You’re busy. Yet every once in a while you feel a pang of good-intentions-that-never-get-acted-on guilt when you look at an area of your home or office that needs some attention. Before you even complete the thought, the phone rings, the email dings, your boss sticks her head in the door and asks, “Have you finished that marketing update yet?” or the kids call out, "Don't forget to pick us up at four o'clock sharp!" The guilt pang is pushed aside as you say to yourself: “I like an attractive, orderly setting as much as the next person, but with everything else I have to think about right now, is it really that important?”
Consider the hidden costs of clutter. A setting that is crowded, cramped, or chaotic can result in a slow drain on staying healthy, happy, and productive. It can cost you in dimensions both profound and subtle. Here are glimpses of some people who decided to eliminate that drain.
“You May Have Just Saved My Marriage.”
“You may have just saved my marriage,” the woman said as she talked to us privately at the end of a seminar and book signing.
Startled, we asked, “What do you mean?”
“Well, my husband is a packrat and it drives me crazy. He has already filled our attic, garage, storage shed; and now his stuff is invading the bedroom closet that was already crammed full. He’s promised many times to clear it all out, but he never does. I was starting to think he just didn’t care enough about my need to live in some degree of order and raise our children that way. I am frustrated, embarrassed, and depressed to see how we live. I’d begun to think about divorce, until something you said today.”
“What was it?” Barbara invited.
“Remember when you said your setting tells the whole world secrets about your life? And that people who can’t let go of things have often had a significant unresolved loss in their lives?”
“Yes, I do.”
“My husband’s mother died when he was four years old. I always knew that loss affected him deeply, but I never before linked it to this need to hold on to things. I want to go back and see if he will get some help with this. I hate to give up on our marriage, and now maybe I don’t have to.”
Living clutter-free can improve your relationships.
“I wish I had done this years ago.”
After a long intensive session of working together to organize his office, a United States Ambassador told us, “I should have met you 25 years ago when my career was just beginning.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Ambassador, but you seem to have done very well without us.”
“But you have no idea what I might have accomplished if I had not been so disorganized. My career is full of nuance and subtlety. Yet I spent way too much time distracted by details like lost papers and missing materials.
“A more organized setting would have left me free to focus on critical alliances rather than draining my attention away on administrative details. I’m glad I finally did this. I just wish I had done it sooner.”
Living clutter-free can enhance your career.
“My Passion for My Work Was Totally Shut Down.”
“Establishing my photography business based at home was fine when I had only one child and very few clients,” Susan reported. “Then my family and my company both flourished, and suddenly there were David and I, two children, and a successful business operating in the same space we had started with.
“I noticed that laundry was gradually taking over from lenses. I loved our townhouse in the historic area of Alexandria, Virginia, and I had always counted on the visual stimulation of my home and community to get me inspired. But finally I found myself feeling listless, tired all the time, and tired of feeling tired. Every time I looked at kids' shoes in one corner and an abandoned toy truck in another, I just wanted to get out of there.
“The worst part for me is that I am so responsive to my environment. My setting either energizes me or drains me. I had to drag a thousand cobwebs off my brain before I could ‘see’ again to do my photography. It was like my passion was totally shut down and imprisoned in a smothering clutter trap.”
As Susan and her family went on a drastic clutter diet, she reawakened her artistic eyes and resurrected her passion for her work.
Living clutter-free can invite your talents to flourish.
“That One Day Saved Our Company From Disaster.”
Very often, the skills that make people successful leaders, entrepreneurs, and artists are the very skills that make them lousy at managing their surroundings. Many of us have a hard time deciding how one piece of paper that makes them think of fourteen key words can be put in one file folder and found easily later.
One business owner brought us in to work with him and his assistant. We spent a day organizing and indexing all the corporate documents and active files.
He called three weeks later and said, “That one day we worked together saved our company from disaster. My assistant quit unexpectedly one week later to join her fiancé who had been transferred overseas. Those indexes we created allowed me to hire a replacement and keep operating smoothly with minimal interruption of projects.”
Living clutter-free can prevent disruptive disasters.
“I Resolve To Take Action Now.”
Kim and her brother had just finished moving their widowed mother into senior housing less than half the size of the home the family had enjoyed for more than thirty years. The mother’s health was fragile, and the move had been wrenching for everyone. The siblings had hired professional organizers to help reduce the physical and emotional toll on each of them. That helped a lot.
Later, when they were sharing hot-fudge sundaes to celebrate a successful move, Kim told her brother, “I will never let my house get cluttered with that much stuff.”
“That’s big talk from someone who still has her Barbie doll collection and her first Beanie Baby,” her brother said.
“No, I mean it. Always until now I saw clutter as just something I’d take care of when I had enough time to get organized, or as something that I could just rearrange logically or contain attractively.”
“So what’s different now?” he asked.
“Now it really hits home that clutter is not just messy, inconvenient, and sometimes embarrassing. It gradually eats away at my precious space, time, and peace of mind—because something is always nagging at me. If I sit down to enjoy a quiet cup of coffee, I notice all the things that need to be put away or rearranged, and I just don’t relax.”
“Aw, Sis,” teased her brother, “I think you just never want to burden your adult kids with having to sort through your old underwear drawer, years from now, like we just did for Mom.”
“You may be right. But at this moment, I’m angry with Mom for letting her house get as bad as it did. I want to head off that feeling for my own kids. So this time it really is different. Here’s my new resolution: I am no longer willing to feel frustrated and smothered by the disorder around me. I resolve to take action now.”
Living clutter-free can eliminate burdens and guilt to ensure a legacy of love.
Living clutter free can eliminate:
- Risks to relationships you value
- Distractions that rob you of focus and energy
- Blocks to your creativity and other life gifts
- Dangerous dependence on others who may not always be around
- Leaving behind an unintentional burden of resentment, guilt, or regret
