Declutter Your Space And Your Mind Will Follow
The feeling of renewal as the seasons change likely has a hand in why we associate spring with cleaning, decluttering, and organisation. It provides an opportunity to clear the mind and renew focus as you rid your surroundings of the things you don’t need. This is why decluttering your home and your office can have a big impact on your overall happiness and productivity.
Once your environment is clear of distractions and negativity, your home and office can create a space where you feel positive, inspired, refreshed, and rejuvenated. In order to begin organizing your space, there are plenty of tips that can help to jumpstart your process and help you maintain your organizational efforts long-term.
The Impact of Decluttering Your Home
Decluttering your home is important because it allows you to take an inventory of your belongings, makes it easier to sort through, and provides you with the opportunity to get rid of the things you don’t need. This method of removing items you don’t use is freeing, and can leave your home feeling fresh.
In 2019, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix became incredibly popular, proving that people want to live a tidy life. Through this show, viewers were shown the power that their belongings have on their environment, and how to use that to their advantage. Finding items that spark joy, and realising that it’s possible to live more simply, proved to have an impact on overall happiness.
Why it’s Important to Organise Your Office
It’s important to organise your office for some of the same reasons that it’s important to declutter your home. However, the utility of your office is a little different. Organising your office is important not only because it can leave you feeling refreshed and positive, but also because it can help your productivity.
In truth, a clean and organised office makes employees happier, more productive, and more efficient. Whether your office is at work, you have a home office, or both, it’s important to keep it organised in order to work your best. While you declutter and organise at home, make sure you’re also doing the same for your work environment.
Home Decluttering Tip
It can be hard to figure out how to start decluttering and organising your home. Before organising, you need to declutter, which can be an involved process for many living spaces. However, there are ways to help you get through this part of your process.
- Declutter in phases: The process can seem daunting, so make it easier by going through your home in phases. One week, do the bedroom, the next week do the bathroom, etc. In each room, break it down further. One day, do the dresser, the next, do the closet, etc.
- Use four categories: When going through your belongings, break your decluttering into four categories: Trash, donate, keep, relocate. This can help you decide what to do with each item.
- The idea of sparking joy: Marie Kondo talks about the idea of your items sparking joy for you. This is helpful to think about if you can’t decide if an item should stay or go. Take a minute and decide if the item sparks joy for you. If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, let it go.
- Closet hanger experiment: This experiment will help you to declutter later on: start by hanging all of your clothes with the hanger hooks backwards in your closet. When you wear an item of clothing, turn the hanger around to the correct way on its hook. After a few months, whichever hangers aren’t turned weren’t worn and can be donated.
- Keeping doubles: Some people have duplicates of certain items, like spatulas or hair clips. Practice the idea of keeping doubles and donating the extras. This will allow you to have one item, and one backup in case the other is dirty or gets broken, and that’s it.
Once you’ve decluttered, work on organizing the items you’ve kept. This means folding clothes, putting papers and important documents into folders, organizing shelves, and stacking books.
Shoving your kept items back into corners and into drawers will effectively ruin your hard work, so take the time to implement an organizing tactic once you’ve decluttered. If you’re decluttering your home to get ready to move, make a checklist and move your kept items into organized boxes instead of back onto shelves so that your new home will have an organized start.
Office Organisation Tips
Whether focusing on your work or home office, your productivity station is the setting for some of your most important tasks. Because this area is so paramount to your ability to work well, it’s extra important that this area is conducive to your workflow.
An organised area has a hand in your productivity, so it’s important to implement an organisational system that is realistic for you. Take the steps to declutter your area, keep it organised, and have some systems in place so that your area can be organised long-term.
- Learning to purge: Desks tend to have a lot of paper, so it’s important to get rid of any extras you don’t need, as well as have a system for how long you keep certain things. Make a note that certain bills are tossed as soon as they hit your bank account, certain documents are only kept for six months, etc. and it’ll help you to purge often.
- Have a recycling system: Having a recycling bin for paper and a shredder for sensitive documents nearby will help you to purge often instead of leaving stacks of paper on your desk to deal with at a later date.
- Utilise storage and filing: Instead of leaving mountains of things on your desk, use filing cabinets, file folders, mail slots, vertical shelves, etc. and label them for certain paperwork. Put paper in its rightful place, or purge it, no in between.
- Scrapping electronics: For some of us, it’s hard to get rid of electronics, but it’s an important part of organising your desk or other drawers. If you don’t use an electronic, donate it. If it’s broken, recycle it. If you’re worried about data security on a laptop or cellphone, research ways to destroy your electronics safely before deciding how to proceed — however, don’t keep them just to keep them.
- Practicality over everything: Get rid of everything you don’t use. Pens, highlighters, notebooks, everything. Keep what you use, and make your desk something that’s user-friendly, not just pretty. If your office is realistic for you, you’re more likely to keep your organisational methods long-term.
Spring is a time for renewal and rebirth, and spring cleaning is one way to help your space feel the renewal that the changing seasons provide. Though it may seem silly, something as simple as decluttering and organising your home and your office can make big changes for your mindset. Not only will you feel more focused and happy, you may also feel more productive and inspired.
If you don’t know where to start, start small. Work on getting rid of things, and organising each space one at a time so you’re not overwhelmed. Soon, your home and your office will provide you with renewed focus and positivity.
