Clutter 101: The Landing Strip

You come home from work or a long day out shopping. Your hands and pockets are full of coins, keys and shopping bags. Where do you put them? If you don’t have a landing strip, then you probably leave them at the first bit of space you come across, whether it be chucked on the floor, left on the dining table or put on the kitchen top. But none of these places are practical because they are only temporary. Remember the golden de-clutter rule – a place for everything and everything in it’s place, and that includes items like your wallet and your phone.

The common theme with those items is that we take them with us wherever we go and short us of us being mugged or losing them on our travels, when we come home we get them back out of our pockets and our bags. Unfortunately, without a defined place for them, we’ll often leave them lying round the home just begging to be lost and forgotten about the next time we have to rush out of the door.

The answer to this dilemma is to have a landing strip in your home. This isn’t a place for airplanes to land, but rather it’s that immediate space you come to as you enter your house where you can feasibly drop your baggage. Though typically this is your hallway, it can be whatever room you pass through as you enter/leave your home. The nearer to the door the better though.

So what makes up the landing strip? As a bare minimum you want a bowl, box or similar storage item so that whenever you come home, you can empty your pockets of keys, phones, wallets, loose coins, etc. into it. That way you have a designated place for those sorts of items so that when you then leave your house you will know exactly where your door keys are, for instance. No more searching through pockets and behind the settee when you’re running late for work!

Depending on how you deal with mail, the next feature to have in your landing strip is a letter-tray or basket to collect incoming and outgoing mail (it’s good if the tool allows for you to seperate the two). Whenever mail comes through your letterbox you can put it in your letter-tray so that you have one localized place to view it all. The same goes for outgoing mail. As part of your checks for “taking off” you can collect outgoing mail along with your keys and wallet all from one area (you can also leave DVD rentals that need returning, books you want to share with friends, etc. in this section too).

The next tool you need as part of a complete landing strip is a cork board or at least something to pin up notes, receipts, vouchers, invitations, etc. For instance, rather than having a voucher stuffed in your pocket where it gets forgotten about and runs out of date, you can be reminded of it whenever you leave the house.

You may also want to consider hooks for coats, bags and umbrellas so that if you see the weather is bad you can reach for the right coat without digging through your wardrobe. And whenever you come back home you can immediately hook it back up rather than throwing it on the floor, hanging on the back of a chair, etc.

Whatever setup you have however, remember to de-clutter it on a regular basis just  like everything else. Get rid of out-of-date vouchers from the cork board, collect together the loose change from the bowl and throw away spam mail from the letter-tray. The landing strip is a de-cluttering zone just any other room.

Finally, I have one small warning. The landing strip is not only the first place you will go to when you come home, it could also potentially be the first place unwanted visitors will go to too, so consider the security of your home before leaving wads of cash and spare car keys in your landing strip. Try looking through your letterbox to see what a burgler might see. If he could see into that bowl with your wallet and car keys in and even reach to it,  then move it somewhere higher!