Cleaning Up the Clutter - Invite and New Fresh Energy

In today’s world, we are drowning in material, informational, and emotional clutter, which gets in the way of our health and sanity. When we focus too much on those things, we lose focus on ourselves and our personal well-being.

We can’t reach our full potential when living in a negative environment, so we need to clean up the clutter to create a more positive space where we can thrive. I want to show you how you can reduce your life’s worries and begin to live in a more positive way.

First, let’s start with material clutter. For a long time, my house was just a place where I ate and slept. To most people, a home is a place where significant life events happen. It’s a place where relationships flourish, children are raised, and couples live out their days.

Possessions can be problematic, because they turn into extra things in our lives that we have to manage. For example, if you own a car you must make sure it is insured, running properly, full of gas, equipped with proper tires, etc. Looking after too many possessions can become stressful.

It’s impossible to master all of the skills required to take care of your possessions, so paying others to do it for you is the best option. If you look after everything yourself, you lose time and money that you could put towards constructive and fun things, and therefore this affects your well-being.

Sometimes, however, some possessions are worth the time to care for them. Cars, for example, are a convenient necessity. You should put in the time to maintaining that necessity. You need to decide which possessions are necessary and which are not, to determine how much time you will dedicate to caring for them. You shouldn’t, for example, take your valuable time to neatly organize garbage that will be taken away the next day – and some people do.

De-cluttering your environment is like looking after yourself, not just your possessions. When I clean up the inside and outside of my car, I feel better, too.

You should de-clutter and clean up as much as possible to free up stagnant energy and allow for fresh energy to come in. Clean up the dust, dirt, and junk from your desk and shelves; and paper stacks, boxes, and junk from storage lockers. Then, organize your balcony, basement, garage, and car trunk.

Sometimes cleaning your environment is overwhelming, so you should make your cleaning and de-cluttering objectives manageable by setting goals for yourself. I like to create a big goal each month, and smaller weekly sub-goals that will help keep me motivated as I see the mini results.

When de-cluttering and getting rid of possessions, it’s difficult to decide which items should go. I decided to look at my things and consider their true importance. Depending on the urgency of survival, I assigned numbers from 1 to 10 to determine my possessions’ importance. This meant considering things like my computer and books, ski boots, clothes, and other semi-useful items.

You can get rid of items by selling them and making a small profit, even if they are used. Garage sales, newspaper classifieds, online classifieds like Kijiji and Craigslist, and eBay, are ways to earn a little bit of money off of things you wish to sell.

To prevent building up more junk once you’ve de-cluttered, make sure you sell items that you have already replaced with newer items. Sometimes you want to replace an item with something better, but you should make sure you sell, recycle, throw out, or donate the previously used item to prevent a growth of clutter.

Besides material clutter, informational clutter can also be a problem. Thanks to personal computing and the Internet, we’ve become more connected to the world around us, but it also means that we’re taking in a huge amount of information. Thus it is imperative that we find a way to manage it all.

We focus our attention on so many things that it can get scattered and overwhelming with the weight of all that information.

Here are ways to deal with informational clutter:
- Make photocopies of everything in your wallet, and keep the photocopies in a safe place.
- Clean up and thin your wallet.
- Make sure your keys, cellphone, notebook, and other “mobile” stuff have your contact information on them (but not your home address).
- Get home insurance.
- Store a copy of your important computer files on a CD, a DVD, or a portable

Hard-drive located off-site. You could upload your securely zipped files to a secure web server.

Further, you can take a load off your brain by storing important dates and events on your calendar, rather than trying to remember them all.

Further, looking at websites on the internet can be distracting. From my personal experience when I’m working, things like social networking websites, news, and sports scores etc. tend to become a distraction that reduce my productivity.

If there are a lot of websites you want to look at, schedule a time in the day when you can look at all of those sites in one sitting. Technology is a tool, use it and then put it away when you’re done.

Emotional clutter is also something that we need to deal with. When you choose to change your life, emotional clutter can often get in the way. Our friends and family can act as a support network, but they can also contribute to our downfall.

For example, a friend of mine was 60 pounds overweight and decided to lose that weight. His parents were out of shape and had contributed to his lifestyle. Although he worked hard to lose the weight and met with early success, he struggled to maintain a healthy diet while allowing his parents to have influence over his lifestyle.

Once he decided to be in charge completely and be around more health-conscious people, he eventually experienced more positive results.

To deal with emotional clutter, surround yourself with positive influence, because we are all influenced by the company we keep. They say a lot can be said about us by looking at the type of friends or people we surround ourselves with.