A messy home is a stressful, depressing and potentially dangerous place to live. Here are seven ways to reduce the amount of mess and stress in your living space.

1. Establish Landing Pads For Critical Things.

When you enter your home, you need a permanent place for your winter clothes, your wallet or purse, your cell phone, your work badge, and your keys. If you get in the habit of putting everything on its proper landing pad, then you'll always have your critical gear ready when you need to leave. You also need to keep your landing pads clear of extraneous clutter. When a landing pad is cluttered, it becomes easy to tuck critical items in obscure, hard-to-find, cubbies. A dedicated landing pad should never be messy.

2. Minimize mail handling.

Traditional Snail Mail is messy. You've got to process incoming mail and get rid of it before it takes over your life. Try to touch incoming mail only once. If you get junk mail throw it away immediately. If you open it, consider it, and leave it laying around, junk mail can become a permanent part of your clutter-scape. If you receive important bills or papers, place them in an appropriate place. Important papers should be filed immediately and bills should be placed in a standard location for processing.

3. Make A Time For Standard Chores.

If you want a clean living space, clean routines are absolutely vital. For example, if you unload and load the dishwasher <http://www.associatedcontent.com/topic/2857/dishwasher.html> every night during the 11 o'clock news, you'll never leave dirty dishes out overnight to attract pests. If you establish a standard time each week for each basic sanitary chore, your home will be a safe, clean, and sanitary place. Routines can eliminate all kinds of mess in your life.

4. Divide the Labor.

In family or room-mate situations, divide the chores so that everyone contributes fairly to maintaining a clean and safe home. If you share a television or computer, chores can be scheduled for times when the resource is being used by another person. For example, if your spouse <http://www.associatedcontent.com/theme/1685/spouse.html> always watches Entertainment Tonight at 7 p.m. and you hate that show, that would be a good block of time for you to tackle a chore or two. Mess expands when a household doesn't attack it.

5. Compartmentalize Your Stuff.

Just as your critical gear needs appropriate landing pads, other "stuff" in your life needs to be stored in a dedicated place. An obvious example is the entertainment center. The classic entertainment center is a cabinet with room for a video game console, a DVD player, and all the games and media in a household. If you have a gun cabinet for guns, a workbench for tools, a sewing <http://www.associatedcontent.com/topic/4611/sewing.html> station for sewing <http://www.associatedcontent.com/topic/4611/sewing.html> gear, and a computer desk for your PC and printer, you are almost organized. If you dedicate portable bins and other storage areas to specific endeavors, you will have your stuff together in short order. Mess is stuff that doesn't have a home.

6. Reduce. Reduce. Reduce.

You have to periodically get rid of extra stuff you don't want or need. You pay for every square foot of your living space. It costs money to store unneeded things. If you take advantage of electronics recycling <http://www.associatedcontent.com/theme/607/recycling.html> programs, charity donation drives, ebay sales opportunities, garage sales, and other opportunities to ship off your mess, you can get your space back.

7. Make Some Rules.

Gradually add little rules to reduce clutter in your life. The toilet paper roll should be hung. Dirty socks should be in the hamper. The kitchen counter should be wiped down before bed. Once you have internalized the rules, you will have established clean, clutter-free, habits. Of course, rules don't make you the marshal. The best rules are agreed upon and enforced internally. If your kitchen is squared away and if your dirty laundry makes it to the hamper, you'll simply feel better.

Mess isn't conquered in a day. For a messy person, it can be a constant struggle to avoid being messy. You simply have to persist. It takes five or six weeks to develop a habit. But, in a world of economic uncertainty, it sure feels good to establish control over your living space.