Introduction
As a kid (or if you are one right now), how many times have you been told to clean your room? I’m guessing a lot. And how many times did you actually clean your room? For most people (including myself), we usually didn’t clean our room. However, that actually is a sin against our productivity and can completely ruin our productivity.
Decluttering your life is the first thing you should do when you want to be more productive. It takes little time and can really go a long way. Decluttering is shown by science to boost productivity, focus, motivation time and time again by scientists. Boosting your productivity is easy once you declutter, so why not do it?
So, without further ado, let’s learn why decluttering can revolutionize your productivity.
Why Clutter Affects Productivity and Focus
First of all, let’s start with the most basic way clutter can hinder your productivity. Imagine you have a lot of documents on your desk, and you really need to clean them. They take up too much space on your desk, and you feel overwhelmed. Those documents will now distract you and stare into you.
Clutter for me was really bad in school since I used to never organize my papers. So, I would lose my homework in the jungle of my backpack before class. Then, my teacher would get mad at me and accuse me of not doing the homework. All this for me to find the papers crumpled up later at the bottom of my backpack
Using “XP” as an Analogy for Boosting Productivity
All of these factors will drain your mental energy. A good way to think about it is imagine your brain has a certain amount of XP to do certain tasks in the day.
For example, your brain has 200 total XP and washing the dishes takes 5 XP. You want to save as much XP to use on bigger tasks like school work and other issues that take like 50 XP.
However, the stress of needing to keep track of your homework so that you don’t keeps a constant drain of 5 XP per hour. This seems like nothing, but realize that after 10 hours 1/4 of your brain power has gone to keeping track of your homework.
Furthermore, you had other tasks throughout the day and now you don’t even have the XP to do something you love.
Now imagine you had that same day, but you’re organized this time. After these 10 hours, you’re going to have 50 extra XP points to do whatever you want.
After reading this, are you surprised that an overwhelming amount of studies highlight that clear environments lead to better performance?
Simple Steps to Declutter Your Workspace
That was a long example on how bad clutter can get. However, I needed to make it long since if you’re like me, you need to engrain it in your brain. Clutter is horrible for productivity.
So, the simplest way to start decluttering is to pick an area, that you want to clean specifically. It can be small, like a nightstand, in fact, it doesn’t matter how large the area is. All that matters is you clean it and make it organized.
Remember, when making habits we want to start small, so starting with a small area is probably preferable.
Another quick tip is to organized similar items together. For example, I keep my pens, pencils, and highlights all in the same area for easy access. This can help with preventing losing a billion pencils (trust me, I’ve been there before)
To tie in both of these habits, you can also establish spending 5 minutes a day just cleaning your room/desk. It doesn’t have to be a lot, however, the act of just thinking about cleaning for 5 minutes is enough. Eventually, the more you think of cleaning, the more likely you’ll do it.
Finally, you should remove everything that can visually distract you. Unnecessary posters, or random papers on your desk under your computer should be gone. You might not think they affect you, but they really do, and once you remove them you’ll understand what I mean.
Digital Decluttering: Managing Your Online Life
A majority of people do all of their work online yet have the messiest, most cluttered, and the equivalent of a hoarders google drive. Decluttering online is as important, or even more important, than decluttering in real life.
Getting distracted online is 1000x easier, and can happen due to literally anything. For example, notifications, emails, social media, just to name a few
The first thing you can do is to clean up your files and google drive. Set specific files for specific things, don’t just rely on your downloads to store everything. In addition, delete every file that is literally useless just to keep your space a bit more organized.
The same applies to google drive, make specific folders for specific needs. In addition, please whenever you create a doc/slide/anything, make sure to save it to the specific folder it belongs in. I know it takes 10 extra seconds, but those 10 extra seconds will save you a minute in the future when you aimlessly search for a missing doc.
Email management is another thing people struggle with. It’s simple, unsubscribe to all spam and emails you never open, and set up filters to only receive relevant information. For example, if you work at a business, you want to only see your business emails. Therefore, setting up a filter will prevent you from seeing anything that isn’t a business email.
Decluttering Social Media and Games
This is probably the one people struggle with the most. However, this is also the thing that makes you break focus the most. So, it’s important that you really pay attention here. Your productivity can survive with lazily made google drive folders. However, there’s no chance your productivity survives with constant bombardment from social media.
The first thing you can do is remove unused apps. The more apps, the worse it is, so just deleting anything you don’t use at all. Then, you should make shortcuts to any productive app or anything important that you use a lot. The easier you can open the productive app, the more likely you are to do it.
Now, it’s time for social media and games. First of all, keep on do not disturb with notifications off anytime you do work. I personally am always on do not disturb, and I highly recommend it to anyone. However, if you can’t always be on DND, make sure to always set it up when you’re working.
Secondly, close the social media and game tabs. This might seem clear cut, but a lot of people just keep the tab open to constantly check if they missed anything. You will not get any focused work done with this attitude, so just close the tabs.
Decluttering your Backpack and Binder for School
Decluttering my backpack is actually the first step I took into decluttering my workspace. A lot of students struggle with this, and I know I did too. I really consider decluttering your backpack as the entryway to productivity for a lot of people because its the first time they realize cleaning has benefits.
First of all, empty your whole backpack right now. It doesn’t matter what’s in it, just empty it out. Secondly, if you have a binder, empty if out right now too. If you don’t, buy a binder and just empty out all your papers onto a desk. Binders aren’t a necessity, but I do highly recommend buying one.
Then, look at everything you have and decide what actually needs to be in your backpack. Not what you would like to be in your backpack “Just in case”, what needs to be in your backpack every single day. Then, do the same thing to your papers and decide what you still need and what you don’t.
After you have your list of items, you’re going to start by organizing papers in your binder by period if you haven’t already. Then, you’re going to put everything back into your backpack that you determined you need.
There we go, we just easily and in 5 minutes decluttered our backpack and we’re ready for school now. I usually do this once a month since overtime you’re bound to be unorganized at least once. However, this is a good stepping stone for boosting your productivity by decluttering.
Conclusion
Decluttering is one of the most important things you can do for your productivity. It will relieve stress and boost your focus. In addition, decluttering is found in basically all aspects of your life from where you sleep to where you work. I encourage you all to clean your room right after reading this. Not later, not tomorrow, right now. And make sure to never forget this simple saying
Nothing changes if nothing changes
