How to Throw Things Away: Decluttering Tips From Minimalists

Is your home filled with things you never use? The solution is simpler than you think: throw them away. Professional minimalists like Marie Kondo and Fumio Sasaki argue that decluttering doesn’t just create physical space—it leads to greater mental clarity, improved mood, and a more purposeful life.

This guide draws on expert advice from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Goodbye, Things, and Essentialism to help you tackle the emotional and practical challenges of letting go. You’ll learn which items to discard first, how to overcome common barriers like sunk-cost bias, and what to do with tricky categories.

Why Should You Tidy?

In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo calls tidying “magic” because, when done correctly, it doesn’t just change your home—it changes your life. A thoughtful reorganization of your space can trigger meaningful shifts in how you think, work, and relate to the things around you.

Additionally, in Goodbye, Things, Fumio Sasaki argues that getting rid of unnecessary belongings not only makes your home less cluttered, but also leads to a more fulfilling, enjoyable, and purposeful life. He found that his own life transformed as he embraced minimalism. Sasaki achieved greater clarity of purpose, an improved mood, and more time and freedom than he had previously thought possible.

Here’s advice from professional minimalists on how to throw things away.

How to Throw Things Away

Don’t look at your whole house at once—this will make the task feel insurmountable. Instead, pick one place to start—such as your bedroom closet, the dining room table, or the kids’ playroom—and take stock of your clutter. To clearly see what needs to be eliminated, understand that “clutter” takes many forms.

Sasaki offers a broad range of practical tips for choosing what to discard and overcoming the emotional barriers to letting go of your possessions.

1) Look For Low-Hanging Fruit

First, Sasaki (Goodbye, Things) advises beginning your minimalist journey by going for the easiest items to throw away. Start with items that are obviously junk: things that are broken, expired, or serve no purpose but have somehow remained in your possession. 

Next, look for duplicate items. A single high-quality version of something is usually more valuable than several mediocre versions of the same item. For example, you probably don’t need more than one set of measuring spoons in your drawer.

Furthermore, when looking for items to let go of, Sasaki recommends that you start with items tucked away in storage spaces such as closets, drawers, and boxes. He reasons that since you aren’t using most of this stuff now anyway, many of these items will be easy for you to get rid of.

Decluttering Tip 1

In Essentialism, Greg McKeown suggests that while sorting items in a closet, you’d typically ask yourself whether you might wear an item someday. But the essentialist would ask a tougher question: Is this a favorite item that I wear often? If the answer’s no, toss it. 

2) Choose What to Discard

When considering each object, how do you know which items are truly essential to keep? Sasaki recommends three strategies:

1. Imagine starting from scratch: He recommends a thought experiment where you imagine that all of your possessions are gone and you have to start all over again. What would you feel that you need? By visualizing an empty home and considering what you’d deliberately choose, you can identify which possessions add value to your life and which ones you’ve accumulated by default.

2. Consider whether you’d replace an item: Sasaki recommends asking yourself what you’d do if each particular item got lost. If you’d immediately go to the store and replace it, then it might be an essential item. If you wouldn’t feel a pressing need to replace it, then there’s probably no reason to hold onto it.

3. Consult your passion: Finally, Sasaki recommends that you keep only items that you’re enthusiastic about. Consider whether you could talk passionately about a possession to one of your friends. If the answer is no, then the item is probably a good candidate for discarding.

Decluttering Tip 2

According to Essentialism, you have trouble getting rid of things because of sunk-cost bias. This means you place a greater value than they’re worth on things you own because you’ve invested in them, so you’re reluctant to get rid of them. To circumvent this bias, ask yourself what you’d be willing to pay for the item if you didn’t already own it. This may be the reality check you need to realize the item’s true worth. 

The Editor’s Approach

According to Essentialism, a good editor, whether in film or in writing, eliminates everything except what needs to be there. Editing is a true essentialist craft. Here are some ways editing can help you declutter your life:

• Editing involves trade-offs: Instead of trying to fit in every detail, character, or plotline, an editor asks how each will make the book or film better by contributing to the central theme. It’s difficult for a writer to eliminate creative work that took great effort to produce. But the discipline to do so is crucial to the craft. Stephen King stressed the necessity of ruthlessly eliminating your favorite passages, pages, or chapters: “Kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” In work and life, removing the nonessential, no matter how appealing it might be, allows you to focus on your central theme.
• Practicing editing helps you execute effortlessly as an essentialist, or achieve your optimum contribution, by removing anything distracting or unimportant. One book editor described editing as an attempt to make life effortless for the reader, that is to make the book’s most important message as clear as possible. Similarly, editing the nonessentials from your life makes all your choices more effortless.
• Editors enhance or add life to a creative work by intentionally subtracting the extraneous. They fully reveal the characters and plot by choosing the right supporting details. In life, purposeful editing can help you enhance your contribution by allowing you to focus your energy on the most important activities and relationships. 

Common Barriers to Decluttering

Here are some common areas of difficulty when decluttering and how to overcome them.

• Gifts
  • The purpose of a present is to be received and to convey the giver’s feelings of affection. A gift accomplishes these 2 things at the very moment it’s given, but then a lot of us end up keeping gifts someone gave us that we don’t use or even like. Don’t do this. Thank it for the joy it gave you when you first received it, and donate it if it doesn’t serve you.
• Cosmetic samples
  • These products are smaller in size and consequently have shorter shelf lives. You don’t want to use expired cosmetics when you’re traveling! Get reusable travel-sized bottles instead.
• Electronic packaging
  • Many people save boxes in this category, thinking it will make the electronics more valuable if they want to sell them one day, and for some items, it might. But if you think of your home as storage space that costs money to maintain, do you think having the box for that electronic will recoup all the money you paid in the years you let it take up space?
    • Exception: Apple boxes and similar quality boxes make great organizers, so you might save some of these to use as organizing tools.
• Cords
  • If you don’t know what a cord is for, you probably don’t need it. Keep the cords you can immediately identify and discard the rest. A tangle of cords just makes it harder to find the one you need.
• Broken appliances.
  • If it’s broken, discard it.
  • If you’re worried about disposing of appliances responsibly, look into your local waste management company to see if they do special pick-ups or have a list of what items to recycle.
  • If you don’t want the money you spent on it to go to waste, see if you have an active warranty on it, or look into getting it repaired. Otherwise, thank it for its service as you discard it.
• Spare bedding
  • If you host friends and family a lot, you might need more spare bedding than other people. But if you have visitors once or twice a year at most, you really only need one set of spare bedding. Bedding that’s stored away for too long gets musty, and that’s not how you want to treat your guests.
• Spare buttons
  • Discard these. If you really want to keep the spare buttons, sew them into the lining of the garment right when you get it. If you lose a button, you can always go to the local craft store to find a similar one. Most people, if they lose a button, either keep wearing the garment without replacing it or leave the garment in their closet, never to be worn again—even if they have the spare buttons.
• Health craze products
  • These usually cost a lot of money, which makes us less likely to want to discard them. But let them go if you don’t use them and they don’t spark joy. Thank them for their service—if you actually used them, or if they just gave you a thrill when you bought them.

Learn More About Decluttering

If you want to dive deeper into how to throw things away, you can read the full versions of each of the book guides mentioned throughout this article here:

• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
• Goodbye, Things
• Essentialism