When you’re around anything for long enough, you eventually grow accustomed to it, may stop noticing it, and might even forget that it’s there. This can sometimes be a good thing, but when it comes to organization, growing blind to your stuff makes it easy for clutter to accumulate. It’s important then to take the time every few months to reconnect with the things around you. Here are professional organizer Emily Wilska’s tips on how to approach the process in a realistic and effective way.

Start slow and small
Though it might be tempting to go all out and sort through every last thing in your home or office in one sitting, you’d quickly burn yourself out if you actually attempted such a feat. Worse yet, you might wind up shoving everything into the back of a closet or deep into the recesses of a desk drawer, which would be a significant step backwards. Rather than going whole hog, choose a specific room or area to start in, and work from there. For example, you might opt to begin in your dining room, or perhaps with the contents of the credenza in your office. Once you’ve made progress in one area, take a breather before moving on to the next.

Touch everything
When you’ve chosen a room or area to work in, aim to touch everything in that space as you go through this process. It’s very easy to focus our attention only on the things we know we like and/or the things we know we don’t, but for this exercise to be as effective as possible, it’s important to broaden the scope. This means that if you’re working in the dining room, you should open every drawer and cabinet and take a serious look inside; in your office, empty your junk drawer and sort through everything you come across. Does this take time? Absolutely, which is why it’s key to work in small batches. Does it pay off? Unquestionably. When’s the last time you really considered how many of the dozens of writing implements crowding the pencil cup on your desk deserve to be there?

Think in terms of connections
The goal behind this process is not to rid your space entirely of stuff, or to put everything you own out on display. Rather, it’s to put you back in touch with things you may have forgotten about or grown overly accustomed to so that you can determine what you actually feel connected to and what you don’t. Try thinking of this as you would a high school reunion. At such a reunion, you’d encounter a few different types of people: close friends with whom you’ve stayed in touch and who you enjoy having as part of your life, people you see occasionally and are polite to but don’t feel any particular affinity for, and former classmates whom you’d forgotten about and would just as soon not run into again. You can use these same broad categories to determine what stuff to hold onto and what to let go of: keep the good friends, bid the undesirables adieu, and decide whether the acquaintances are really worth the time, space, and effort required to keep them around, or whether you’d truly prefer to let them go.

Have a plan for what to do once you’ve decided
When you’ve chosen what gets to stay and what doesn’t, it’s crucial to have a solid plan for what to do with things that fall into the latter category. Remember, letting things you’ve decided to get rid of sit around in your home or office increases exponentially the chances that they’ll get reabsorbed. And on the flip side, if you rediscover things you truly love but had forgotten about, or that had been displaced by stuff you’re now getting rid of, you’ll want to give them pride of place. So set aside time to get the unwanteds out of your space—whether by bringing them to a donation drop-off point, passing them along to a friend or neighbor who can use them, or including them in a yard sale—and to make sure the things you love and will use are easily accessible.

Do it regularly
As with any task, the longer the stretches of time between these reconnecting sessions, the more overwhelming they’re likely to be. Scheduling them regularly means they’ll eventually take less and less time. You might plan these sessions at the start of each season, right before or after school vacations, around significant family or work milestones, or in conjunction with other events that happen a few times a year. After a while, reconnecting with your stuff will become a habit, and you might even choose to do it more frequently; in any case, aim to do it more than once a year.

To make sure that you’re allowing into your life only things you need, use, love, or find beautiful, take the time to reconnect with your stuff. You’ll get the chance to let go of what’s weighing you down and find renewed enjoyment in the things that are really meaningful to you.

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Emily Wilska is an Inaugural Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of the San Francisco based company, The Organized Life. She is a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO), and the Director of Professional Development for the NAPO-SFBA Chapter. She is the Editor of the BellaOnline Organization site, the chair of the Scheme Committee of the Board of Certification for Professional Organizers, and the Editor of the NSGCD’s newsletter, The Chronical. Emily is also the author of Knack: Organizing Your Home.