9 Books to Help You Declutter Your Life in the New Year

You can’t have a “decluttering” book list without Marie Kondo’s now-classic, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing! Her philosophy of cutting back on clutter is all about embracing the things that bring you joy, while learning to let go of things that no longer do.

It’s not just a “get rid of it all” mentality, but instead emphasizes a spirit of gratitude and abundance without clinging to things that are no longer useful.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is cutting down the amount of “stuff” you have, this is the book for you. Ruth Soukup’s Unstuffed: Decluttering Your Home, Mind, and Soul has a particular approach to getting your home cleared up. She focuses on how to deal with the ongoing pile-up of consumerism and how to clear your mind and your home all at once.

In The Home Edit Life: The No-Guilt Guide to Owning What You Want and Organizing Everything, Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, the two authors who make up the Home Edit team, focus not just on “cleaning,” but on finding ways to make organization and cleaning attractive and interesting—think things like color-coded drawers, use-based organization systems, and geometrically pleasing storage. There’s even a Netflix TV series from the same team!

The home-niche queen gives her own guide to organizing in Martha Stewart’s Organizing: The Manual for Bringing Order to Your Life, Home & Routines, with room-by-room strategies for organizing, purging, cleaning, and simplifying every corner of the house—and staying that way.

It’s a straightforward comfy approach that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, just reminds readers how to find joy in the homes they have and how to avoid getting overwhelmed

Nikki Boyd, a professional organizer, is behind Beautifully Organized: A Guide to Function and Style in Your Home, a step-by-step guide to getting your living space the way you want it. Boyd’s book teaches a unique five-step process to streamlining one’s space while also making it more appealing and enjoyable to live in.

On the surface, Liz Marie Galvan’s Cozy White Cottage: 100 Ways to Love the Feeling of Being Home might lookslike more of a “décor” book than an organizational tool. In reality, it’s actually more about how to decorate and organize one’s home to focus on the things that are actually useful and loved, rather than just “stuff” that’s there without doing much.

Make Room for What You Love: Your Essential Guide to Organizing and Simplifying, this decluttering and updating book by Melissa Michaels, focuses on making decisions on what to clear out, how to do it, and how to effectively organize what remains so that it’s easier and more pleasant to live in your own home. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the process, but this book provides a guide to getting through it with satisfying results.

Written by Toni Hammersley, the bestseller The Complete Book of Home Organization is, as its title suggests, a comprehensive guide to getting the home organized and under control. Storage solutions take center stage, with plenty of great creative tips on types of storage, ways to save space, and how to stay organized in any sized home.

Myquillyn Smith’s how-to guide Cozy Minimalist Home: More Style, Less Stuff proves that two of the most popular home aesthetics—cozy living and minimalism—don’t have to inherently contradict each other. It offers tips on how “cozy” doesn’t have to mean a bunch of stuff, instead focusing on how to get a lived-in comfy feel while also organizing and decluttering.