Declutter Your Life

Decluttering has become very popular over the past few years. We see a lot of content on the need to declutter on social media, TV, and websites. It even often comes up in our conversations with friends.

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Decluttering is basically getting rid of anything that no longer serves you!

Most commonly, we think of decluttering when we get rid of stuff from our homes. All the unnecessary physical things you have accumulated over the years that are now taking over your house.

But when you think about it, your life have a lot of other clutter. Clutter that can make your life chaotic, disorganized, and at times plain exhausting.

Your life needs a good declutter to help you prioritize what’s most important to you.

What exactly do you need to declutter? Where to get started?

There are four main areas that you need to declutter in order to gain more control of your life.

The very first life area to declutter is your mind!

Our brains are constantly flooded with thoughts. They always work to make sure we are fulfilling our responsibilities, completing our tasks, plan for the future tasks, and just the never ending to-do list. They are busy learning new things, analyzing situations, and trying to make decisions.

And when your mind is constantly super busy, you start feeling overwhelmed.

So what can you do?

You basically have to put your thoughts on paper.

Get the thoughts out of your mind by physically writing them down somewhere. Because once you write them down, your brain no longer has to worry that you will forget about it and your mental clutter will be significantly minimized.

Some examples you can use:

Next area of your life to declutter is your schedule.

We are all busy and have a ton of things to do. But if you find yourself constantly running behind, feeling frustrated and overwhelmed, and just tired of not having any down time, it is time to declutter your schedule.

You have to take a closer look at your schedule. Write down all the commitments you have.

And be honest with yourself!

• Do you enjoy it?
• Is it necessary?
• Can someone else do it?

Be ruthless!

Remember, you are in charge of your time!!!

Delegate, streamline, or completely eliminate things that are cluttering your schedule.

This life area is pretty straightforward. You get rid of things in your home that you no longer need or like.

Your home is probably the area that you have decluttered before.

Of course the process of decluttering is so simple! Getting rid of things can be really hard and definitely time consuming. But it is absolutely necessary!

Remember that physical clutter will create mental clutter as well. It is hard to concentrate on the task at hand when your space is full of stuff and makes you fell anxious and overwhelmed.

When your house has less clutter it will make you feel more at peace!

You will be able to spend less time cleaning and constantly organizing and re-organizing all the stuff!

Your work life area is the last main area to declutter. Whether you work outside of the home or from a home office. Whether you work full-time, part-time, or have a side business. Any type of work will gather clutter.

When you really think about it, work clutter is both mental and physical.

Mental clutter is created by all the tasks, projects, and commitments. And physical clutter is all the paperwork, digital files, and your desk and/or workspace.

Decluttering at work will hep you be more organized and productive!

Now that you know what areas of your life you should declutter, it’s time to get started!

But how?

Knowing what areas of life have clutter to address is the very first step, but you might realize that you have a lot of them to declutter and making the decision on where to start can be overwhelming.

Brain dumps will usually help to uncover a lot of your stressors. But to help you decide what is most stressful, you will have to do some more analysis.

I always recommend starting with decluttering the most stressful area of your life.

If you know that that is – go ahead and jump to the next step. But if you don’t you have to evaluate each life area to see what are your biggest stressors. You can also use the Life Balance Workbook to help you with both assessments of each life area as well as goal planning and tracking (which are the next step).

We know that in order to get something accomplished we need a plan of action.

One you decide what life area you will declutter first, create a plan on how and when you will get it done.

• What will I declutter?
• How will I declutter?
• When will I declutter?
• Why will I declutter?

The plan should be simple. Something that is easy to follow and keep track of progress.

What is important to remember is that you need to be patient with yourself. Decluttering is amazing and has so many benefits. You will be very glad that you did it.

But the decluttering process can be time consuming and exhausting. And can lead to burnout if you are not careful.

Just take it one step at a time.

One decluttering task at a time.

Once you start seeing progress that will give you some extra motivation to keep going.

But pace yourself. It is truly a marathon and not a sprint!