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Sometimes you have a spare few minutes around the house and want to do something to improve the space. I wrote these mini tidying challenges with those small chunks of time and energy in mind. Your aim is to clear the surface and reclaim some open space, not try for perfection here.

Begin by clearing everything off of or out of the relevant space. Ask yourself two questions in quick succession for each thing you cleared off. (Besides the two questions, I’ve also included some further considerations for each specific area.)

1. Should I keep this?
2. Should I keep this here?

If you should not keep something at all, discard it or put it in an outbox to deal with later. (Please note that does not necessarily mean throwing it in the trash!) If you should keep something, but somewhere else, put it back where it belongs if it has a place. If something you should keep somewhere else does not have a place and you cannot immediately think of one, put it in a pile of things to deal with for now. Finish by putting everything remaining back in the space. After that, if you still have time and energy, maybe keep the momentum going with another of the mini tidying challenges!

Bathtub or Shower

For this challenge, just focus on what is inside the bathtub or shower area, not anything that could be used there, as that would probably not be a mini challenge. Now, I do not take the full The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up approach of removing everything from the shower or bathtub each time. That said, I do still recommend only having things in there that you actually use on a regular basis.

Breakfast Table

On a fundamental level, a breakfast table is casual. I do find, however, that even the most casual dining experience suffers when I lack the space to put down my plate and mug comfortably. Things like food packaging can often pile up on one of these, and that is usually pretty easy to deal with. Discard the empty ones and put the ones with food still in them back in the kitchen or pantry.

Coat Rack

Should everything you have out on display on your coat rack be there right now? Or should some of the off-season articles perhaps be put away until their time comes? Those are not just rhetorical questions, by the way. If you have a large enough coat rack and a small enough collection of outerwear, feel free to keep your winter coat out the whole year. Although I don’t have a coat rack, I do personally keep all my clothes in active storage year-round.

Coffee Table

These are fundamentally challenges of organizing, rather than styling. The goal here is to clear some space and make sure that everything on the coffee table should actually be there. I personally recommend storing remotes on the television stand instead, because of my cat, for instance. But if you finish clearing things off and want to keep going, this might be a good time to add something new and beautiful to your coffee table.

Gift Cards and Rewards Cards

I am going to go out on a limb and say that any Blockbuster membership cards you have should be kept, if you want to keep them, with keepsakes rather than active cards. With several holidays coming up soon as I write this, it might also be a good time to start thinking about if any of your gift cards could be useful for your holiday shopping.

Mugs

This one might not be a mini challenge if you have decades worth of collectible mugs or several pattern sets. In that case, you should feel absolutely free to only tackle your mugs as part of a long-term tidying and organizing project. But if your assortment of mugs is reasonably small, removing the ones you don’t use or want to use can make it easier to reach the ones you do.

Television Stand

By television stand, I do just mean clearing off the top surface here, not any media storage surrounding the television. These are mini tidying challenges, not long-term projects. The scope of this mini challenge is more along the lines of putting cases back away and making sure that you know where all of your relevant remotes can be found.

Please feel free to comment with any other suggestions for mini tidying challenges, or to contact me if you’re looking to move forward with a larger organizing project (like a collection of physical media)!