Clearing Out The Clutter

One aspect of my life I’m working on improving this year is removing a lot of clutter that has built up in my life. I look around my bedroom and ask myself: “Why?”. Why did I choose to buy that, put it there and at the end of the day, does it really need to be there at all?

By asking myself these questions I’m able to give a yes or no answer and chuck it if necessary or keep it if it’s something that I use every day and has worth.

Here’s one example, my desk. It used to have resting on it: my MacBook Pro, a Griffin Elevator, wireless keyboard and mouse, various cables, books and notepads and of course, a stack of post-it notes. I’m not going to go through every item and tell you in detail the decision I came to when I asked myself these questions, but as an example. “Don’t I have an application that works just as well as post-it notes?”.

You might be asking, why sorting through clutter and minimising the items you own and use matters. I think the answer lies in the word focus. To me focussing is exemplified by being able to get on with a job without getting caught up in unnecessary distractions (I don’t even want to think how many times I checked Twitter when writing this post) and getting on with what really matters, the task at hand.

By removing those items that we don’t really need in our lives, we’re in fact reducing the amount of trivial decisions we have to make and instead of working out the best way of doing a task, we’re able to simply get on with it.

This year, I’d like to be able to be in a position where many of my day to day items can fit in a backpack, and not feel the need to overpack for every eventuality, because there are less of them, but just have what is needed to get the job done. I would suggest that it’s a good idea to ask yourselves these questions if you want to remove the clutter in your life so you can get on to the task at hand, after all; the less things you have, the less things you have to worry about.