May Declutter: How To Tackle The Bathroom and Home Office

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May is a good month. The weather is improving in most parts of the world, the house feels lighter after four months of gradual work, and there’s enough warmth in the air that the whole exercise feels a bit less like a chore and a bit more like spring maintenance.

This month, the physical focus is split between two very different spaces: the bathroom cabinet, which tends to be a graveyard of half-used products and expired medications, and the home office or work-from-home corner, which has its own particular brand of chaos. On the mindful side, we’re looking at consumption habits more broadly, specifically at buying less in the first place. And digitally, we’re tackling news subscriptions, reading apps, and the bookmarks folder nobody has opened since 2019.

As always, pick what feels relevant to your life right now. These posts are meant to be a menu, not a checklist.

The Physical Stuff: Bathrooms and Home Offices

These two spaces don’t obviously belong together, but they share something in common. Both tend to accumulate things quietly and steadily over time, without the obvious seasonal triggers that make kitchen or wardrobe declutters feel timely. As a result, they often get skipped. May is a good moment to actually go through them.

The Bathroom Cabinet

Depending on your setup, the bathroom cabinet, the shelf above the sink, or the under-sink cupboard is one of the more revealing spaces in a home. Open it, and you’ll usually find a combination of things you use every day, things you’ve used once, things that were gifts, things bought optimistically for a skin concern that turned out not to work, and things you genuinely cannot remember acquiring.

Start with the obvious: check expiry dates. Medications absolutely need to be checked, and any expired medications need to be disposed of properly. In the US, the FDA recommends not flushing medications and instead using a drug take-back programme. DEA drug take-back locations are searchable by postcode. In the UK, any pharmacy will take back unused medications for safe disposal. Most countries have similar schemes; your local pharmacy is always a good starting point.

Skincare and cosmetics also have expiry dates, usually indicated by a small open-jar symbol with a number on it 6M, 12M, 24M which tells you how many months the product is good for after opening. A lot of products in the average bathroom cabinet are well past this. The Good Face Project has useful guidance on understanding product labelling if you want to go deeper.

Once you’ve cleared out the expired items, look at what’s left. How much of it do you actually use regularly? Products bought with good intentions but never made it into a habit can be donated if unopened or passed on to someone who’ll actually use them.

The Home Office or Work Corner

More people than ever have some version of a home office now, whether that’s a dedicated room or a corner of the kitchen table. Either way, it tends to accumulate its own particular type of clutter: cables, old tech, stationery you don’t use, paper that wasn’t quite important enough to file but felt too risky to throw away, and equipment from previous jobs or old setups.

Start with cables. This is almost universally agreed to be the first step in any home office declutter, because cable chaos affects how the whole space feels, even when everything else is tidy. If you don’t know which cable it belongs to, test it. If it doesn’t belong to anything you currently own, it goes. Velcro cable ties are inexpensive and make a genuine difference in keeping remaining cables manageable.

Next, old tech. Phones, tablets, laptops, e-readers, cameras most of us have a small graveyard of devices that no longer get used. In the US, Best Buy’s recycling programme accepts most electronics for free. In the UK, Recycle Your Electricals has a postcode-based locator for drop-off points. Devices with any remaining value can be sold through Swappa (US) or Back Market (UK and international).

For stationery, the test is simple: would you buy this today? Dried-out pens, pencils worn to nothing, stickers from a project that ended years ago. Let them go. What remains should actually work and actually get used.

A Note on Work-From-Home Spaces

One thing worth mentioning if you work from home even part of the time: the research on this is fairly consistent. A cleaner, less cluttered workspace is associated with better focus, fewer distractions, and lower stress. A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that visual complexity in a workspace directly affects cognitive load. In plainer terms, a messy desk makes thinking harder. Sorting your workspace isn’t just tidying up. It’s an investment in how well you function during the day.

Mindful Decluttering: Buying Less to Start With

This month’s mindful section is a bit of a departure from previous ones, in which we’ve mostly focused on what to do with what you already have. In May, I want to look at the other end of the problem, the acquiring end.

The Consumption Habit

One thing that becomes clear after a few months of decluttering is that the stuff doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from shopping. And a lot of that shopping is habitual, emotional, or unconsciously triggered rather than genuinely intentional.

The research on this is pretty interesting. A study from the University of Michigan found that browsing and shopping tend to increase when people feel a reduced sense of control in other areas of life. Retail therapy, in other words, is a real phenomenon with real psychological roots. Understanding why you buy things, not to judge it, but just to notice it, is genuinely useful information.

The 30-Before-You-Buy Rule

One practical approach that comes up a lot in minimalism and slow-living communities is waiting before purchasing. Different versions of this suggest waiting 24 hours, 30 days, or until you’ve thought about it 30 times. The specific number matters less than the principle: creating a gap between wanting something and buying it.

Buy Me Once is a website worth knowing about. It curates products specifically chosen for longevity and quality, things designed to last a very long time rather than to be replaced frequently. It’s a useful reference when you do decide to buy something, helping you buy fewer, better things rather than more cheap ones.

The Library as a Radical Act

One genuinely underused resource for mindful consumption is the public library. Not just for books, but increasingly for other things too. The Library of Things in the UK loans out tools, kitchen equipment, camping gear, and more. Similar schemes exist in various cities and countries. In the US, many public libraries now have tools, seeds, board games, and even musical instruments available to borrow.

For many things we think we need to own, borrowing is a perfectly good alternative. Using something a few times and returning it keeps things out of your home and out of the landfill.

Digital Decluttering: News, Reading Apps, and the Bookmarks Graveyard

The digital theme this month is reading, specifically the sprawl of reading-related digital clutter that most of us have accumulated without quite noticing.

The News Subscription Audit

News subscriptions have multiplied significantly over the past decade. A lot of people have signed up for trials that rolled into paid subscriptions, or subscribed during a particular news cycle and never cancelled. May is a good time to look at what you’re actually paying for and what you’re actually reading.

Go through your bank statements and identify every news or media subscription. Then ask, honestly, which ones you’ve read in the last month. Not opened. Actually read. The ones that aren’t getting used can probably go. If you want to keep up with a publication but can’t justify the full subscription, many newspapers offer cheaper digital-only tiers, or email newsletters that give you a reasonable sample for free.

Ground News is an interesting tool in this space. It shows you how the same story is being covered across different outlets and political leanings, which can reduce the number of sources you need to follow while actually broadening your perspective.

Read-It-Later Apps

Pocket, Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Apple’s Reading List. Most people have at least one of these, and most people have hundreds of saved articles in them that they’ll never actually read.

There’s a term for this in productivity circles: the “read it later” trap. The act of saving something feels productive. Actually reading it is a separate and harder task that often never happens. The result is a backlog of saved content that creates its own low-level guilt.

The practical fix is to either clear the backlog periodically, or anything saved more than three months ago that you haven’t read yet is probably not going to happen, or to be much more selective about what you save in the first place. Pocket and Instapaper both have archive functions, so you can clear the backlog without permanently deleting things.

The Bookmarks Folder

This is the digital equivalent of a junk drawer, and most people’s bookmark bars are absolutely full of them. Links saved years ago to websites that may no longer exist, recipes from blogs that have shut down, and tools you were going to try and never did.

A browser bookmark audit is not glamorous, but it’s surprisingly satisfying. Go folder by folder and delete anything you haven’t used in over a year, anything that no longer loads, and anything you genuinely cannot remember why you saved. What remains can be reorganised into a smaller number of clearly labelled folders.

If you use multiple devices, syncing bookmarks through your browser account means you only have to do this once. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all sync bookmarks across devices when you’re logged in.

Newsletters: The Quiet Inbox Refiller

We talked about unsubscribing from mailing lists back in January. By May, new ones have probably crept in. The inbox has a way of gradually refilling. A quick pass through your email looking for newsletters and subscription emails is worth doing again, particularly for anything you subscribed to since January.

The test is simple: do you look forward to receiving this, or do you just mark it as read without opening it? Anything in the second category can go.

A Few Extra Thoughts for May

The bathroom cabinet declutter takes less than an hour. It’s one of those tasks that feels bigger than it is. A bin bag, an hour, and it’s done. If there’s one thing on this month’s list to just get on and do, that’s probably it.

Don’t buy storage solutions before you’ve decluttered. This is a classic trap: buying boxes and organisers to contain the clutter rather than reducing it first. The storage solution you need after decluttering is almost always smaller and cheaper than the one you thought you needed before.

Five months in. If you’ve been following this series since January, you’ve worked through holiday storage, the wardrobe, the bedroom, sentimental items, paperwork, the kitchen, and now the bathroom and home office. That’s a significant chunk of a house. The cumulative effect of small, consistent efforts over time is the whole point. You probably feel it by now.

Next month: June decluttering the garden, shed, or outdoor spaces, plus a look at the living room as a shared space, and getting on top of your digital calendar and old appointments.