Have you considered using technology to declutter your home life? If you look around your house, many of the things lying around are unnecessary. The pile of paperwork sitting on top of the counter shouldn’t have happened in the first place. If you have boxes of plastic containers with photo albums, those should be in the basement or attic. There are many things in your home that are better off recycled either by you or in a recycling facility.
Use technology to make organizing and decluttering the home easier for you. Whether it’s recycling old stuff, selling unwanted things online, or storing photos digitally, you should maximize the benefits that technology brings to home maintenance. No home should suffer from an unnecessary amount of clutter if owners only use the technology, tools, and devices available today.
Recycling Materials
You should start the decluttering and organization process by throwing away things that you don’t need. However, that will amount to trash that will fill up landfills and affect the environment. Focus instead on recycling these materials. You can use a trash compactor that compresses the garbage so if you have to throw them away, they won’t take as much space in the landfill or the garbage treatment facility.
For the plastic materials, you can bring those to a recycling facility where they use a plastic compactor machine to crush and compress the plastic products to form eco-friendly bricks. Environmentally-conscious companies use eco-bricks and panels to build residential and commercial buildings. The process of recycling plastic materials ensure that these will not form part of what currently ails the environment.
To-do Lists
Instead of writing those to-do lists on pieces of paper and have them lying around, consolidate these lists in your smartphone. Handy tools such as your phone’s basic reminder and to-do app will make your list accessible to you wherever you are. You can check which of your tasks you finished by opening the app and reviewing the list.
Unwanted Items
Instead of letting these things rot away, sell them on eBay, Craigslist, online forums, and even social media. You’ll get a decent income from these seemingly unwanted things lying around your house. For example, that old grandfather clock on the mantle will command a price of at least $30 as long as it is working. Many people are looking for antiques and vintage items they can use to decorate their homes. If you have recently renovated and came across items you no longer want because they don’t complement your home’s design, put them up for sale.
Documents and Photos
Unless you are living under a rock, you are still printing photos and documents nonstop. Of course, it’s important to have hard copies of important documents such as your academic credentials, birth certificates, insurance policies, bank statements, and more. But, do you need multiple photocopies of these as a backup?
Instead, you can scan photos and documents to store them on the cloud or an external hard drive. You do need to store receipts and other important financial documents, but not in printed form. You can even use your phone’s camera to “scan” photos and documents.
Entertainment
Are you still in the habit of collecting DVDs and Blu-ray discs? Aside from the fact that their makers could phase them out soon, they take up too much space in your house. Go digital with your entertainment activities. Subscribe to streaming services or get an external hard drive and buy movies and TV shows in digital format. Several digital-based services will let you download, organize, and stream content. This will save you a ton of space.
Smart Home
If not for organizing and decluttering your home (and your purse), you should at least invest in smart home technology to secure your family. The smart home system is integrated into your smartphones. You can lock and unlock doors (and even windows). You can access security cameras remotely. The system allows you to check in on your children when you leave them with the babysitter. Provided, of course, that the babysitter knows the nanny cam is on.
When you arrive home, you can lock and unlock the garage doors from the comforts of your car. You don’t need to endanger yourself by alighting from the car, walking to the garage, and then opening it to get your car inside. Those few seconds it took you to walk from the garage to your car is enough for a burglar or criminal to enter your home unsuspiciously.
Technology is here to stay, so why not make use of it? The fact that you own these devices—smart TV, smartphone, scanner, etc.—already means that you know how useful they are in your everyday life. But they’re more than just a phone or a scanner or a home entertainment system. They are a means to organize your life, too.