I'm a professional declutterer. Here are 3 tips for year-round 'spring cleaning.'

• Everyone rushes to clean their closets when spring starts.
• I'm a decluttering expert and think decluttering should happen all year long.

Letting go of things feels hard; hence the clutter situation in most of our houses. There are a lot of reasons we cling to things we don't use or love: we're emotionally attached to them, it can be hard to judge whether or not an item will come in handy, and it's hard to figure out what to do with the stuff we don't want.

But the longer you kick this particular can down the road, the harder it will be to attack it later when the stuff has really piled up. If you manage to pare down your possessions the way you manage other household chores, you take out the anxiety and sense of overwhelm.

Decluttering is just another task

Start to think of decluttering as just another regular task, and you'll find it's not any more onerous than emptying the dishwasher.

Imagine this: you pull a pair of socks out of the drawer in the morning, look at them, and put them back in favor of another pair. Chances are you don't really like those socks and rarely, if ever, wear them. But they're in decent shape, so it's never occurred to you to get rid of them.

This is how we end up with reams of stuff we don't use. If you could train yourself to notice when you're avoiding using a thing, like that pair of socks, you could immediately toss it into a donation box and have one less piece of clutter.

Involve your family

When my kids were younger, I'd add decluttering to their chore lists: make your bed, clean out your backpack, find six things you don't want to own anymore. They didn't have to give it a lot of thought; nearly every room has a fair number of items that aren't indispensable.

That's the beauty of making decluttering a regular part of your life; you're just curating, removing the dead wood. If you can easily let go of the things that don't matter to you, you'll have built up your decluttering muscle to tackle the harder things. Making decisions about your grandmother's china will take a bit more emotional fortitude than ditching a wonky spatula, but doing enough of the latter will make the former easier.

How to declutter on a daily basis

After you finish cleaning the bathroom, take a look at just one category of the stuff that lives in there: hair care, medications, makeup, whatever. Glance through it and see if there are any obvious outliers: the pomade you never use, outdated cough syrup, old lipstick. Don't stress; just grab a few things and toss them out.

When you're done sweeping the kitchen, don't just shove the broom into the cupboard. Spend a minute looking at your cleaning supplies and toss anything that's not getting used. Just know that some of these fall into the category of hazardous waste and have to be disposed of according to local rules.

Putting away the folded towels? Eyeball the entire collection and make sure they're all in decent shape. Donate anything that's not up to par. This might be a good time to think about how many towels you really need and pare down a bit if your collection has gotten out of hand.

And my all-time favorite decluttering strategy: Find five things. This is a terrific one for every member of the household. After breakfast on Saturday or dinner on Tuesday, tell everyone in the house to go find five things they no longer need or want. It's so easy, and if you do it once or twice a week, you'll have a lot less junk to deal with.

Decluttering is about removing excess. Just as you'd get rid of bread that's gotten moldy, let go of the shirt that's stained, the book you didn't really enjoy, and the earbuds that only work some of the time. You can save it all up and try to power through it in a burst of spring cleaning, but your life will be a lot easier if you do a little bit every day.