*Disclaimer* If your head feels like a melon and your throat a cactus today you might be best advised to come back to this post a little later on.  It’s about cleaning, y’see.

OK so 2012 is barely 12 hours old, but as far as I’m concerned it’s never too early to do some strategic “life cleaning”.  Life cleaning isn’t about unnecessary dusting, rubber gloves or using old toothbrushes to remove mould from the underside of your fridge (seriously, Life. Too. Short).  While clean houses are, of course, great things, life cleaning is about the strategic elimination of unnecessary complications and clutter from our lives.

Here are my top five strategic cleans for the start of 2012…

1. The Spice Shelf

Has everyone seen this Michael McIntyre sketch about herbs and spices?  Oh it makes me laugh!  Mainly because he’s spot on – my spice cupboard is FULL of those little green-topped jars (and yes, one or two do still have the plastic on).  I buy them when I’m following a recipe and then forget all about them unless their names are cumin, cinnamon or oregano.  The shame!  This New Year, however, I’m going to take every single jar out of the spice cupboard, check it for mould and, if it passes the test, look it up online: what does it do, what does it go with and how much of it can I use before whatever I’m cooking turns into FIRE?  New Year’s life clean number 1: Organise the spice cupboard.

2. The Inbox

My inbox reached a state of near-meltdown last year with all the automated junk I was receiving.  Seriously, Groupon?!  I got two emails per day for around six months.  I never bought a single thing.  It was at the point where almost 90% of the emails I received were from companies that I had absolutely no interest in that I decided something had to be done.  And as it turned out, what needed to be done was no more complicated than sitting still for half an hour and unsubscribing from everything.  And would you believe it, I haven’t missed junk mail one tiny bit.  New Year’s life clean number 2: Join the minimalist inbox club.  I promise it will make you feel light as a freshly baked fairy cake…

3. The Google Reader/Equivalent

A couple of blogs I was following last year started to get me down around Autumn, so much so that I was beginning to avoid opening my Google Reader at all.  Bonkers really (and very unfair to all the blogs that I do love to read).  Unless you are contractually bound to read blogs, you are entitled to ditch things when you stop enjoying them.  I want my online bookshelf to be something I enjoy and take inspiration from – not a closet full of whining and narcissism that I’m nervous even to open.  In the end, I unsubscribed from a few feeds around October and took steps to install a few more positive, life-affirming ones instead.  New Year’s life clean number 3: Ditch the bad feed karma.

4.  The Handbag

This is probably my favourite life clean.  So quick!  So effective!  All you need to do is empty out your handbag, purse or pannier and make a few piles: one for the things that get to go back in, one for the things that don’t get to go back in but do deserve to be kept and one for the rubbish/recycling.  You also need to have a place to put the things you’re keeping but not putting back in your bag.  Otherwise you’re just transferring mess from one place to another, and nobody likes that.  Receipts you no longer need to keep; spent shopping lists, bus tickets, empty chewing gum wrappers etc – goodbye!  New Year’s life clean number 4: Lighten your load.

5. The Wardrobe

You all know I love a good wardrobe clean, and the New Year is as good a time as any to purge ourselves of unwanted or underused clothes.  If you can’t face tackling the whole thing, may I suggest a bespoke blitz that takes in underwear, socks, pyjamas and shoes – in my experience the four areas that generate the biggest piles.  And if all that decluttering leaves you feeling crafty (what? It might!), you could finish by making some home-made lavender sachets to fragrance whatever you keep.  Simples!  New Year’s life clean number 5: wade through your wardrobe.

Image above from here.