When you sit down to do some real de-cluttering, you can easily get distracted by returning certain items to other places in the house (or other people). Organization blog Unclutterer provides a nice strategy for avoiding this distraction.
While certain items inevitably get moved far, far away from where they belong (whether it's your kitchen scissors showing up in the living room or your neighbor's screwdrivers still sitting on your workbench), if you return them to their rightful place in the middle of cleaning, you might never get back to cleaning. Unclutterer suggests saving all this until the end:
Instead of leaving the room, simply put the out-of-place item into a clean clothes hamper. Then, after you're finished clearing the clutter and organizing the space, you can attend to the significantly out-of-place objects.
Take care of the items that belong in your home first. Group the items in the hamper by area of your home. Next, starting on the top floor of your home, work your way down to the basement, or, if your home is all on one level, work clockwise from the main entrance. Maintaining this pattern will help you to do as little back-tracking as possible.
Once you've taken care of the items you own, you can then plan out when you can return the items you've borrowed from others—whether it's right then, or when you have the extra free time to do so. It's simple, but a nice strategy that will keep you from moving on to another task before you're done with the current one—or worse, yapping with your neighbor for an hour and not getting anything done at all. Hit the link to read more.
A Strategy for Processing Out-of-Place Objects [Unclutterer]