While
I'd love to contribute yet another list of practical things you can do
to make life simpler, I often find lists to be overwhelming. You don't
know where to begin, how many tips to apply, and where you'll apply them in your life. Unfortunately, the perceived value of a list is often a lot higher than actual value (measured by how many tips you actually apply and the results they incur)
Having a basic understanding of what simplicity means (and what it looks like in YOUR life) is a lot more practical, because it helps you realize where the pieces of your life go, and what pieces are extras that you can safely get rid of.
Having a basic understanding of what simplicity means (and what it looks like in YOUR life) is a lot more practical, because it helps you realize where the pieces of your life go, and what pieces are extras that you can safely get rid of.
I
did include two lists of tips you can follow, but understanding
simplicity and seeing how the tips connect to your life is a lot more
important.
So let's being...
There are 2 types of clutter that make life not so simple:
- Mental clutter
- Physical clutter
Dealing With Mental Clutter
Mental clutter is made up of ideas for potential projects and activities you want to do and things you want to learn and skills you want to develop and goals you want to achieve and current commitments that you have and tasks you're mentally juggling and appointments on your calendar and deadlines that passed you by (and others looming ahead) and trying to make sense of past experiences and struggling to understand how the world works and why people are the way they are and who you are and what your purpose in life is, and on, and on, and on...
With that mental load it's hard to experience the simplicity of life.
You're juggling too many thoughts and you're bringing all these thoughts with you to any experience. Sitting with friends and chatting about movies, but your mind is thinking about poverty or why there's conflict in the world. Watching a movie and you're wondering: what have I done with my life?
This mental clutter generates white noise in your head that's constantly buzzing in the background, making each moment heavy and every step burdensome.
What you need to do is to expand your mental space and put ideas where they belong, so they don't end up tied together and creating mental clutter.
Goals to accomplish are different to activities to do, so separate them mentally. Want to lose fat or gain muscle mass? These are goals. You never "do" these goals in life. But you can go to the gym to accomplish these goals, or come up with an exercise routine to do at home. These are activities. The more clarity you have about what these activities look like, the less mental noise you'll create.
My tips for dealing with mental clutter are:
- Begin with a vision: There's a reason why a picture is worth a thousand words. You can see where things go and how they relate to one another without having to laboriously describe the details and explain the connections. What do you want your life to look like? What does simplicity mean to you? What do you find exciting? What do you find enjoyable? Who do you want to be surrounded by? What do you want to accomplish? Write a book? Climb a mountain? Travel the world? Decide what you want your life to look like
- Eat healthy food, exercise, sleep well: "A sound mind in a sound body." Taking care of your body will allow you to experience greater mental clarity, an improved mood, and greater self-confidence. Don't skip this or postpone it until you figure your life out.
- Meditate: A greater deal of mental noise is the result of constantly evaluating things in our lives. This is bad, this is good, this is bad, this is horrible, this is annoying, etc. Meditation gives your mind the space to observe, without judgment. You take out the emotional edge from the experience, allowing you to develop greater clarity and emotional calm. Give yourself five minutes to observe things without judging them and to focus your thoughts on the present without projecting to the past or the future. That's meditation (at least in my book)
- Do Things Gracefully (DTG): DTG is my productivity system (a play on the Getting Things Done (GTD) system, by David Allen). I deal with my commitments in 3 steps: 1) Collect. 2) Organize. 3) Schedule. Collect is a brain dump of everything on my mind, and it's where I write down what others suggest to me before I figure out how it relates to my life. Organize is where I put ideas/tasks in the life areas or projects to which they belong. Schedule is where I decide how I'll spend my time and what activities I'll be doing. It helps me see what my day looks like.
- Make time for "meta-work": Organizing your todo list or clearing out your desk don't seem like productive things to do. I call them "meta-work". They don't substitute for actual work (you want to do the tasks on your todo list), but they do help cultivate mental clarity and allow you to become more productive when you are working.
- Make sure your schedule has breathing space: If your commitments are scheduled back to back (or they sometimes overlap), then you're giving your mind an opportunity to tie commitments together, leading to clutter. Besides, meetings and activities rarely take up only the time you've scheduled for them, so make sure you have buffers in your schedule to maintain your peace of mind.
- Work on one thing at a time: Again, you don't want your mind oscillating between two (or more) different commitments because each task will become the background noise for the other. Imagine your current task is the only thing you have in the world to do. Everything else can wait.
- Speak to someone... even if it's a rubber duck: I'll hazard a guess and say that nothing I mentioned so far is new to you and you probably could've figured it out on your own if it wasn't. Most people who see a therapist admit that the advice they've received isn't new to them, but it does bring them clarity. That's because we find it hard to juggle mental problems and solutions, so we need to talk to someone and hear the answers we already know come from them. Your mind can think of many things at the same time, but you can never utter more than one letter at a time, or one word, or one sentence. This sequencing helps bring about clarity because it forces you to focus on one idea to communicate. If there isn't someone who you trust that you can talk to, write down your thoughts, or speak to an inanimate object
Dealing With Physical Clutter
If you step into a jungle would you imagine yourself saying: "This place is such a mess, we better start organizing it."
Most likely you wouldn't. Because that "mess" is how the jungle is supposed to be, and you expect it to be that way. But in a home garden, leaves need to be raked and tall grass needs to be mowed, because we have certain expectations of what a good garden looks like, and there are associated actions (commitments) to change our environment to meet our expectations.
Physical clutter is "stuff" you haven't decided what you want to do about. Where does it go? What needs to be done? How will you do it? The things in your environment are left in different places without the associated actions explicitly defined. So your environment becomes an arena where tiny objects are constantly shouting at you to do something about them. A pen on the dinner table is shouting: "Hey! Get me out of here! This isn't where I'm meant to be!"
Your bookshelf is a choir of books singing: "Read me! Read me! READ me NOOOOW!" (And, unfortunately, most books don't know how to sing)
Since you haven't decided on any of these things (where that pen goes or what book you'll be reading next), your physical environment generates its own background noise that adds to your mental clutter, making life feel overwhelming and complicated.
You want to have an environment that serves your life and ambitions, and you, therefore, need to decide what goes into your physical space and how you'll use it.
My tips for dealing with physical clutter are:
- Begin with a vision: No, you're not experiencing déjà vu, but a vision of what you want your life to be like determines if the things that surround you fit into that life or not. If you've lost interest in a topic there's no use in keeping books you know you're no longer interested in reading.
- Begin with small sections: Tidy up your environment one small section at a time. A portion of your desk, then the next portion, then the next, and you'll be done with your desk. Next comes the bookshelf: first portion, second portion, third portion, and so on. You can't tidy up a room all at the same time, so focus on the actual steps you'll be doing to get it done.
- Decide what you'll be using each space for: What activities will you be doing in each room? How does the setup help you do these activities? Do you have the right tools set up where they should be?
- Don't keep junk you think you'll fix one day: It's a burdensome commitment that will most likely linger for eternity. Just apologize to the device and dump it in the trash (but gently).
- Have a place for everything: Clutter happens when we haven't decided where things go. Decide on a place and make sure everything sleeps where it's supposed to sleep at night.
- Don't let mess accumulate: If you have a place for everything, then you know where everything should go. Not putting things in their place is a sign of mental clutter (your mind is preoccupied with something else). Reminding yourself to put things in their place helps you maintain control of your mental clutter so it doesn't impact your physical space, which can spiral to more and more mental and physical clutter.
You don't have to follow any of the tips I mentioned, but knowing that you want to deal with both mental and physical clutter is a great starting point. You might have your own steps to follow (after all, you know best what's relevant for you).
What do you want your life to look like? What do you want your environment to look like?
Plan and act accordingly.
Good luck.
