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Decluttering your space can feel like a Herculean task that you’d much rather put off than tackle. But one simple and comically named rule of thumb may help you make some headway. It’s called the “poop rule.”
When trying to decide if you should keep or get rid of an item, ask yourself this question: If the object had poop on it, would I wash it off or throw it away?
This “rule” went viral after ADHD content creator Becka Karle, known as @adhdorganized on TikTok, posted a video on the social media platform about it in July. The video racked up 175,000 views on TikTok before making the rounds on other social media sites.
Karle told HuffPost she first heard about the poop rule from a therapist she was seeing to help manage her attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms. At the time, Karle was downsizing her home, having a hard time going through and purging items she had accumulated over the years. Difficulty staying organized is a common challenge among people with ADHD (more on that below).
Her therapist told her to pick up each item in her hands and actually picture poop on it.
“Like an old toiletry or something would be gross, right? So my therapist was like, ‘Would you wash poop off that?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely not. It would be all in the cracks, you know?’” Karle said. “And she was like, ‘Exactly. Now, what about a shirt that you wear to work a lot?’ And I’m like, ‘Honestly, I probably would wash it.’”
Karle said the poop rule worked for her because she’s “a very visual and literal person” and it kept her “accountable.”
In the comments of Karle’s viral video, one TikTok user compared the poop rule to Marie Kondo’s own tidying technique but with a twist, writing, “So…Marie Kondo’s ‘Does this spark joy?’ made more visceral? Love it.”
And in a viral post viewed more than 5 million times, Cooper Ownbey, an archival researcher and scriptwriter, wrote on X, formerly called Twitter, that Kondo’s method never worked for her but that “an adhd tiktoker just changed my entire life by introducing ‘the poop rule.’”
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