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Do not inventory your house. Inventory the five or six categories you keep accidentally re-buying. A complete inventory takes a weekend and gets abandoned within a month; a partial one takes twenty minutes and starts paying you back the first time it stops a duplicate purchase.
The mistake that kills most inventories
People start with completeness as the goal. They open a spreadsheet, name the columns, and begin in the kitchen with the intention of capturing everything. Somewhere around the third drawer the effort stops feeling like progress and starts feeling like data entry, because it is. The spreadsheet is abandoned, and the conclusion drawn is "inventories don't work for me."
The actual failure was scope. An inventory is not an archive; it is a lookup table for decisions you make while standing in a shop. Anything that will never be looked up is pure cost. You do not need your sofa in a database. You know about the sofa.
What to actually include
Include a category if it meets two conditions: you own several, and you cannot state the number from memory. In most homes that lands on much the same list — clothing (especially the basics you top up without thinking), kitchen tools and small appliances, cables and adapters, cosmetics and toiletries, stationery, batteries and light bulbs, and hobby supplies.
Leave out anything unique and memorable. One television. One bike. You have never once bought a second bike by accident.
The field that makes it useful
Name and category are obvious. The one that changes the nature of the tool is last used. A list of what you own answers "do I have one?" A list with last-used dates also answers "what do I own that I am not using?" — and that second question is the entire back half of decluttering.
You do not need to track it religiously. Even a rough date, set when you add the item and updated when you happen to think about it, is enough to separate the things in daily circulation from the things quietly occupying a shelf for two years. The interesting number is not exact; it is the order of magnitude. Six days and six hundred days are obviously different, and that is all you need.
How to enter things without hating it
Typing is the bottleneck, so avoid typing. Talking through a drawer out loud is several times faster than typing it, and photographing a shelf and letting recognition draft the entries is faster still. Kept does both — voice capture turns a spoken sentence into a structured list, and you can photograph up to ten items at once — but the principle holds whatever tool you use: capture fast and messy, tidy later. An inventory that is 80% right and exists beats a perfect one you abandoned.
One rule worth keeping regardless of tool: nothing should enter the list without a human glance. Automatic recognition is good enough to draft and not good enough to trust, and a list you do not trust is a list you stop consulting.
Maintenance, realistically
Add things when they arrive — the moment you unbox something is the cheapest moment to record it, because it is already in your hands and already in your attention. Remove things when they leave. Then open the whole list once a month, look at what has not been touched in a long time, and make one decision per line. That is the entire maintenance burden, and it is about ten minutes.
The return is quieter than a dramatic before-and-after photo but it compounds: you stop buying things you own, you stop searching for things you already have, and you can answer honestly at any moment what is in your home and what is merely stored in it.