DE-CLUTTERING YOUR SPACE, DE-CLUTTER YOUR LIFE! (PART 3)

RULE #3: De-clutter Your Personal Space

Recently, a client came to my office with a great amount of stress. She sat in my office and cried, “My life is in a place of chaos. I’m overweight, my marriage is rocky, I feel tired all of the time, and I don’t even have time to clean my own house. I am behind the eight-ball with no plan of escape.”

After listening to her desperate plea for help, I asked her to take out a piece of paper and play a game with me. The game was hide and seek. The goal of the game was to search (or seek) for hidden time in her daily routine that would allow her to find greater life balance. She looked at me as if I were asking her to do the impossible.

She said, “You don’t understand, I HAVE NO TIME!” I explained that I agreed that time is a tricky little bandit that gets away from us if we let it. I then assured her that I felt like a good 007 agent, up for the task of finding the time she had somehow misplaced.

As we took inventory of her day, we started with her morning routine and discovered that her lack of planning was draining precious moments from her schedule. We found 30 minutes lost due to a lack of planning her kids clothing and lunches for the day. We discovered another 30 minutes lost when she took calls from random friends with no real purpose but to say “hi”.   Another 15 minutes was lost looking for her keys, shoes, or other pertinent items to each day’s kick-off.  Best yet was the precious time she lost looking through senseless emails and building her “farm” on Facebook.  As we continued “searching” throughout her day’s schedule, it was an eye-opening experience for her as we discovered an extra 2.5 hours in her day that were prime moments being wasted. After our meeting, she left with a new lease on life, a new outlook on her possibilities, and a new plan for reorganizing her time, her relationships and even her home.

So, today, when we talk about de-cluttering your personal space, we are specifically talking about your home-life.  If you say, “Staci, I just don’t have time to clean or cook healthy meals.” I encourage you to play little game of hide and seek with yourself, too.

You don’t need HOURS to tackle the challenge of de-cluttering your home-life. Like the old saying goes, “You can’t eat an elephant with one bite. But inch by inch, anything is a cinch.”

Baby Steps

Take baby steps and set aside 15 minutes a day to tackle one project at a time. Here is a step by step approach you can use to get started.

STEP #1 – Prioritize.

Start your de-cluttering process by sitting down and assigning priority to each room in your home. Create a sketch or graph of your home and put a number on each room according to importance of clean-up.   For example, if you have a desire to get healthy and change your nutritional lifestyle, Room #1 would be the kitchen and pantry.  Room #2 would be the second room on your priority list, and so on.

STEP #2 – Divide and Conquer

Once you identify the first room you will focus on, break it into projects. For example, let’s say your kitchen is priority #1. Your first project in that room might be to organize your pantry, getting rid of all the processed junk food. Rather than looking at the kitchen as a whole, start with one area.   If you have a lot of unhealthy carbohydrates that you know are sabotaging your wellness goals, start by clearing everything out of the pantry and sorting it in another room. Only put back in the pantry what deserves to stay based on your desire to change your life of wellness.

If you say that your bedroom is #1 on the list, perhaps tackle your nightstand first.  Little wins are VERY important to a complete declutter process. If you are tackling the nightstand, remove all contents in the nightstand. As you put items back in the nightstand, purge with passion. If you have not used something or worn something in a year, it’s time to purge it. If it has no sentimental value, let it go to a charity, a garage sale, or make a few bucks with it on Ebay. The point is, start somewhere. By dividing big rooms into small projects, you will have quicker sucesses and stronger motivation to keep going.

STEP #3 – Keep On Keepin’ On

One of the last statements made to my by my grandmother before she passed away was, “Honey, just keep on keepin’ on.” Those simple words have had such meaning in so many areas of my life. From the natural childbirth of my son after 17 hours of labor to the passion behind starting a non-profit organization from scratch to the sometimes daunting goal of keeping our family home organized and clean, I can hear her words ring loud and clear, “Honey, just keep on keepin’ on.”

Once you have conquered that first project, don’t stop! Find another project in that top priority room and dominate it. No matter where you start, whether it be a closet, pantry, bedroom, the kitchen sink, or any space of your choice, just keep on keepin’ on. Take those little 15 minute windows and make them prime-time for clean-time. Don’t just sit on the couch when you watch that reality show, go ahead and pull a drawer into the living room with you and organize your socks, de-clutter your jewelry box, organize your warranty papers. Make the most of your time by making your time work for you!

(Note: For those of you who are in need of true down-time due to being hyper organizers, chill out and enjoy the night off. For the rest of the 99% of time-waisters, however, enjoy a great game of TIME hide and seek and eat that elephant of clutter, one bite at a time!)

DE-CLUTTERING YOUR SPACE, DE-CLUTTER YOUR LIFE!

BY STACI WALLACE

PT. 2 – DE-CLUTTERING YOUR WORK/OFFICE ENVIRONMENT

Did you know that your desk can play a physiological role in your daily productivity and overall health? A messy desk and disorganized office environment could very well be the cause of deeper issues in life.

According to researchers at NEC-Mitsubishi, a computer-monitor manufacturer, many office workers are suffering from IDS, irritable desk syndrome (IDS), which can cause chronic pain, loss of productivity and other physical and mental symptoms. IDS is actually a sickness associated with working long hours at a cluttered desk (often with poor posture, as well). In a recent study of 2,000 office workers, researchers found that:

• 40 percent said they were “infuriated by too much clutter and paper on their desks but could not be bothered to do anything about it.”

• 35 percent said they had back or neck pain because they knowingly had poor posture or an awkward position while at their desk.

“What most individuals fail to realize is that desk symptoms typically escalate very quickly, from persistent discomfort to chronic pain, which can end a person’s career and reduce their quality of life in a wide range of ways,” said Nigel Robertson, researcher and noted “deskologist.”

Other studies have stated that working at a cluttered desk is less time-effective and often results in workers devoting excess time and attention to finding what they need, before they even get to their regular assignments.

“Studies have shown that the person who works with a messy desk spends, on average, one and a half hours per day looking for things or being distracted by things. That’s seven and a half hours per week,” says time-management speaker and consultant Dr. Donald E. Wetmore.

Of course, the antithesis of this syndrome is the person who spends excess time organizing too much. The key? Balance. Once you set your space, maintain it with a simple system of organization. Here are a few tips to getting started on a de-cluttered work/office environment.

1. De-clutter your raw space.

Not sure where to begin with a completely cluttered office? Start by de-cluttering your raw space. Take one drawer at a time and take everything out before trying to organize. You may have papers, files, or documents that are useless and just cluttering your space. As you begin adding things back to your drawers, be strict about what makes the cut back into the drawer. Your office is your sanctuary of productivity. Don’t let just ANYTHING be accepted into the drawer or in your office as a whole. Items must earn their way into your space based on their importance and their ability to produce income, productivity, or creativity to what you do.


2. Eliminate visible clutter.

Once you have gone through your drawers and eliminated the “inner” excess, you should have an organized “inner office”. Your “inner office” is what people DON’T see. Much like finding “inner peace”, your “inner office” will be the foundation of what others should begin to see externally. Now that your inner office is in order, clean off your desk completely, removing all pictures, notes, papers, etc. Once you have a clean slate, only add the essentials back to your space. If you are a picture lover, make sure that your pictures are organized, well displayed, and appropriate for your environment. Your desk will be a reflection of your life and if you have a disorganized mess of pictures, papers, or trinkets on your desk, it will show the lack of balance in other areas, as well. On the other hand, a clean desk is often a sign of a clear mind.


3. Place value on your open space.

Now that your inner and outer office space is clean and de-cluttered, choose wisely what you allow to take up space in the future. When new papers come into your room, read them and determine if they are to be taking up space or hitting the bottom of the trash can immediately. Open your mail and read it. Experts say that a major amount of office clutter comes from items we intend to get to at a later date that never end up being addressed. Mail is a good example; open it, read it, and then either eliminate it or file it appropriately. This will also help you in assuring that bills are paid on time and not overlooked in the shuffle.

4. Specify your space.

You can eliminate needless stress by labeling your space. For example, if you have a file or box that is labeled “IMMEDIATE ATTENTION”, that means that anything in that box gets your attention before the end of the day. Before you go home, look through the box and make sure you have completed the items of high priority. Have a space set aside for essential items. For example, by eliminating that mad scramble for your keys or any other item, you’ve spared yourself loads of unnecessary anxiety. Save yourself this precious energy and give your space labeled boundaries.

These are just a few tips for de-cluttering your work/office environment. Stay tuned next week for tips on how to de-clutter your home/life environment.