you should be further along than this. That other people manage it. That it somehow reflects on you as a person that your home is in this state.

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.

Life just got loud for a while, and the home bore the weight of that – but the guilt makes the process of starting to declutter feel even harder than it already is.

Please hear this: You’re not stuck because you’re incapable. You’re stuck because everything is yelling at you at once – and your brain backed away to protect you.

4 Decluttering methods that don’t work for the Ostrich

Before getting to what DOES work, it’s worth naming what usually doesn’t – because the Ostrich has usually tried most of these and already knows they don’t stick. Knowing what potentially won’t work for you is almost MORE powerful than what will…

The 1 day blitz approach

This doesn’t work because although clearing your diary for a full day of decluttering sounds productive, it front-loads all the decision fatigue and physical effort at once.

By mid-afternoon you’re exhausted, the room looks roughly the same as it did this morning, and the lesson learned – consciously or not – is that decluttering doesn’t work.

Not to mention that the idea that it can all be sorted out in 1 day just isn’t realistic – it likely took a long time to get to this stage of clutter in your home, and so you have to be careful not to try and bite off more than you can chew in terms of time lines and results.

If you don’t temper with reality, your disappointment will feel like failure – unfairly so.

The room-by-room approach

This doesn’t work well either, at least not at the start of decluttering for an Ostrich.

That’s simply because starting with a whole room when there’s so much in it, is too big a unit.

The category-by-category approach

Starting with things like clothes, books, and papers, also tends to fall apart because it requires gathering things from multiple rooms first, which is a project in and of itself when there’s so much in each room to filter through.

As such, this stage is quite deceiving because it feels like you’re dealing with less (a good thing) – but the fact that you have to sift through pretty much every part of your home to find everything in that one category is enough to send the wrong feeling through your body before you’ve even started.

And lastly? The motivational approach

Things like watching videos, making a Pinterest board of the sort of home life you want, reading about how good it’ll feel, etc… – doesn’t work well for an Ostrich Homebird type because it subtly increases the gap between where you are and where you want to be without giving you a firm plan or path between the two.

Sheer motivation at this stage has to be held for a longer term than for other Homebird types – and that’s exhausting.

There are lots of better ways…

6 Things that actually work: the Ostrich approach to decluttering

The Ostrich needs a completely different starting point for decluttering:

1.  Start with rubbish, not decisions

The first move isn’t to sort, keep, or donate anything. It’s to remove what’s unambiguously rubbish – and only that.

Take a bin bag around the house and collect together the obvious stuff:

Receipts that mean nothing. Empty packaging. Things that are broken beyond fixing. Duplicates that have been superseded. Food that’s gone off. Anything that is clearly, obviously, no-question rubbish – without any decision required.

This is the Bin Bag Challenge that we start with in The Declutter Equation, along side a couple of others, and it works because it produces visible, immediate results without triggering the decision fatigue that derails a proper declutter.

The room looks lighter immediately. The drawer closes more easily. Something has actually happened.

And that something is important because it proves that action produces results, which is exactly what the Ostrich’s brain needs to see.

2. Have a plan

Before just getting stuck in – and randomly letting go of some stuff – it’s always better to take a pause first.

This pause means you can get clarity on how you’re going to tackle things, and what you want to achieve.

That way all decisions will be easier because they’ll come from a position of understanding rather than guesswork (which is always more draining), and you’ll have clear guidelines for yourself that will keep things moving forward – even when you feel stuck.

That’s why the first ‘M’ in the Declutter Equation is Masterplan. We look at aligning your home with what you specifically need and want – and then curating from there.

3. Work in small sections

There will come a point in decluttering where the small jobs are done, momentum and confidence has built – and then the bigger stuff starts.

The trick now though is to not worry that you’re decluttering a larger space – but instead break it down into really small and manageable sections.

Things like one drawer. one shelf. one surface. or one small category within one area.

This isn’t because bigger wouldn’t be more efficient – it would – but because finishing something matters more to the Ostrich than the size of what’s finished.

Focusing in properly, and completing a small section in a little amount of time produces a true sense of progress that 100% sustains the next session. Spending five hours on a room and not finishing it does the opposite.

Small units that get completed are better than large units that don’t. Every time.

Small steps compound. You don’t need to do it all at once – you just need to do something that finishes.

4. Take it in chunks of time rather than projects

‘I’ll sort this room’ is a completion target that often can’t be met in a single session, which means the session feels like it’s ending in failure even if a lot was done.

‘I’ll spend 20 minutes on this’ is a time limit that can always be met. When the 20 minutes is up, the session is complete. What got done, got done. Tomorrow there’ll be another 20 minutes.

Time limits work for the Ostrich because they make it easier to start – 20 minutes is always manageable – and they always end in a win rather than a not-quite-finished feeling.

Over days and weeks, the 20-minute sessions add up to far more than the big days that never quite happen.

Try this: Set a timer for 20 minutes. Work until it goes off. Stop when it does, whether you’re finished or not. This is a complete session. It counts.

5.  Get things out of the house immediately

One of the ways a declutter session can feel like it’s produced no visible result is when the sorted items stay in the house afterwards.

It is still cluttering your home – in bags in the hallway, in boxes in the spare room, ‘ready to go to the charity shop’., etc…

The net effect of your decluttering session is invisible. And honestly – you feel like you’ve got nowhere fast.

For the Ostrich in particular, getting things out of the house as quickly as possible after sorting matters a LOT.

Bags go in the car the same day. Charity shop runs happen that weekend, not eventually. Things given to specific people get collected or dropped off promptly.

Out of the house is the point. Until it’s out of the house, it’s still just clutter with a plan.

The habit: Have a charity bag / box permanently in your home and/or car. Anything decluttered goes in straight away. When you’re passing the shop, you can just drop it in. No waiting, no accumulating, no bags living in the hallway.

6.  Notice what you’ve done – not what’s left

The Ostrich’s instinct after a declutter session is to look at what’s still left to do – which, at the start, is, of course, considerable.

This creates a negative thought pattern that undoes progress before it’s had time to compound.

The practice worth building instead: after each session, notice specifically what changed. The drawer that closes now. The shelf that has some breathing room. The floor space that wasn’t there before. Name it. Acknowledge it.

Because things HAVE changed.

The changes may be small but they’re real and they’re cumulative. The brain that can see progress is the brain that volunteers to make more of it.

After each session: Just as I suggest in The Declutter Equation – take one photo of the area you’ve just sorted. Not to share – just to have. When the overall progress feels invisible, look back at the photos. That’s what you’ve done.

The bigger picture for the Ostrich

Decluttering is the start of the Ostrich’s journey, but it’s not the whole of it.

What you’re actually working toward is a home that doesn’t require this level of management – one that’s been reduced to what’s genuinely needed and useful, set up in a way that maintains itself rather than accumulating again.

That home is reachable from here. But it’s built in small steps rather than big ambitious days. And it starts with a bin bag and twenty minutes – not a cleared diary and a perfect plan.

Then it will build, naturally.

Whatever you choose to do – I’m rooting for you – and I can’t wait for you to feel the benefits of taking your home back – it’s SO worth it!.