When Clutter Overwhelms

Does your workspace look like your child’s bedroom, with different contents? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? What about your brain? What would I see if it was a room and I could look in? Conversations about clutter and its level of expansiveness can create conflict. If you are a defender of clutter, I ask that you at least consider the impact of your level of clutter tolerance on the effectiveness of your work and those around you.

Post-it Notes, co-invented by National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees Art Fry and Spencer Silver, have helped to declutter many a brain since 1980. But look at some offices and bathroom mirrors, and you find a clutter transfer. The abundance from the brain was just moved, reducing the anxiety over forgetting but creating anxiety over all the incomplete tasks spread across the mirror or desk.

Hoarding is so prominent that it has its own reality TV show. Probably none of those scenarios happen overnight. If it’s not a hoarding disorder, "tomorrow" becomes the culprit as we keep putting off sifting, organizing, and eliminating and choose to accumulate instead. An interesting human behavior is how we sometimes compare ourselves to the most extreme expressions of an issue to help us feel okay about our overextensions.

The construction of climate-controlled storage has exploded in my community. What about yours? This is evidence that we need more space. Needing more space doesn’t need to mean we build more to get more. We could get more space by removing more stuff, not just moving it elsewhere.

Freeing up space and time can be pretty challenging when we aren’t sure where to start. Even in graphic design, white space is meant to keep the viewer from feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content. As I read on a neuroscience website, “A cluttered environment can lead to cognitive overload, as the brain struggles to prioritize attention amidst distraction,” videos and ads were popping up all over that page.[i] It was wild! But it also proved the point. My brain was going haywire!

Clutter comes in various forms, from stuff to responsibilities, commitments, and thoughts. My radar for clutter is high, but its observations are also practical (even compassionate). I remember walking into a Department of Social Services office and seeing all of the case files on the desks of social workers. I immediately understood what those tasked with each of those files face daily. Some clutter we have no control over.

Some of us are more aware of clutter’s presence than others, or maybe it’s differing definitions of what constitutes clutter. Isn’t it funny how your clutter can even be organized to you? Woe be to anyone who ever disorganizes your piles! Your clutter has structure.

If clutter doesn’t bother you, what about those around you, home or office? How do they feel about the clutter you don’t see? Did you know that there are people far on the other end of the continuum who feel clutter? Truly. It’s a physiological response. You may not realize how much clutter affects you until it’s gone.

One definition of clutter is to fill or cover with scattered or disordered things that impede movement or reduce effectiveness. At home, work, or within your organization, are the clutter and disorder at levels that impede you and reduce your effectiveness? How long have you lived with it that way? Let’s declutter your world starting today.

Declutter Approach 1 - Sort Through by Category
When one of my sons was young, and his room was overwhelmingly unkept, I would help him clean it. I didn’t do the work for him, but I helped him approach the anxiety-creating mess to conquer it.

“Go through your room and bring me every stuffed animal you find.” After he completed that search-and-rescue, we moved on to large cars and trucks, then matchbox cars, Legos, and so on. Each step of the way the sorted things were put in their holding place. Finally, we were left with only trash.

As mentioned earlier, stacks and piles can have some order to them. A person can narrow the document search by knowing what’s in that general vicinity. Investing the time to work through those stacks for further sorting can narrow future searches even more. Move the piles to files, the trash, or the shredder. Two stacks today, two more tomorrow, and so on.

Like with my son, start with one category at a time. The same goes for your computer. Like my son, you might need some help. That’s okay. Ask a trusted friend to help. As the files are created, that work is done for those categories. Now, use them. Manage the Matter below will provide more thoughts on sustaining this work.

As an organization, this kind of work is helpful to sort through all of the work you are doing. Should you be doing all that you are trying to do? As a team, sort the work by category to gain a full understanding of all that you have on your collective platters. I bet it will be eye-opening. You might need to consider Declutter Approach #4.

Declutter Approach 2 - Clear Out and Selectively Move Back
Thinking about decluttering, I remembered another decluttering time when we were cleaning our home attic. We borrowed a friend’s large enclosed trailer and cleared out years of accumulation. Then, little by little, we worked through the attic contents in the trailer and moved things back in that we wanted to keep. Everything that went back was with purpose and had its place. What was left went away.

If it’s stuff and not thoughts, this may be a more time-driven approach because of the clearing out. Time-sensitive can be helpful because it will motivate you to complete what you started. However, don’t let that pressure to finish lead you to re-clutter instead of de-clutter.

You may become a bit more of a minimalist after you experience how the absence of clutter feels. One of the powers of a clean slate is that possibilities become more abundant when vision is unobscured.

Do a brain dump. Think of it as creating an external drive for your brain. Post-It Notes (small or giant…did you know?), legal pads, journals, or a whiteboard can be helpful here, especially if you organize content by subject matter. I’ll say more about this below in Declutter Approach 3, but start with the larger ideas. Think of each pad or page as a container that will collect the smaller “thoughts” accumulated as they emerge from your cluttered brain. Keep those “containers” nearby so you can add to them.

Declutter Approach 3 - Cut Big to Small
Recently, my wife and I were clearing out an overgrown area on the edge of our yard, and I realized a pattern. As we were cutting and dragging away, I noticed my wife shift to pulling much smaller brush. I suggested focusing on the big things before worrying about the small. Removing the larger trees and brush allowed for more freedom to move around and expand our work.

Deciding what to grow and what to let go can be difficult. Start with the easy yet significant choices first. This might be a resource-use conversation – space, time, energy, money, and brain. Cutting may mean the difference between want and need. When it comes down to it, there is much that we think we need that is ultimately just a want. Wants are not bad, but we can’t always keep what we want. Sometimes, we need to cut the big wants we hold on to for there to be resources for the need to be fully met.

Is there something that needs to be cut back, not eliminated, just cut back to create space? The more open space created by clearing bigger stuff, responsibilities, funding, or calendar chunks, the better you can see what remains. The open space becomes motivating. Decisions made that increase the space for moving about empower decisions that need to be made. This is true for your brain space, too.

Declutter Approach 4 - Hand Off to Another
One person’s clutter can be another person’s concern, passion, or responsibility. What responsibility do you have on your brain, a Post-it, a whiteboard, or in a pile? Should it be yours?

I love getting people to assess responsibility. Granted, we do some things to carry our share of the load so that the family or team can function. Those duties are not what I’m pointing to. What I want you to consider are the responsibilities that are outside of function and more out of core vision and mission. Should it be yours?

Is this responsibility that you are trying to carry more at the heart, soul, and capacity of another organization? For them, it isn’t “extra.” For you, it is. Hand it off. This is the nature of collaboration, about which I have written a series of blogs. For you to off-load the extra weight of responsibility means you manage what should be yours so much better.

Managing the Matter
“I don’t have time to declutter!” You made my point. You need to declutter because you don’t have time. Invest the time by building in the time to do consistent decluttering work. Don’t put it on your calendar just anywhere. Consider times of the day, week, month, or year that are usually less productive and make that time productive with this decluttering work. Consistent rhythms can make a significant difference when managing your world to prevent clutter that impedes.

Considering the why behind the declutter investment can help motivate. Remember, your space, time, energy, money, and brain are limited. What you do with them can be a multiplier or a subtractor. If I know what to do or where that information is without search time, I don’t spend so much time figuring out where to start or hunting through the stacks. Less to think about means I can think more about what needs my thought time.

Hopefully, what you have here motivates you to get started. There is an abundance of “how-to " guides for this decluttering work. If you need more ideas, search online for “how to declutter.” But that can lead to “too much” information to sift through. My encouragement is just to get started.

Part of the challenge is making choices, isn’t it? Choices are value statements, but they are also responsibility statements. You can’t carry or keep everything or everyone that comes your way. You don’t have that kind of capacity. Start making some of those choices today and feel some of the overwhelmed fade away.

Action Points

• “I don’t have time to declutter!” It's because you don’t have time you need to declutter. Starting today, for 30 minutes daily, invest in “freeing up” using Declutter Approach #1.
• What do you want to do but aren’t because of too much responsibility clutter? Declutter.
• Is your brain so full that you have no margin to think through the things that matter? Declutter.
• When you look around your office and on your desk, does what you see hinder or empower your work? Declutter
• Consider times of day that are usually less productive and make that time productive with this decluttering work.
• Choose a Declutter Approach from above and start…today, not “tomorrow.”
• Invite someone really good at decluttering to help you.

[i] https://neurosciencenews.com/anxiety-stress-messy-home-23874/

Do you desire to strengthen your CharityTracker or OasisInsight network to new levels of collaboration and impact? Reach out to Chuck today to schedule your conversation: chuck@simonsolutions.com. 

Dr. Chuck Coward serves as Community Impact Specialist for Simon Solutions, Inc. Chuck has invested over 35 years in fostering human and community development from a variety of places and roles, including as a pastor, non-profit Executive Director, Director of Development, businessman, consultant, university professor, The Struggle Coach, and the founder of Entrusted Foundation. Serving to make people and communities stronger is his great passion. Chuck is the proud husband to Anita, dad to four, and granddaddy to eight.