thank you to squarespace for sponsoring this video
hello wonderful humans and welcome to the last video of the decluttering series
we've decluttered our desk our living space our closet we've shared our decluttering results on
the vibely app but we are not fully done until we declutter what's on the inside so you might
have heard of the mind and body connection i think there's also a mind and space connection because a
cluttered space can result in a cluttered mind and a cluttered mind may manifest as a cluttered space
so the first thing is probably something you've already heard a lot about on the bliss bean it is
journaling i usually journal for a few minutes in the morning and in the evening but for this
decluttering challenge i actually made myself write for a continuous 60 minutes without
stopping just writing whatever was on my mind i talked plenty about journaling but i think what
happens when you really make journaling a habit is you can kind of start to treat it as just a daily
thing to check off your to-do list and so i think because of that i was starting to kind of suppress
some of the deeper topics that i was just too lazy to write about so that was an interesting
experiment and me and my brain got to know each other a little better but it also wasn't all
necessarily like answers to life's big questions or huge revelations about myself a lot of it was
just stuff that was hanging at the back of my mind that i just kept putting off thinking about like
for example reminding myself that i had a bunch of clothes literally sitting in bags in my room that
i need to drop off and donate or that i need to figure out what type of room i want to reserve for
my student residence next year so journaling for a solid hour is just a really good way to basically
clear out all the cobwebs in your mind and all this stuff that's not letting you achieve
peace we spend plenty of time especially if you watch this channel this is probably true for you
thinking about what we have to do and want to do and are gonna do we make lots and lots of to-do
lists but the only way that you can say yes to the important things is if you say no to many
others and this isn't always super explicit or easy to spot like someone giving you a project
and then you say no to it there are literally millions of things that you choose not to do
every day like why are you not learning how to fillet a fish right now because you prioritized
other things like watching this video great decision by the way i've been struggling this
year with saying yes to a lot of stuff that i later regret a little bit and i think it's
because i have no clear guidelines for making decisions i just base these decisions off of
feelings and things are fine feelings are good but i found that when i was making decisions my
feelings were very much influenced by the fear of saying no social pressure fear of missing out and
so i thought what if i set some guidelines for myself like a couple of questions that i would
ask myself any time that i needed to decide whether to say yes to something so first of
all if i were to rate how excited i am about this on a scale of one to ten but i couldn't use seven
how would i rate it a lot of things are seven so choosing seven is kind of a cop-out if you
have to choose between six and eight that forces you to really get clear on how you feel about it
second try to imagine how it'll feel working on this project because i find that usually
the pre-project meeting and talking to people about it and planning it out is a lot more
exciting like there's a lot more excited energy than there is once you actually start the project
and are doing the mundane daily work of it so do your best to be realistic when you imagine it and
then the third question that i wrote for myself is this something that i would have considered
if it had not been brought to me is this something that i would have actively sought out for myself
a great book that i read like years ago and implemented recently is the power of a positive
no so basically it explains that instead of just saying no you say yes no yes where that first
yes is a yes to your own values and commitment so for example you might start out by saying
i am setting aside lots and lots of time and studying really hard right now to prepare for
my final exams which are very important to me and then you say firmly no i will not lead this
project and that final yes is basically you two trying to find a reasonable compromise that is
mutually beneficial for your future relationship see how much better that is than just saying no or
saying yes but then being really bitter about it afterwards one thing that you should say yes to
is squarespace was that a good segue thank you to squarespace for sponsoring this video i have used
squarespace ever since i started theblissbean as a teeny tiny little baby blog in july 2017. one of
the really important things when you're starting a blog is to have a consistent and of course
aesthetically pleasing brand and you can do all of that with squarespace all you gotta do is choose
some pretty colors and fonts and then with all the extra features that squarespace has you can send
email campaigns that match your branding and pull from your products and blog posts you can create
instagram content with unfold and even design a logo in their logo maker it's all in one place
if you want to start your blog your brand your empire you can head to squarespace for a free
trial and then use my code thebilssbean to get 10 off your first purchase of a website or a domain
i'm not saying give up on everything that you're working towards because with most
big goals big projects there's gonna be a dip where it's really difficult and frustrating
so if you're really still passionate about it just keep swimming and you'll get through it
but which of your goals are you clinging to out of stubbornness even though they
aren't very meaningful to you anymore it's definitely impressive to stick to and achieve
the goals that you set but don't do it just because of that do it because you genuinely
want to achieve that goal and have that outcome because otherwise you're just taking time away
from other more meaningful things that you could be doing so what i did to check off this step of
the mind declutter was i opened up my artist of life workbook from lavendaire and i looked at
all of the stuff that i wrote at the beginning of the year and just crossed off stuff i didn't want
to pursue anymore and that is okay all of my main 2021 goals remained because i purposely kept those
very minimal but the smaller stuff like some of the projects and some of the sub categories just
sort of lost their luster for me so i just oh my god i just when my rings just flew off that
stuff i crossed off and i did not feel bad about it now that you're left with the stuff that you
really want to accomplish plan out some steps that you can take to get closer to those goals
and do them asap because i think there's also some mental clutter that comes from having goals
in the back of your mind and also knowing that you haven't really done anything to achieve them
i'm a list maker i like a good list i've had lists like books to read movies to watch things
to do some day but once in a while i will look at a list and just be like this list does not spark
joy anymore this list is only reminding me of all the things that i still haven't done so goodbye
delete so if you like making as many lists as i do try to notice when you have an attachment to
them where are you holding on or like clinging to things that you wanted to do someday even though
the you that you were when you wrote that list was a totally different you from the one that you are
now and you might be thinking like beatrice it's just a list of movies to watch it's not that deep
but i think that there's some mental clutter when this list is growing and growing and you are busy
and you don't know when you'll ever get around to watching all these movies i was talking to
a friend recently about systemization mainly with work-related stuff but i thought how can we apply
more of that attitude to just our lives in general it's not about trying to be like a robot and have
procedures for every little thing that you do in life it's more about being a human who has limited
decision making brain power and who wants to spend less time figuring out how to organize digital
files or plan out your week and more time being a human so you can create habits like for example
every day after you finish dinner you go and wash the dishes and that way eventually it becomes like
a routine it becomes automatic and you don't have that mental clutter of constantly debating should
you wash the dishes or not you can create routines for yourself this is also something that i talk a
lot about on the bliss bean you can have a morning and an evening routine so that you
can get a really good start to the day and then wind it down in a really mindful way basically
automatically every single day one of the things i consider to be a key aspect of a productivity
system and one of the things i talk about in my 21 days to productive flow course is having some
sort of a catch-all tool you might have a bunch of different buckets for information like video ideas
go here gift ideas go here things to do next month go here which is all great but if you're working
on something that is totally unrelated do you really want to spend the time and the focus to
go and find that specific bucket or do you want to just immediately capture that question or thought
or idea and dump it onto some little post-it note or a voice memo or a note in your notes app
afterwards once you do have time you can take your catch-all and put everything in the bucket that it
belongs in but in the meantime you don't just have these random thoughts floating around your head
i also want to talk about cleaning up your digital life because while your files and emails and
social media and stuff might not take up physical space they definitely take up space in your mind
and on your hard drives so first of all go through all your social media apps and see
if there's anything that you just can delete all together but then for each one that you keep see
which accounts you can unfollow or just silence go through your email newsletters and sales alerts
and notifications i know when i'm going through my email inbox i'm usually too lazy to unsubscribe so
i'll just delete all the emails that are junk mail but if you just take a couple of minutes
to unsubscribe from the stuff that you don't want to be receiving you can have a lot less clutter in
your inbox try to limit your apps to just one page now that ios has this app library thing it can
make your phone less cluttered because anything that's not essential can just be hidden away there
it also gives you a way to sort of hide away distracting apps and make them harder to get to
you can go through your camera roll your computer your hard drives google drive dropbox
email attachments imessage attachments just any clutter that's taking up storage get rid of it
when my hard drives get close to full i usually go through to see what old low quality b-roll do
i have that i probably won't use in future videos and then what final cut pro libraries can i delete
that i'll never need to edit in the future on a similar note make sure that all of your stuff is
backed up so i have all of my photos backed up on google photos and then for video files and
everything else i have a solid state drive that i use while i'm editing those projects and then
two hard drives that are identical copies of one another for kind of a long term archive there's
this app that i really like using that makes it easy to sync your files across your computer
and your hard drives so you don't have to manually move files and remember what new files you created
you can schedule for example specific folders on one drive to back up to another drive any time
that those two drives are plugged in so it's very convenient and that is it the last tip of the very
last video on my youtube channel just kidding only of the spring decluttering series but i hope you
guys really enjoyed this series and decluttering and minimizing alongside me because i know i feel
a lot lighter and better now you can check out the rest of the series if you missed any of the videos
before you go give this video a like and subscribe to my channel and i'll see you next week bye
you