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CANDACE TENDED TO let clutter pile up because she wasn’t processing it on a daily basis. With her OCD and control issues she would put off emptying her shopping bags or clearing a table because she felt like she couldn’t do it in the most perfect way possible. The main issue for Candace was to just attack clutter daily, before it got out of hand.

For the “ten-minute sweep,” each family member (even children) chooses a specific small area to focus on. It’s important to keep the cleaning area small and achievable; I suggest no more than a two-foot-square area.The person sets a timer and spends ten minutes cleaning that area. This doesn’t mean just moving things from that space to a nearby chair or pile. All trash actually goes into the trash. Items to be donated need to go into the donation box. Other things that need to leave the house (library books or store returns, for example) go next to the front door, to be taken out the next day. Following through is the key. Simply shifting items from one room to another is a waste of time. Taking action and pushing through to completion is what gets an area clean.

Cleaning a house for an entire day is not realistic for most hoarders, but a ten-minute sweep is doable for even ADD hoarders who get easily distracted.The time limit gets them to micro-focus on a very specific task, and they can visually see great results immediately. Feeling good about what has been accomplished is a huge part of cleaning.

For Wendy and Sam, the best rule was “everything has a home.” We made a list of their main household items and where they went—for example, pill bottles in the bathroom medicine cabinet, laundry in the hamper, and food in the kitchen cabinets. This may seem like a fundamental rule that everyone learns as a child, but many hoarders didn’t pick that up either because they grew up in hoarder houses themselves, or they grew up in traumatic households where finding a meal or avoiding a beating was a daily reality. Cleaning was the least of their worries. Others may have learned but have forgotten after years of living in their own hoarder chaos.

It helps to add a guideline that like things go together. This means, for example, that clothing should be grouped: A dresser should be near the closet instead of being across the room. Bathroom supplies, like towels and extra shampoo, should be in a closet or on a shelf in or near the bathroom instead of in the kitchen pantry. A basket or drawer for incoming mail should be near the desk or table where the checkbook or computer is for paying bills. Batteries, car keys, candy, and my son’s comb do not all go in the same bucket and should all go to their separate homes.

This rule works well combined with reminders posted around the home that say things like “Pill bottles don’t go here—they go in the medicine cabinet.” Those notes can reinforce for hoarders where things are supposed to go, especially in the early days immediately after a cleanup when the hoarder is still learning the new layout of the house.

▶ In = Out

Lucy’s main issue was similar to Jackson’s: She just brought far too many craft and baking supplies into the house. After her cleanup, we made the attic her “personal space” to limit her craft items. But Lucy lived alone, so there wasn’t anyone there to enforce the space rule when things started to spill into other rooms of the house.

So, in addition to the “every item has a home” rule, Lucy added “in = out,” meaning that whenever something new comes into the house—whether going into personal or shared space—something of equal size must leave. It doesn’t matter if that item goes into the trash, to a donation site, or into recycling. It just needs to go out of the house immediately. For Lucy, this meant that she could only bring home a new bag of yarn if she had already used up the same amount of yarn or donated the same amount the day before. This means she would always have roughly the same volume of stuff in her house.

Hint for Shopaholics

A SHOPAHOLIC HOARDER can slip into old habits easily; the