We already talked about focusing on your priorities, cleaning up your calendar and inbox and decluttering your workspace. Let’s now take a broader stab at simplification and decluttering.

Simplify and declutter. Do it quick and radically, it will develop inertia. Don’t limit decluttering to your physical space, do it everywhere. Don’t fill up the empty space with new stuff.

Simplification helps you be you more relaxed, in the moment and happier because you are distracted by fewer things. There’s less stuff to maintain or to worry about. Further, clean space allows your mind wander freely and come up with new ideas, while stuff distracts and captures it (often with all the things you still have to do, like dusting those vases…).

Simplify and declutter radically

Simplification and decluttering (i.e. the art of getting rid of things you don’t really need) gains momentum as you are doing it. It has a strong inertia in either direction.

It’s pretty hard to get started. Off the top of your head, you seem to need all the things you have – why else would you have bought them in the first place?

However, push through it. Once you identified a few things that you don’t need anymore, or never truly enjoyed having in the frist place, things will get easier. As you get rid of things, you will feel a relief and that will propel you to get rid of more things that you don’t really need or want anymore.

Be willing to cut deep and cut fast. Putting one thing away a week will not give you that momentum and positive feedback. Instead take a weekend afternoon and make it a goal to fill a whole moving box (or two if you are an ambitious person). Don’t fret over decisions, if you don’t want to fight for an object, you are probably ready to let go.

Cut your losses

There’s a rule in investing that applies here as well:

“Don’t throw good money after bad money.”

What that means is that you should not add additional money to a sub par investment only because you hope that it will get better in the future. While that stock that went down for a year is really cheap now, chances are that the trend will continue and you will lose a lot of money.

Likewise, if you have bought something in the past that seems like a less stellar idea today, don’t get stuck in that ‘investment’. It might have been a good idea back then, but if it is not anymore, then say goodbye. Don’t throw ‘good money’ (your time, energy and mental capacity) after ‘bad money’ (something you don’t care about anymore).

If you have separation anxiety, don’t throw things away or donate them right away. Put them in a box. Once you didn’t touch that box for three months, bring it to a local charity for donation.

It’s ok to have bought something that doesn’t fit your life anymore. Cut your losses.

One area at a time

Attack one area of simplification at a time. Don’t let yourself get distracted as you hop from area to area.

If you want to declutter your living room, don’t get distracted as you bring stuff out through the garage. Pick one area or room at a time and tune out everything else. As always: focusing wins the day!

Decluttering and simplification is not only about stuff. The space you live in has a big part, but clutter and complexity is everywhere. Address all those spaces:

• Spaces – your home and living spaces, your yard, your office and work spaces, you storage (how much of that stuff do you really need),…
• Obligations – emails, calendar, volunteering, promises to ‘friends’, events,…
• Digital – websites, news, games, (phone) apps,…
• Relationships – friends that don’t lift you up, connections that drag you down, negative people, ‘friends’ on social networks,…

Don’t fill up the empty space

Of course, once you have decluttered an area, don’t fill up the empty space with new stuff. Keep the emptiness and enjoy it.

A clean empty space is not an invitation to bring in lots of new stuff (new clutter).

Cherish it, protect it, feel really bad for anything that contaminates it. Regard anything that move into that space as an intruder who needs to fight for its right to be there.

 

---

Did you like this article? Want to read more?

I will keep posting articles here and I have them lined up way into summer 2020. However if you want to get it all in one comprehensive, structured, and grammar-checked (!) view, check out our new book:

 

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps

By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk

ISBN 9781077278929

Find it on Amazon: Paperback, Kindle

 

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.