Change Your Life by Clearing Out Your Clutter!
by Dana Korey
Change your life by clearing out your clutter!
Clutter is stuff you don’t need and don’t want. It’s mental fat. It weighs you down and slows you down. Your personality and potential get suffocated under layers of stuff. Like fat, clutter grows over the years, hassling you, eating away at your energy. It distracts you and blurs your focus.
Clutter means you can’t find anything, you have regular panics about lost items, you keep buying new things because you can’t find the old ones. It demands your time. It has to be dusted, filed, or otherwise unproductively dealt with. It’s in the way, so you keep having to shift it around before you can put other things away.
Clutter takes up space in your head, not just your closets. It nags at you with reminders of unmade decisions, unfinished projects. Its difficult to move forward if you keep tripping over reminders of how you used to be; of what you thought would be right for you once, but wasn’t; leftover from past dreams and past failures; things which you’ve grown out of or moved on from; decisions you haven’t made and things you just haven’t gotten round to. Clutter doesn’t just make it hard to close the doors on cupboards….it makes it hard to achieve closure in your life.
It’s estimated that we use 20% of what we own 80% of the time. Much of the other 80% of our possessions we’ll just be clutter.
How many times have you heard yourself say:
“I can’t throw this away, it cost good money” OK, but it’s served its purpose. Think of it like a vacation or an evening out, a temporary pleasure. You’ve had your money’s worth out of it…now its history.
“I might need that someday” Yes, but are you cluttering yourself for years because of something you could buy another of ( if you did ever need it!) for a few dollars? You can’t keep everything…clutter is anything unused or unloved. Ask yourself this: do you want to be a library or storage facility for every object that comes your way? Do these items bring value to your life or just take up space….can you find this somewhere else like on the internet?
“I’m so used to it” familiar clutter can be a security blanket, reassuring you as to who you are and holding back the fear you might feel if you were free to move uncluttered into a new and challenging future. But you know how irritating it is when family members persist in treating you as you were, not as you are? Well, clutter can be just as limiting as outdated family viewpoints, keeping you stuck in the past.
Dana Korey is the president and founder of Away With Clutter®, a professional organizing company based in Del Mar, California. She is a nationally recognized speaker and has been featured on HGTV, Fine Living Network, NBC, CBS, and FOX. Her clients include Staples, Coldwell Banker, SAIC, and Ron Popeil of Ronco Inventions. Her company website is: http://www.awaywithclutter.com Her email is: dana@awaywithclutter.com |
