Clear Your Clutter: Change Your Life. Here’s How
Living in a cluttered and disorganised environment is stressful. 😫
The accumulation of all sorts of miscellaneous crap can lead to a lack of focus, increased anxiety, and reduced productivity.
Even the messiest alley cats among us need to know how to clear up clutter and get organised, and how to create living space that supports us to live our lives less chaotically.
Experiencing even 5% more peace and satisfaction on a daily basis has a cumulative effect that over time can completely transform our lives.
We have an emotional relationship with all of our stuff so it’s not unusual to shrink back from the challenge and tell ourselves “I’ve always been a messy person, it can never change. Any effort I make here is bound to fail.”
Instead though, if we tell ourselves: “I’ve never learned how to be tidy. It is something I can’t do yet.” We leave the door open for the possibility of change. And it is a change that can change our life.
Being open to learning how and taking a structured approach can make the impossible, possible.
HOW TO DO IT
Step 1: Decluttering
The first step in the journey to an organised life is decluttering. Take on one room at a time, one week at a time.
If you crowd yourself out in the decluttering stage you risk early overwhelm and reactively giving up on the whole thing.
Start with the hardest room - the room that harbours the most “Stuff”. When you break the back of the task early by doing the most difficult bit first, you’ll be freewheeling through the rest of the rooms, powered by your feeling of accomplishment.
Allocate 3 or 4 separate areas of the room as:
Keep
Donate
Sell (view this one as optional as although it might make back some money it involves extra work)
Bin
Be ruthless in your decision-making process, if you are wavering, ask yourself - if it turns out that I actually do need to use this again at some point in the future, would it be possible for me to borrow or buy another one?
If the answer is ‘Yes,’ get rid of it.
Step 2: Creating Zones
Once you've decluttered, it's time to create zones throughout your home.
Assign different areas for different activities for example work, relaxation, hobbies, and specific areas for storing things.
This separation keeps chaos at bay by stopping stuff from drifting into unrelated areas.
When you spot something that has migrated, you then get into the habit of taking it back to the zone where it belongs.
Zoning also saves time because when you are looking for stuff based on its function, finding it is much quicker.
Step 3: Getting Storage Solutions
Good storage solutions are the lynchpin to making sure that your newly organised environment stays that way. Invest in quality storage containers, like durable stackable boxes, cupboards or shelves, that work for the space you are in. Get them second hand if you want to save some money.
A top tip here is using clear containers and having a clear labelling system so you never have to waste time looking for stuff once it has been put away.
If you have limited room, make the most of vertical storage or things will end up being stored on valuable surface space.
Step 4: Creating Daily Habits
Having an organised home is not an act, it is a process. Just like having a garden, it needs to be cultivated consistently.
Just a couple of daily habits will help keep your hard-won bastion of calm and order intact.
Set a 10 minute timer or play a couple of bangers to tidy up at the end of each day, repatriating items to their zones and clearing surfaces, returning things to their designated storage places, and clearing surfaces.
A simple routine like this stops stuff from piling up into a much more daunting job and keeps it feeling almost effortless to maintain.
Step 5: Digital Decluttering
Clearing up clutter isn't limited to physical spaces; it also extends to digital environments.
Organise your digital files by creating folders with clear labels and subcategories.
Delete old and unnecessary files to free up storage space and make finding important documents easier.
Regularly sort through your email inbox and unsubscribe from newsletters you no longer read.
THE BOONS
The boon of getting organised goes way beyond having a prettier living space.
Boon 1: Reduced Stress and Anxiety
Being in a clutter-free place promotes mental clarity and reduces your levels of stress. With order in your surroundings you're less likely to feel overwhelmed by the visual chaos that clutter can bring. The result: you'll be able to focus better, think more clearly, and approach tasks with a calmer mindset.
Boon 2: Increased Productivity
Leaving clutter in the gutter really boosts your productivity. When you know where stuff is and have dedicated spaces for specific tasks, you’re a machine!
Wasting less time dithering, looking for stuff and head-scratching means you can crack on with things efficiently, applying your precious time and energy to things that are actually meaningful.
Boon 3: Enhanced Creativity
An overloaded, disharmonious space can really stifle creativity and crowd out inspiration.
Inspiration requires reflection and reflection requires space. Clearing clutter provides that space for new ideas and lets you approach problems with a fresh perspective.
That feeling of calm that orderly surroundings give you is conducive to creative thinking, instead of that narrow, blinkered mindset that feeling mildly stressed-out can evoke.
Boon 4: Better Time Management
All our finite lives are made up of precious time so the fact that getting organised stops us squandering it might be the biggest boon of all.
When everything is in its place, you find what you need when you need it, confining panicky, time-wasting searches to the past. You’ll find an efficient environment promotes an efficient you, and you’ll notice you gain more awareness of how you’re spending your time and a better grasp of your schedule.
Boon 5: Positive Mindset
When you are living in an organised space you’ll notice YOU JUST FEEL BETTER.
Tasks will seem more doable and feel less worrying… The very act of decluttering and maintaining - that fact that you have set your mind to it and achieved it despite your doubts and discouragement - fosters a rightful sense of accomplishment and control.
This sense of self-efficacy extends into other areas of your life, promoting a more expansive outlook, overall.
THE BLOCKS
To reap these extensive rewards we have to cut a path through the blocks that can stand in our way, and knowing what these obstacles are in advance positions us to overcome them.
Block 1: Sentimentality
Getting rid of sentimental things can be tricky.
To steer round this block, focus on the memories associated with the thing rather than the thing itself. Take a picture of it, if you want to keep a prompt for those memories, then let the thing itself go.
There’s also a hierarchy when it comes to sentimental attachment. Use a scale of one to ten to establish how much nostalgic emotion the item genuinely evokes. If it is less than eight - get rid!
Block 2: Procrastination
Procrastination is the arch enemy of decluttering. You can combat it by chunking down tasks into smaller, manageable sub-tasks.
Set a 10 minute timer and do focused decluttering in short bursts to reduce the sense of overwhelm.
Block 3: Maintenance
Preventing the chaos from sneakily encroaching back in over time is an ongoing duty to yourself. As well as your ten minute tidy up routine at the end of each day - put a regular decluttering session into your work schedule.
Just an extra hour once a fortnight or once a month will keep you large and in charge of your space. Have a nice drink or something really good to eat at the end of these top ups to thank yourself, too.
Block 4: Clutter Magnets
There are always a few places that tend to accumulate most of the clutter, like porches, doorways or kitchen countertops.
If you absolutely must use these spaces to park things, temporarily apply the 'one in, one out' rule, you can only put a new thing there once you have taken away an old one.
Alternatively, is there some extra storage in or around that area that would stop it from getting so clogged?
THE LONG HAUL
To benefit from being in an organised environment you’ll need to make peace with staying on top of it for the rest of your life.
It might sound like a big ask but there are a few long-term strategies that make this easier than it sounds.
Strategy 1: The Season Reason
Schedule a couple of hours into your calendar at the start of each Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter to reassess your belongings. Inevitably we acquire new items over the course of the year, so this bakes in an opportunity to check whether we want or need to keep this stuff and if so, what can be let go of to make room for it. If you do this each season you will never have to do a massive declutter again in your life, which is a pretty compelling reason.
Strategy 2: Consume with Care
Be careful about falling into the trap of mindless consumption. Targeted adverts fool us into thinking we need and want stuff that we don’t.
When you feel pulled to buy something new, ask yourself:
Whether it truly adds value to your life
Whether in three months time, will this thing still be making you happier?
Will it be making your life more fulfilling and less stressful?
If the answer is not a strong yes, then decide not to buy it now. Tell yourself if you are still hankering after it in 6 months you can get it then. 9.9 times out of 10 you won’t be.
Strategy 3: Paper Capers
It is often a pesky proliferation of paper that undermines even the most noble of decluttering efforts, so stay vigilant to keep the tide paper at bay.
Sort paperwork immediately, digitise important documents, whack them in a Google Drive or similar so they won’t get lost if your device breaks, then recycle then rest.
There are very few documents that are important enough to need to keep a hard copy of.
In conclusion
It’s not exciting, it’s not fun, but learning how to clear up clutter and get organised is an investment that will drastically improve your overall quality of life.
Schedule in the time you'll need to follow the steps so you can embrace the boons of an organised life and get acquainted with a version of yourself who is you but more productive, creative and feels more at peace.
Your future self will thank you for it.