De-Clutter your life

Living in a cluttered environment creates stress in our system and affects our personal and professional lives.  Cleaning the clutter is a daunting but a worthy task.

With beginning of new year, each person who has hope and inspires to become better each year, want to take action. They may jot down several goals; though not all of them would persuade them as months pass by.  So the moment you read this article, I would like to urge you to take immediate action and have clutter clean in your life that bothers you most.

Physical clutter:

Sometimes houses look more like museums than houses due to the ‘collection’ of things, isn’t it?

The problem is people attach too much sentimental value to too many things and they don’t want to part with them but they have no use for them either.  

My suggestion: Be ruthless when cleaning!  Throw out all the stuff which no longer serves you in your life and I promise you -  once you clean the clutter, you will heave a sigh of relief and feel liberated from all the bondage you‘ve been holding on for so long! It works like meditation effect on minds and clear walk to head.

Even Vastushastra and Feng Shui says, you need to organize things in your house, workplace in a way that will fetch energy the most. Essentially, all cultures' says, it’s necessary to be energetic to be effective and organized nature is a way to gain energy.

Many people keep a lot of things, thinking that those things will be of some use one day.  Finally when that ‘one day’ comes, they either can’t remember that they have that item because it’s stored away somewhere or they don’t use it because it’s in an inaccessible place.  What do they do?  They go out and buy that item again, store it again – adding more to the already existing clutter.  

But how can we get started?  

As a starter - Men can clean their wallets and women - their handbags. You will get rid of a lot of clutter and this will motivate you to undertake a bigger exercise at home / office.

start one drawer / one cabinet / one room at a time and started putting things into three boxes, named as:

• Good riddance   :  Junk/ things to be thrown away
• Good intentions:  Things which can be donated to charity/servants, etc
• Good grief         :  Things to keep. Yes, it is “good grief” because these things need    

                                             maintenance and you live with these things.

List of physical clutter commonly found in most households :

Caution: Before disposing, check each item for its value and usage before making the decision which box to put it in.

• Old receipts / bills of all kinds that you no longer need (be careful before disposing important bills regarding loans, expense claims, construction, taxes and other important financial matters)
• Old magazines / books/ CDs that you no longer read / refer or listen to.  This includes those that you always wanted to read/listen but you never had time.  If you didn’t have time until now (minimum period to keep and make use define as one year say), are you REALLY going to have time in the future?  Think about it! Categorise it if this is good grief or it can be good intention for someone in your circle making it good habit?
• Old text books/ notebooks/ toys of your children
• Visiting cards of people you can’t identify or never call. Why can’t we use smart phones and store them for easy access if needed.
• Kitchenware that you no longer use (anything that you didn’t use it in the last one year, you probably don’t need it.)  Remember less is more – it will save you lot of time, space and energy.  Think of using utensils in multi-purpose ways.  Ex: if you can use same utensil for non veg cooking, you actually don’t need veg and non veg cooking utensils on shelf.
• Worn out plastic containers / plastic bags/ bottles
• Clean the freezer and fridge on a regular basis (say once in a month) to throw out all the old and mold stuff. Keep whiteboard or note on fridge adding calender days to be cleaned in an year. Easy and most useful to-do.
• Old spices / sauces / canned food which were opened six months ago but not consumed
• Broken appliances / gadgets /rusted garden tools
• Make up items not used in the last six months
• Clothes / shoes / belts/ bags/ bed linen which you no longer use
• Stationery items – pens which no longer write, broken pencils, dried up sketch pens and markers, dried up paints, and all kinds of used up/ broken stuff
• Wedding cards / invitations after the event date
• Greeting cards / junk mail / paper cuttings /articles which you no longer need
• Medicines which have expired
• Old cables / wires / old cell phones and chargers
• Decorative items / artefact's/ furniture which outlived their life or you cannot maintain or blocking pathways in your house.  

As you can see the list is exhaustive, the above is only a sampler!  As you check each item, only you can determine the usefulness of the item to you and whether it serves any purpose in your life.  Emotional clutter

We clutter our mind and heart with many emotions and events and unfortunately, most of these are negative.  We lose energy and health due to these negative emotions. Fear is the mother of all negative emotions such as blame, guilt, anger, jealousy, resentment, etc.

To be emotionally clutter-free, do the following powerful process :

i. Before going to bed every day imagine the person who has hurt you sitting in front of you and you speak to this person about how he/she has hurt you.  At the end forgive the person and drop the negative emotion. If you can not do it by bedtime, do it in your prayer times.

ii. Alternatively, you can write a letter to this person (even if the person is no longer living), pour your heart out and then tear the letter into pieces.  Flush the torn pieces down the toilet, burn or trash them.  Along with those pieces imagine your negative emotions are getting released.

iii. If you think, someone close to your heart has some misconceptions about you or holding something against you, which is impacting your relationship ultimtely, in some or other way, go and talk to that person what's holding him or her to see you with same love as before.

Take him/her to nice coffee or dinner to relax with him/her. Plan out conversation, saying that you know what's blocking him/her to be what he/she was before with you. You just want to let him/her know, it's perfectly fine with you to be this way for now, but not at all okay with holding something deep down to crack whole relationship. At the end, remember everyone evolves with time, experiences and situations that needs to be faced. It's just zeal in relationship that you want to keep it alive and do not want to control rest other things. if your objective of discussion is to take out blockages to keep your relationship happy then it's amazing way to work upon; else this may lead to something more troublesome. Have good intentions to make it good and be ready to digest others viewpoint.

iv. Writing down ‘to-do’ lists that can be seen; setting up reminders is another way of freeing mind space for better things.

These are very powerful processes.  It may feel uncomfortable initially but if you continue with it, you will be able to release negative emotions.

Virtual clutter

If we see unlimited or very much upper boundary storage available that does not mean, we should be overloading filling out all space and compromise our PC’s performance. Now a days google drive, drop-box or other cloud storage servers also offer you limited space,like your laptops hard disk.

Delete all downloads of music, movies, files which have outlived their usefulness.

• Create a master list of phone numbers on your smart phones and update it on a monthly basis.
• Delete all whats app images, videos from your smart phones which you think does not make any sense to you on future note. Save important once on google drive connected.
• Correct your what’s app setting to save media on phone as well chat history to be saved. See if all groups/person’s conversations needs to be saved.
• Delete all those emails which are unnecessary.
• Don’t upload 1000 pictures in Facebook – nobody has the patience or time to see all your vacation explorations. Just five or ten reflecting your memory would work.
• Delete all the programs from your computer which you are not using.
• Delete all temporary files regularly.

A clutter-free environment is a stress-free environment. It creates peace and harmony in our surroundings, in our minds and ultimately in our lives.  Such an environment welcomes growth, creativity, productivity and prosperity!

At the end of ‘Good Grief’, ‘Good Intentions’ and ‘Good Riddance’, there is ‘Good Luck’!

Happy Cleaning the Clutter to make your year happy!