Clear the clutter!
Nothing can sap your vitality like clutter. Clutter creates stress in your life, both at home and at work. Just sitting in a cluttered house or office can cause stress. For me, just knowing that the room next to the one I’m sitting in is cluttered will cause me discomfort! But listen to some of these statistics:
- Not keeping track of papers can become expensive. Late fees for credit card payments rose to $18.1 billion in 2006 from $17.1 billion in 2005. Robert Hammer, RK Hammer Advisors, 2007
- From a survey of 1,000 middle managers of large companies in the U.S. and U.K., 59% miss important information almost every day because it exists within the company but they cannot find it. Accenture, Wall Street Journal, 5/14/2007
- Fifteen percent of all paper handled in businesses is lost, according to the Delphi Group, a Boston consultancy, and 30 percent of employees’ time is spent trying to find lost documents. Jane M. Von Bergen (Knight Ridder Newspapers), The Boston Globe, 3/21/2006
- According to a survey of 2,600 executives by Esselte, maker of Pendaflex and Dymo, FastCompany Magazine, 8/2004, executives waste six weeks per year searching for lost documents.
- Getting rid of excess clutter would eliminate 40 percent of housework in the average home. National Soap and Detergent Association
Peter Walsh says in his book, It’s All too Much (New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 13, “Clutter is insidious, a slow but steady tide. It enters your home little by little, usually over years. Clutter sucks life away. It leaves you depressed overwhelmed, lacking motivation, and unable to breathe. Clutter prevents you from enjoying the most precious, intimate moments in life. Clutter robs you of far more than the space it occupies — it steals your life!” While this may be worded more melodramatically than I would have worded it (my motto is, “When in doubt, throw it out”), there is no doubt that as you let “stuff” take over your house and workplace, it impacts you emotionally, mentally, and physically.
I believe that most people initially delay dealing with clutter because it doesn’t seem like a priority issue. Then, as the clutter increases, the task becomes unmanageable, and the thought of tackling such a monumental task is too much to even think about, much less take on. So the clutter takes over. But what we’re really dealing with is a lack of self discipline. You don’t have to deal with all the clutter in the house or office at once — just start by doing something, and then commit yourself to working on a room every week. If you’re one of those people paying into the $18.1 billion credit card late payment fees pot, you should move decluttering to one of the top priorities in your life!
I recommend you start by examining the importance in your life of the stuff you’re accumulating. What are your goals for your life? For your home? Does the stuff you’re storing add to the accomplishment of your goals? Do you have the kind of home that you envisioned having when you moved into it? Is it a place where you and your family can relax and get refreshed? Is the stuff adding to relaxation and refreshment or hindering it and negatively impacting the quality of your relationships?
If you have a problem with clutter, get started cleaning it up right away. Peter Walsh is a professional organizer from TLC’s series Clean Sweep. He organizes people’s homes for a living. And he recommends that you kick start the decluttering by setting aside a Saturday for all members of the family and work on the worst room. You should separate everything in the room into three groups: what you’re going to keep, what you’re going to throw away, and what you’re going to sell or give away. The keep pile gets put into place according to what you want to accomplish in the room, the throw away pile gets taken to the dump immediately (before you have time to change your mind), and the give away pile has to go out the door, never to come back in your house for any reason.
If you’re not up to a Saturday kick start, start TODAY by taking on a task you can get done: clean up your medicine cabinet, clean out the hall closet, organize the pantry, clean out the refrigerator, clean up the top shelf of your desk, etc. Work on one room a week. Put 15 to 30 minutes a day into it. Commit yourself to throwing out things you don’t use — there’s more at the store if you need it some unspecified time in the future. Keep going until you get the area cleared out.
Don’t try to excuse yourself out of cleaning up by saying you don’t have money to buy organization systems and tools. Those items usually just add to the clutter in your house, because you initially put things in them, but you don’t maintain the system. So a few years later, you accumulate the same amount of new clutter, plus you have a shelving or drawer unit with things in it that you’ve forgotten you have.
One more point I believe is important: organization is a tool to help you accomplish your goals. It’s not a task master, a ball and chain, or a club to beat yourself or others with. You need to analyze your objectives, and then apply the self discipline necessary to accomplish the appropriate level of organization. Organization isn’t about how you maintain your shoes or clothes, or how you file your bills. It’s about the level of order you need to achieve optimal productivity and creativity for family or co-workers. A lot of organization books seem to me to go overboard scheduling and establishing rules for every area of life, every moment of time. That might be effective for those particular personality types, but it won’t do a thing for you if you’re not already internally motivated to live that way. (And if you have a problem with clutter, you’re not internally motivated to live that way!)
For those of you that feel you need additional help to get organized, there’s actually an organization devoted to providing help to those suffering from clutter syndrome: National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization. They have conferences and various resources available for sale on their web site. Do what it takes to start decluttering right away. You’ll be amazed at how much more you’ll enjoy your time at work and home when things are set up in a user-friendly way. And you’ll save money by getting your bills paid on time, using the food in your freezer and pantry before it expires, and by not buying things you already have but have forgotten about.
December 12th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Add to my Bookmarks
December 13th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
I read the article several times and liked it a lot. I am thinking that you might want to add a little more about how junk accumulates.
Description of Junk Accumulation
Many of us have accumulated lots of stuff over the years. We may get 100 credit card letters from various banks each week and are concerned about identity theft. Since we don’t have time to shred all these letters right away, we stack them up. Soon the pile gets mixed in with other documents, and now we need to sort through it and figure out what to keep and what to throw away. We certainly do not have time to do the task of shredding and sorting, so it gets put in a larger stack or in a box. One box becomes two and then three, and soon we have a monumental task.
These boxes get shuffled to the garage, where they keep company with useless “gifts” we feel obligated to keep, remnants of half-finished projects, those items that we knew “we could find a use for some day”, clothes that no longer fit, cribs and car seats and other items we no longer need, and broken and worn out items we inexplicably chose to keep rather than toss. After spending a number of years in the garage, these items are now caked with several feet of dust. If you are like me, you might begin treating the garage like a room under quarantine. It is avoided except when another item needs to be dragged in.