How can you reduce clutter in your life?
Cluttering in life occurs when your life is disorganized.
Clutter is when you have things in your life that strains your capacity to manage. Clutter can be emotional, mental or even physical. However, physical clutter could be a sign you have mental and emotional clutter.
Clutter is a phenomena where we have confusion and lack of direction because we have allowed so many distractions in our life.
mental clutter is when you think about so many things at the same time without clarity.
Physical clutter is seen in things we keep and how keep them.
Emotional clutter can occur can occur when you have emotional attachment with many people.
A person with a cluttered life is a person who is holding more than they can manage.
Surprisingly, people whose life are cluttered are usually quite intelligent and very ambitious. Their essence of being ambitious makes them accumulate things in life. They could also be people that are nice and easy going that could be accepting too much from people. For instance, people that accepts too many requests for help or otherwise.
Do you usually finds it difficult to resist an offer for a new course, or an invitation to attend a function? Then you are a candidate for clutter.
If you have a cluttered life, you may have desks that are piled with things. Papers are full on your desk, your computer is full of files on the desktop such that you will take time and effort to trace any particular file and the number of icons cannot even all fit on the screen.
Your sitting rooms could be having things randomly scattered all over.
You take a lot of time to trace a misplaced item like a TV remote in a house you live alone. Your bedroom has pile of dirty and clean clothes that co-exists together.
Another sign your life is cluttered is that you wash clothes and when they are dry, you don’t put them in the right place, you can postpone arranging them and you find yourself looking from a pile of clean clothes what to wear. Before you know it, all your clean clothes are dirty again before you arranged any of them.
People with cluttered life usually have soo much to do at their hands but ends up doing very little. They feel overwhelmed by the number of things they are likely to accomplish and this may cause anxiety and compromise their ability to concentrate on a productive cause.
Effects of cluttered life
Loss of productivity
Cluttered life causes loss of productivity, time and strain relationships. When you have too much to do, you lack time to nurture meaningful relationships. Because of clutter, you may lack time to go out and create meaningful relationships because you end up being busy all the time and cannot manage time.
A coping mechanism for a person with cluttered life is procrastination.
people with cluttered life are usually distracted by new things. Usually they are overwhelmed by the number of things they need to do and so they pick new activities as a way to manage stress from overwhelming things around them. There is usually feeling of helplessness in the person because their clutter makes them weary.
wasting time
People with cluttered life usually wastes a lot of time because they take long time before they start doing what they need to do. For example if you have a cluttered desk, you easily misplaces files and tools of work. You ends up spending a lot of time looking for things. A person could spend substantial amount of time trying to find a file they were working on or a tool they have misplaced. They end up wasting time and they find that by the end of the day they have accomplished very little.
Stress
Time wasted when looking for things in clutter causes mental stress because you desired to accomplish much but now you feel frustrated because you had done very little by end of the day. The result is that you try to find coping mechanism by looking for more appealing activities like scrolling a phone or watching a video on the laptop, postponing activities that are giving you mental stress. you find yourselves lagging behind in projects and not completing your assignments on time. This can strain relationships with your boss causing you more stress. People with cluttered life are always stressed people making it difficult to harness their potential to achieve anything substantial. So clutter can cause you to fail in life.
hyper activity
People with cluttered life cannot have rest because they feel guilt when not doing something, and because they cannot rest, the don’t produce quality solutions to problems, hence they achieves very little. Clutter can cause you relationships because you are likely to lack emotional control as you are always stressed. Emotional outbursts can strain relationships at work and hinder career progression.
How to remove clutter
Manage yourself
No matter how busy your schedule become, be calm, don’t bow down to the feeling of urgency to keep doing something even when your body demand rest. Take a break, go and have nice time with friend, go and have a nice meal in a restaurant, you are not the one keeping the earth in it’s motion, relax.
Avoid procrastination
Do first things fast. Don’t postpone making your bed until later time. Fold your clothes immediately without waiting for a convenient time. Don’t postpone anything.
Be selective
Not very good deal that needs your attention. Just have feel few things to do. Avoid being distracted from important things in your life by some appealing activities. You don’t have to enroll for an online course that seems a super deal for your career. Go us of few things that can add value and not wide range of interests
Be neat
Take time to look for nice clothes for yourself, you works too hard, you deserve nice things. Groom yourself.
Ensure your desk or your house is not cluttered. Where necessarily, hire somebody who can arrange things professionally in your office if you find it difficult doing it yourself, after few times if paying their wages, you will learn the importance of being orderly and what positive energy it can bring to your brain.
Be professional
Arrange things in folders in your computer. Don’t fill your laptop desktop with files which will cause you spend useful time looking for things in your computer. Have a pattern of saving files. It can be frustrating when you have to spend half an hour trying to look for a file you created few days ago. Ask somebody from IT to help if it is difficult to manage your files in the computer.
Say no
Don’t be the nice guy in office that always pick tasks yet you have too much to do. Learn to tell people you cannot take any more. After all, when you burn out and become unproductive, they will accuse you for it.
Have a plan
Determine what activities you need to accomplish at a specific time and schedule for it. Break down a huge task into small chunks that can be finished within a given unit of time like an hour, 2 hours, half a day or even a day. Stick to your schedule and don’t pick some extra tasks in between.
Check your desires
There is a wise saying by king Solomon that says “A bird at hand is better that wondering of desires”. Don’t desire people that wont like you. Some people have emotional baggage because they don’t love people that loves but and they are always disturbed and angry because they love people that wont love them back. It is amazing how we often does that. Don’t ignore people that likes you as you pursue those that don’t like you. This way, you have better emotional support. don’t go for things you like in people, beauty and material things excites just for a short time, go for people that truly loves you, because only then you will have long lasting joy and stability.
Practice this for a month and let me know if it has not brought positive change to your life by sending me a comment.