I’m pretty good about getting rid of clutter around the house. My husband would say I am too good at times, and yes, I’ve been known to throw out a piece of paper we need later on. But most of the time my de-cluttering obsession serves us all well.

Recently I realized that there were a few small areas in the house that weren’t well organized and annoyed me every time I had to interact with them.

• The small cabinet we have in the kitchen where we store randomness of every kind and the top of which had become “put stuff here and then ignore it for days” area.

• The box in my daughter’s room which contains her hair pins, ribbons, and various other hair accessories. It’s a mess.

• The pantry. Yes, I still feel giddy that we actually have a pantry, since it’s the size of what for years was our New York City kitchen. And the nice people who lived in our house before us put up some convenient shelving in it, which is helpful. But perhaps because I’ve never had a pantry before this one turned into a random mess quite quickly.

So I decided that minor annoyances are easy to remove from my daily life and set out to get these three areas organized. I tackled the kitchen cabinet first, taking out the contents of all of its drawers and going through the pile of things on top of it. Guess what? I threw out about 50% of what I found. It was old junk, papers, documents, , maps that we no longer needed. (Yes, I recycled what I could, thanks for asking.)

Then I went after the hair stuff box in my daughter’s room. Same story — I ended up throwing away a ton of things that she never used any more. (She did keep a few so that she could do her stuffed animals’ hair. No problem.)

And then the pantry. This was the biggest annoyance and took the longest to organize. But you know the punchline — many things in there ended up the garbage. They were either old, or expired, or unrecognizable from the move.

Getting these few areas organized feels good, although I am sure they won’t be in great shape shortly. But the main point is this: You can’t organize without being ruthless about de-cluttering and throwing things out at the same time. Sure, there are probably exceptions, but in most cases organizing stuff means getting rid of at least some stuff (throwing out, giving away, donating, recycling, etc.)

I very strongly believe that having less stuff and clutter around is good for you and makes life a bit more calm. There is a pile of papers on my desk right now that has distracted me at least five times as I was writing this post, and if that’s not a testament to clutter reducing productivity, I don’t have a better example. So c’mon, go be a ruthless de-clutterer for 10 minutes — you’ll feel awesome!