Declutter Your Life: Expert Tips from Angie Hyche

Welcome back to the Real Life Momz podcast, where moms come to you for tools and inspiration to create the life that they desire. I'm Lisa Foster, your host, and today I have Angie Hyche. She is an author, speaker, podcaster, and certified professional organizer. Through her organization company shipshape solutions.

Angie's goal is to simplify the lives of her clients so that they can focus on what's most important and spend time doing what they love. So thank you, Angie, for coming on the show today. Yeah, thank you so much for having me excited to be here. Oh my gosh, me too. So. You are passionate about just organizing. I mean, you organize lots of things between physical stuff, like your home to closets, to paperwork. And I even think you do some attentional organization too within yourself. So I'm excited to hear all about this, but maybe tell me first, like what even got you on [00:01:00] this passion of organization?

 So it was definitely a twisty turny road to get here. I, it's kind of my fourth career, I guess. I actually started in, medicine. I got my undergrad degree in biology, and, worked as a PA. Physician assistant in pediatrics. I've also taught at the high school level and the elementary school level.

I spent most of my adult life actually raising my girls. I have two adult daughters. But. I was out of medicine for so long when I was raising them that the idea of getting back into it with the way everything changes was kind of daunting. And while I was at home and I was a community volunteer in schools and, one of the things that I really got into was community theater, one of the theaters that I was active in 

the room where they had all their costumes and props and set pieces was a complete disaster. And I had always really [00:02:00] liked putting things in order and kind of obsessed with it. Well, the theater's part time employee and I decided that we would tack. Project because it was just driving us crazy.

 The theater was wasting time and money looking for things and buying things they couldn't find. And so over a period of several months, this person and I went through everything the theater owned big huge room, like eight closets and a storage unit and just spread it all out and sorted through and it was just the biggest mess and I just absolutely loved it.

And I just said, I think I could do this every day. I really could do this every day. I didn't even know at that time that organizing was a field. So over the next few years, I did some research. I found NAPO, which is National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals, found out yes, it is a Profession, it's a fast growing profession.

 But [00:03:00] then I knew that if I wanted to do that, for work that it would mean, starting my own business. And that was very intimidating to me. And so for quite a few years, I just said, I don't know, I don't know that I'm up for that. But, when my husband and I hit empty nest stage, it was kind of like, okay, if you're going to do it, 

this is the time to really go for it. And, I was scared to death, but, I just jumped in and that was 2016. And, I have just loved it so much. 

 Well, first of all, I love the whole story because I mean, you started in medicine. Oh my goodness, like so different. And I love people who change and evolve and follow their just kind of hearts and dreams and what makes them happy because yeah, it's really scary a to change. And do something different, let alone start your own business when like a lot of people, you know, don't have the business, especially coming from medicine.

You don't have the [00:04:00] business sense, right? You don't have the training and everyone thinks you need that training to start something. And the answer is, I mean, it's beneficial, but you don't, you can do. Exactly. What you did was open up something that you just love. And then I love that you still evolved it into more of what you love doing.

So kudos for you you you're never staying in your comfort zone. You keep like, Oh, I got this. I'm going to do something else now. I'm going to move forward. So that's lovely. I love that. 

 And I know one of the things you do is help to organize, like, Families. I mean, we have a lot of parents that listen to this podcast and organization. I think it's so tough because it's not just our own stuff, right?

As a mom. Yes, I have my own stuff, but I also have many other people's stuff like my kids stuff, my husband's stuff, and not just Physical stuff. Like I'm also talking about scheduling stuff. I'm my planner. Oh my goodness. I'd be in trouble if I showed you my planner. [00:05:00] It's a mess.

So what do you say to parents? Like, what are the tips that you give them to help them feel organized? . So it really is a phase of life where you just have so. Much going. And I've worked with so many families and I feel like I've learned so much over the period of years. One of the most important ones that I see this a lot with parents that are overwhelmed. They deal with so much just shame and guilt and embarrassment.

Like, Oh my gosh, my life is a mess. My house is a mess. I just, I can't do this. I'm so overwhelmed. And the thing that I like to say above all is to give yourself grace when we talk about organizing, one of the people think of first is Marie Kondo.

You know, she, she didn't begin the profession, but she kind of brought a [00:06:00] lot of attention to it. And I don't know if you keep up with her very much, but in the last year or so, she had a third child. And she has relaxed her standards a bit at the house. And a lot of people are just like, Oh my gosh, have you heard what Marie Kondo has said?

Cause she has said now my home is messy, but the way I'm spending my time is the right way for me at this time, at this stage of my life. And I love that because even she, as some people call the queen of organizing has realized. And this time you've got to just kind of shift your mindset a bit and to just give yourself grace that there's a lot of moving pieces, lots of stuff, lots of people, lots of schedules to keep up with.

And, you may have to just kind of relax your standards. I recently found, an author, podcaster, speaker, her name is Casey Davis, and, I watched one of her TED talks and her overwhelming message above everything is that cleaning and [00:07:00] organizing are morally neutral.

It's so huge said, you know, because a lot of people say, Oh my gosh, I'm a terrible mom. I'm a terrible wife. I'm a terrible person. I can't keep up with everything. No, it's morally neutral. And sometimes we do the best we can. And we're just barely trying to survive and it's okay. 

 Feel great about what you can do and then don't beat yourself up because it doesn't help at all. A clean room doesn't necessarily make me a good mom. No. And, you know, because the other thing is that you can go totally on the other side of this. Spectrum, I think that in some ways I was too obsessed with keeping things in order all the time And maybe not prioritizing what was more important, you know what's more important for my house to look great all the time or for me to love my husband and put [00:08:00] him first, to love my kids and to teach them the truth and teach them what is right.

And, and, and if that gets lost in the shuffle of trying to keep the schedule in the house looking great, then that's not a victory. So. The priorities have got to stay in the right place while you're trying to juggle all of this. And so it may mean 

that some of those things that, you know, ideally, yes, I would love everything to look perfect, but maybe right now it just can't.

 So what I'm hearing is organize your priorities first. Absolutely. First things first. 

 You've got to keep it all in perspective.

So, and other things, I'm really big fan of refining your routines just down to where they're just, just really, really solid.

 Routines like laundry, dishes, daily pickup, paperwork, all those things. Yes, sometimes you let those slide but.

[00:09:00] As much as you can, stick to those routines. One of the ones that I think gets, pushed aside is daily pickup. If you spend five minutes a day. Just putting things back, , or just clearing trash or whatever.

 Then it will keep you from having to have like hours and hours on the weekend, just regular. Routines. 

Routines are key. Yeah, if I leave too much, then it's like, Oh, so I'm leaving everything for the weekends, you know, because I'm working and I have kids and.

And exactly leaving everything for the weekend, then takes on my whole weekend. And then that is not fun. 

 We're big declutterers at our house. We like to get rid of extra stuff. We have listened to the whole Kon Marie stuff, , and have done it, but. Everybody has stuff.

 There's so much stuff. And what do you do? Because I feel like I can't control everybody's stuff. What do you do with all this [00:10:00] stuff in the house? How do you minimize or organize it? So my favorite tip that I give as far as decluttering, so many times we see it as, okay, well, next weekend, I'm going to go through the whole closet and believe me, I love that kind of thing, but sometimes you say that.

Never happens, a practice that everybody can do that takes like almost zero time. And it makes a huge difference is what I call daily decluttering. And all that means is that there is a container in a place that is easy to get to. Everybody knows where it is. It is labeled so that you know, this is the place you put something, anything that you see in your home that you, can't say, I love it and I use it.

And it's probably clutter. And as soon as you see it, wherever it is, you just go ahead and stick it in that container. And then when it fills up, you donate it, and it's a continuous [00:11:00] process. That way, if you're in the closet and you see. Like, Oh, this is too tight. This is driving me crazy.

You just go ahead and pull it off, stick it in there. You're in the kitchen or like, why do I have 10 spatulas? Throw some in there, you know, wherever you are. Again, it takes almost no time. It's only the time to go over and put it in the container. And then the time to take it to the donation center. Another really helpful practice. Using a principle. This is another Dana Kay white thing. She uses the container concept a lot. And, um, container concept is not necessarily what you think. It's not like finding the right container, but I have a container that is the size of a shoe box.

 Only a certain amount of things will fit in that shoe box. So I'm going to limit myself, contain myself to that. So if you think of. Your let's say your chest of drawers that you keep closing in the bedroom. I'm going to contain myself or limit myself to only [00:12:00] what fits in those drawers.

And so if I have two drawers that I have t shirts in and I buy a t shirt, it's not going to fit in there. Well, something's got to go, something's got to go. So kind of defining what your limits are on. Whoever's room it is, a drawer, a cabinet, a closet. If you think about it, your whole house is a container, really.

Um, it's, it's really, it's a relentless process because if we don't continue to shed and we know we're going to, as consumers, we're going to keep bringing in, then it's just going to get. More and more and more cluttered and all of our clutter, our stuff, our things in our schedule and to-do lists in our mind, all of that clutter is a distraction from our 

priorities.

Tell me about the clutter in our mind. Because I do think as, a mom there is a lot of. Different things I am thinking about all the time. So yes, [00:13:00] tell us about that clutter in our mind. Yeah, this is the most difficult category for me. The attention, I call it attention clutter.

Um, we constantly have all these things swirling in our mind. And a lot of it is related to the other categories of clutter, particularly schedule. I think schedule and attention clutter kind of. Go hand in hand. The more we have going, the more we've got to think about. But one category of attention clutter that I like to talk about, because I think there's a solution for it this comes from a book by David Allen called getting things done.

It's a business oriented book. It's been around since the eighties. It's, it was really a landmark book. And there are two principles from that book that just really revolutionized my life. And this is one of them. So David Allen talks about open loops. Getting open loops and a trusted system.

So an open loop is anything that is not in a state that you need it to be [00:14:00] in and you're trying so hard to hold on to that piece of information in your mind. So this could be anything from like Oh, I got to stop on the way home and get some eggs or. I need to call so and so, or oh, I need to send that email.

Oh, I've got to get the present for the gift next week. You know, all those things that are just swirling around our heads. We're trying desperately not to forget any of them because we don't have them. Those items are not. In a state to where we know that's going to get taken care of. And that's where he's talking about the trusted system.

So for instance, if I say, oh, I've got to stop on the way home and get eggs, and I'm just trying to remember that, well, what could I do with that? I could tell myself. Okay, I could put this on my phone as a reminder, GPS wise, when I leave this location, remind me to stop and get as, 

there's so many ways we [00:15:00] can either automate that, Google calendar, reminders, Trello, um, it could be paper, it could be multiple things for me. It's multiple things, but I've got to get. All those things into a state to where I know, okay, I don't have to think about that now because I've got my reminder set that next week on Tuesday morning, I need to blah, blah, and I'm going to be reminded of it.

That is what a lot of our attention clutter is. And when, when we're trying to hold all that information, no wonder we can't be present where we are because we're so terrified that the balls are going to drop. And that's, that's the source of a lot of it. Figuring out how to get all that stuff into a way you can trust. And if you don't have that right now, the best way to start that, I encourage you to sit for 15 minutes with paper and a pen and get it all out.

Out of your head, out of [00:16:00] your head, out of your head, just jot it down in a list. And then like, okay, here's all this stuff. Now, how am I going to, how am I going to get that to a state where I don't have to keep worrying about remembering it? 

Yeah. I use that too. I use paper. I use my phone, but I use it in the notes section, I would say, you know, because I'm listening to you and it's like, I have Google calendar and this and that. And then I'm like, Oh my God, that's clutter. It seems like there's so many. Oh, yeah. Things. Yeah, that that can become cluttered too, right, having all these things on your phone.

 That is a really tricky line to cross. I'm in my book, Unholy Mess, what the Bible says about clutter. I'm very open about my own social media addiction that I had to, I had to claw my way out of phone addiction. It was really bad. So our phones are really powerful tools, but they can also be.

weapon of mass distraction, you know, so, so [00:17:00] yeah, you, you've got to really watch it. I mean, I could be going to put something on my reminders and then all of a sudden I go, Oh my gosh, I've been on Instagram for 45 minutes. Not that Instagram is wrong, but it is a really tricky thing. Yeah. And the more you're talking about, it's like, I'm thinking like, wow, like, you know, your home and your clutter there.

It's like, well, you leave the home. You get away from it. Right. But your phone clutter, I'm going to call it clutter, is on you all day. Oh, yeah. And just looking at it with all those apps. Around, you know, like, especially mine isn't that bad, but my husband's, Oh my God. Like whenever he's like, Oh, can you find Yelp?

And I'm like, no, you have a hundred screens. I'm scrolling through. I cannot even believe how many apps he has. But it's amazing. How much clutter we are just literally carrying around in our pockets. Oh, yeah. , I mean the, the whole [00:18:00] digital, clutter with. With phones and tablets and all that.

Oh my goodness. I, feel like, yeah, we've got issues with physical clutter and storage units and all that and, schedule.

Yeah. But I feel like this attention clutter is just really dogging us right now. Um, I think it's the biggest battleground. It's that clutter in our minds. Yeah. And I don't think people. Even think of it as clutter, right? Like I, I didn't really, yeah. Until talking to you, really I've read a lot of different definitions of clutter when I was getting ready to write my book.

And the one I liked the best is that it's a distraction, a distraction from our priorities. Whether it's our stuff or the. Things on our calendar or to do list and it may be all great stuff, but it may just be too much, right? Especially in this season of life,, when we've got a lot of people, we're taking care of a lot of stuff, it's not [00:19:00] the best time to volunteer for a zillion things.

I was a very active volunteer, but I was too active. You know, if you're too busy. With either your phone or your volunteer support that you your family, like my family begging me for years, Mom, I'm trying to talk to you. You're on your phone. That was a problem. That was a real problem.

Yeah, I love that definition clutter is anything that's really distracting you from your priorities. Yeah. So, okay, because I do think clutter can hold us back from moving forward, right? Is that the, is that the big take away , because people might just be like, yeah, clutter.

So I'm, so I'm distracted, you know, but isn't that. If we don't get ourselves decluttered, whether that's mentally, physically, emotionally, whatever, that really it is holding us back in our own life. It definitely is. And, I [00:20:00] think the biggest danger, it definitely was for me, my biggest danger was that I was not really, I could be with my family.

My body was with my family. But my mind was somewhere else completely. Um, I didn't write this sentence, but okay. Let me see if I can think of it. The greatest gift you can give someone is your full attention. 

 I love that. Think about how many times you are. With other people, but you're not really there. Yes. Your mind is not there and if like when I was with my family and I pick up my phone whether I realized it or not I was communicating to them that what I was looking at it my phone on my phone was more important.

And I so wish that I could take back some of that hurt, but I can't, I can only live for now and try to do better now. But yeah, I [00:21:00] think the biggest danger is that we're just not there. We're not able to participate in what's going on around us. We don't have our heart, our full heart and soul in it.

 Yeah if you can give our moms that are listening or parents that are listening one challenge, what would you tell them 

I think one of the hardest, but most valuable uses of time is just to take a few minutes, sit down pen and paper. Think about three areas, the physical clutter of stuff, the schedule in your mind, think about what is distracting me right now, I really want to focus on what's the most important well, first of all, I mean, how many times do you sit and not just give, you know, a knee jerk reaction of what is the most important, but really think about,

 The most important things right now in my life are What is it your [00:22:00] family? Is it your faith? What is it? Is your health and what are the things that are distracting me from that? What is what is distracting me? What do I need to cut? Do I need to get rid of some stuff?

Do I need to just get really brutal with, okay, my calendar is just too crampacked. These are good things, but there's just too many. Um, do I need to let some things go entertainment wise? Do I need to trim my social media? What is it? What's really distracting you? And, are you willing to do the hard work to let it go?

There is such freedom, , in my, in the podcast, Uncluttered, Shaping Your Heart and Home for What Matters Most. We close every episode with an uncluttered life is an abundant life. And that seems very counterintuitive, right? Because you think of abundance. as lots, [00:23:00] you know, the more I have, you know, the more activities I have, the more abundant my life is.

And honestly, no, because we're so pulled in so many different directions. That's not a life of abundance. That's not a life of peace. And I also just want to reiterate what I said at the beginning about that cleaning and organizing are morally neutral and to give yourself grace. Sometimes good enough is you, you want things to be perfect.

Good enough can be perfect. Perfectionists are, are, um, I'm definitely a perfectionist. Sometimes perfectionists live a life where they're just constantly disappointed because it's not what they want, but maybe for right now, it's just, this is good enough for right now because I want to be there with my family.

I want to be present. I want my mind to be free of all that. So what can I do to be free?[00:24:00] Yeah, I love the way you look at clutter. Coming on this podcast, I'm like, Oh, we're gonna learn how to organize. In fact, before I came on, I like went through my closet. Do I love this?

Do I not love this? And I am donating a bunch of stuff because I was preparing, but it's not about that. It's not about that. Yes, it is. And no, it's not right. It's about much, much more. So I love what you're bringing to the world of clutter. Yeah, it's so much deeper I mean, I can talk for hours about like how to organize your pantry and your closet and your office and your garage and all that, but really it goes much deeper than the how to's.

The how to's are great, and they're helpful, but when we realize how damaging clutter is. Then I think we kind of step it up a level in terms of, okay, I got to get serious about this because of what matters most. Yeah. [00:25:00] Well, I know you do so much with actually helping people in all realms of clutter.

So can you tell us where people can find you and what you offer? So, um, I'm not working with clients anymore in homes. I do some volunteer organizing for nonprofits just to keep my hands in stuff and because I love helping them. But what I'm focusing on now is speaking, , to groups, whether that be.

Civic groups or church groups or whatever, uh, my podcast and writing. I've got a second book coming out in June of 2024 with Leanna, my podcast co host. So, I'm all about now writing and speaking and podcasting about clutter. So easiest way to find me is on my website, which is shipshape.solutions. And then Uncluttered, our podcast and our upcoming book, our website is uncluttered.faith

 And I did look at your website and it [00:26:00] also for people who are looking to maybe figure out how to, get more organized. You have a lot of videos and things on your website that can answer some of those questions too. Yeah. I've got some videos. I've, I've been writing a monthly organizing column in my local newspaper.

For seven years. So there's like over a hundred articles. So if you want to find tips on organizing your garage or whatever, they're all on there too. So that's, that's available as well, even though I'm not working with home. So lots of free stuff, free resources on my website and, um, and if anybody's got.

Uh, organizer and decluttering challenge. Hit me with an email. I love to talk about it. So Angie@shipshape.Solutions. If you've got a group that needs a speaker, I'm really, really love that either in person or virtual. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this insight with us.

 Sure. Thanks for having me, Lisa.