Declutter Your Life: Reduce Stress, Increase Productivity, and Enjoy Your Clutter-Free Life (4 page)

• Decide how much television you can afford to watch each week. Make a list of shows to watch and stop when you reach the allotted time. This will force you to prioritize.
  
• Record shows on a DVR or TiVo and fast forward through commercials in order to reduce the total time spent on a show.
  
• Purchase or rent shows on DVD to increase your family’s control over when and how you watch television.
  
• Designate a certain time each evening for television. Our family watches television between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. on weeknights.
  
• When you start watching a show, evaluate how you or the family feels about it. Never keep watching a show just because you started it. Your time is valuable, and you want to fill it with entertainment you truly enjoy.
  

How many social media accounts do you have and how often do you check them? As a freelance writer, I struggled with time management for several months. I could not figure out how so many hours passed by, but I did not get much work done. As I took stock of how I spent the time, I realized that I was checking Facebook in a habitual manner every time I used my browser. I was not spending a great deal of time during each session, but a few minutes were wasted every time. It probably added up over the course of a day to two hours or more.

Take stock of your social media habits. You may be filling your time with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn and more. In addition to reducing your productivity, social media use might add to your mental clutter. I found that when I read updates from numerous friends every few hours, my mind became occupied with things other than the task at hand. From worry about sick friends to jealousy over someone’s newest vacation pictures, I was being distracted. Decluttering your social media habits involves recognizing that they are a bad habit. Once you can do that, here are some tips for keeping social media connections without impacting your productivity and mental concentration.

• Unless you need multiple accounts for business networking purposes, choose one or two accounts that you use regularly and where you can interact with the most friends.
  
• Avoid liking, friending or following every person you encounter online. Keep your lists manageable and subscribe only to items you really want to read about each day.
  
• Keep social media buttons off of your menu bars. If you have to type the address in, you are more likely to think about what you are doing. I was habitually clicking on the Facebook button and navigating social media before I realized what I was doing. Sometimes, I did not even mean to go to social media and meant to conduct research online!
  
• Do not make use of “keep me logged in” options. Again, if you have to type in your user name and password each time, you will realize how much you spend accessing social media.
  
• Set times for accessing social media. I check mine in the morning, at lunch and in the early afternoon. My friend uses Facebook as a reward. Each time she completes a certain amount of work; she sets a timer for five minutes of Facebook use.
  

Decluttering your life is not easy, but maintaining a decluttered state is even harder. It is not impossible and should not be stressful, but it does take work and a commitment to the process. Obviously, you need the continued buy-in and support of the entire household. Support from close friends and coworkers are also helpful, especially if you share work or living spaces. You need to create a plan and commit to it. Clutter will not stay out on its own and you will need to devote time on a periodic basis to reorganizing or cleaning a cluttered area.

The number one key in maintaining a clutter-free life long-term is motivation. We all know people who have spent hours cleaning, organizing and redecorating a room. Perhaps we are those people. We present the stunning results to family and friends and we take pictures. I always take pictures of a room I just redecorated or organized, because I have the secret thought that it will never look that good again. This is the wrong type of thinking. Instead, I should commit to keeping things clutter-free. Here are a few tips for developing that type of thought process.

• When you declutter, create an easy to maintain organization. Simple, easy-to-access organization is the best way to ensure everyone will continue to use the system.
  
• Spend ten to twenty minutes each day putting your area back to its proper order. This is where baskets with names come in handy. Make everyone responsible for putting their own things away.
  
• Reinforce the fact that a decluttered space is more livable. Note how easy it is to work in a space, find things you need and live in the space.
  
• Never be too hard on yourself. If the dining room table collects some clutter, you have not failed. You are simply living in your space. Just make sure you clear it away at the next appropriate time.
  

I provided a lot of information in this e-book, and you may be overwhelmed. Take a moment to look back at the chapter on relaxation and just breathe. Dealing with clutter should reduce the stress in your life, not add to it. You can begin with simple and small tasks like the three easy steps below.

Get a pen and a notebook. Make a list of all the areas in your life where you would like to see more organization and less clutter. This is the beginning of your plan. Do not try to tackle every area at once. Instead, divide each area into subsections. Your home might be divided into living room, dining area, bedroom, closet and kid’s room. Your office would be divided into desk, filing cabinet and book shelf. You could even make further divisions for easier to conquer tasks such as top desk drawer, left desk drawer, top filing cabinet drawer, and so on. Next to each subdivision, write the names of anyone who shares that space or is responsible for that space. You will need to meet with that person, explain why declutter is necessary and develop a cooperative plan of action.

Chose only one space to work on, depending upon the time you have available. If you have fifteen minutes before leaving the office, clear out the small desk drawer. If you have four hours on a Saturday, tackle the dining room or a closet. Circle that item and mark it out when you are done. Circle the next item on your list and tackle it the next time you have a few moments or hours.

To increase your motivation for the job, do not forget about rewards. If you have decluttered the bathroom, you might enjoy a relaxing shower in the newly organized space. You could also relax with a cup of hot tea, read a good book for half an hour or splurge on a candy bar. Positive motivation will increase your willingness to move forward with the long-term project.

The downstairs bedroom in our funky A-frame home was a running joke for many years among our extended family. When we moved in to the home, my husband occupied the space as an office. At the time, he was working at home and I was not. Over the course of a year, the space was filled with boxes, filing cabinets, peg boards and miscellaneous items. By the end of that year, you could only see the floor in a slim path from the door to his chair. After my husband started working outside of the home again, the office simply sat without change for several years. He could make it to the computer and seemed to be able to locate necessary supplies, but it was always a hassle.

After several years, I started working at home and we decided the office needed to be a shared workspace. There was no way I was working amid piles of boxes and paperwork, even if I could see a way to clear a space for my small desk. We made a shared commitment to clearing the office. I thought the job would take days, but my husband said, “It has to be done Friday night. It is the only time we have.”

With that looming deadline in mind, we went to work. We even had my son help sort papers and organize trash. Over the course of four hours, we threw away two garbage bags of paper, discovered that my husband was not even using the small closet and sorted through two filing cabinets full of ancient documents. We placed a shelf in the unused closed to increase our storage space and cleared the entire floor. We also divided the space. I have one wall and he has the opposite. We placed a bin near the door labeled “To be filed,” because my husband is fond of tossing paper to the side for later. My desk is a simple table with a single small drawer to avoid my habit of stuffing drawers full of stuff. You can see that we addressed each person’s clutter habits in the design of the room, and it has been easy to keep clean since.

My brother-in-law walked into the office shortly after we organized it and cried, “My goodness! There’s a floor in here!”

Unclutter your “floors” today and make the best use of your space, time and mental energy. Begin taking steps to declutter your life, reduce stress and meet goals with increased productivity and motivation.

If you found the information in this e-book helpful for your life and would like to pass on any of these tips to your family and friends, I invite you to share the book on your social media pages. I also invite you to review the book on Amazon.com. Feedback is always appreciated, and I would love to hear which advice was most helpful to your life.