How-to: My 3-step decluttering routine

I'm starting this month by decluttering my life.  Well, my room at least.  I have been temporarily bunking in my older brother's room (he's now based in Australia) for about 5 months now.  I know.  Five months isn't exactly temporary.  My excuse is that no one really uses the room anyway and my room (particularly my bed), a month after moving out, pretty much became my storage place for all things wedding (magazines.. supplier contact cards.. more magazines).
Anyway, over the years I have been following a 3-step routine in organizing my stuffs.  I want to share them as I hope they'll serve you well as they have me.

     1. SEGREGATE ITEMS BY GROUP - At home: Get one big box to pile in all your wedding materials (e.g. magazines, wedding supplier calling cards, DIY materials).  This way, you free up some space already and you have all your wedding stuffs in one area.  On your computer: You can apply this with wedding materials you accumulate on your computer.  Create on folder and name it like 'Wedding Stuffs - To be organized'.  This way you know exactly what's in it and you know that it still needs to be arranged.  Start dragging all wedding-related documents, folders, and etc. here. 

     2. ORGANIZE THEM - At home: Group all related items together.  Say wedding magazines: arrange them in one pile and the same goes to other related items (e.g. supplier pamphlets together).  You may need a separate table (or bed, hehe) to put the grouped items on.  On your computer: Create another folder and name it 'Organized Wedding Materials'.  Inside, start creating individual folders for wedding gowns, wedding cakes, flowers and so on.  You can micro-manage this even more by being more-OC when it comes to grouping together wedding items.  For example, in the 'Gowns' folder you can create two separate folders to indicate bridal and entourage wear (I'm guilty of doing this).  Then, under the wedding entourage folder, you can add new folders to indicate the color or style.  You can do this on the other wedding categories as well.

Found this at Walmart.  This can be used for Step 1 and definitely for storing as well.

     3. STORE, STORE, STORE - At home: Decide (if you haven't already) where you would like to store the organized stuffs.  For example, you may want to keep wedding magazines on a free space in your closet while calling cards will be kept in an envelope to be stored in a drawer.  My sister thinks it's weird that I do this now instead of during step 2 right after grouping of the items.  However, I know that that will be tiring mid-way.  Why?  Because apart from my bedroom closet, I also have storage spaces all over the house.  If I was going to pile up magazines then store them, then collect DIY materials then go to a separate room all together to store them, I will no longer have enough energy left to organize the other items.  Besides, I like knowing that I'm at the last step already and that I only have one more task to finish.  On your computer: I have a tendency to just copy images (that I love) from the Internet then save them as is in my desktop.  The result?  I have one too many images with names like '300x200 image' or '948472jkdkfjg'.  Not a pretty picture when you have a folder viewing option set to 'List'.  And so this is the time I start renaming images and files to how I want them named for easy identification (e.g. bridal bouquet - vintage red style).  After I'm done, I whip out my external hard disk (or my pen flash drive) and save a copy of my just organized wedding stuffs.  This makes my wedding preps portable (aka bringing wedding preps anywhere like at work - shh).  

Hope this helps.

PS.  Those wedding stuffs I just finished organizing (especially on my PC)?  The many resource materials I have but can't delete because I cannot, for the life of me, narrow down to what I and Mr. J want our overall wedding will be (from gowns to color to reception look).  I am no bridezilla, but I am going wedding overdrive though.