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I have a confession to make.
I'm naturally pretty damn messy.
Not hoarders messy, but definitely need
advanced notice of company is coming over messy.
A couple of years ago, I realized
I needed to make a change, and that my messy environment
was negatively impacting my mental health.
Going to sleep and waking up every day
in a cluttered environment felt like a double whammy,
starting and ending each day with a failure.
It had to stop.
These are the changes I made and have
sustained over the last three years that
have kept my mess at bay.
Number 1, be extremely intentional with what you own.
A lot of people don't like the idea of minimalism,
but becoming intentional about what I owned
was a turning point in my transition from slob
to not slob.
I have a habit of acquiring stuff, either
through impulse purchases or adopting things
when friends move out of state.
This means I had closets full of fishing poles and wading boots.
I have never fished in my life.
Baking accessories?
I hate to bake.
And abandoned hobbies.
Turns out I don't have a real strong passion
for wood burning.
This contributed to my overall messiness,
because even when I wanted to clean up my act,
all this crap I'd accumulated was working against me.
I ended up just moving piles from one area
to another in an effort to tidy.
One weekend, I decided I was done.
I took two cars full of perfectly usable stuff
to my local thrift store, and I haven't missed a single item
since.
I also went through and digitized.
Breed took pictures of a giant box of sentimental cards,
knickknacks, stuffed animals, and other gifts
I'd been lugging around with me for years.
I can still look at those items and read those cards
if I'm feeling nostalgic, but without the physical items
filling up my space.
I also curbed my impulse spending
by deactivating my Amazon Prime and deleting my saved payment
data from my most often used shopping sites.
Now my environment is filled with the things
I use constantly and nothing else.
Number 2, create better systems.
A lot of my mess came from having inadequate systems
around my house.
Take my mail, for example.
I had it absolutely everywhere.
Bills, important tax documents, Costco flyers, and junk mail
were strewn over my house because I didn't have
a system for anything incoming.
The first thing I did was collect my mail
from every corner of my house, sit down on my computer,
and opt for paperless billing every chance I had,
which easily cut the problem in half.
Then I bought a small recycle bin
that I keep near my front door.
Everything that doesn't require a response
or need to be filed away doesn't come in the house.
Systems can be applied to any source of mess.
Constantly piling dirty clothes in one area of your room?
Put a laundry basket there to remind
yourself to toss it in the washing machine
when the basket is full.
Have a certain coffee table that collects trash and junk?
Get rid of the table, or move it farther away from the sofa
so it doesn't become a catch-all.
Find mess hotspots in your home and create
systems to circumvent the issue before it even
becomes a clutter trash pile.
Number 3, don't put things down, put them away.
In the last few years, this has become my spiritual mantra,
and has reduced actual cleaning time to a few minutes a day
instead of an entire weekend.
Every time I'm tempted to leave a half empty can of LaCroix
on a bookshelf or leave a pile of papers on the floor,
I tell myself, "don't put it down, put it away."
Do I occasionally mess up?
Absolutely, but the amount of time
I've saved by being mindful and choosing
to be deliberate with how I operate within my space
has been a game-changer.
Along the same lines, I also take on a clean
as I go mentality, whereas before, I operated with a clean
eventually when I have to because of shame mentality.
Maintaining is much easier than cleaning.
Rinsing newly dirty dishes with soapy water
is much easier than scraping off caked-on old food.
Once you realize the power of maintaining,
you'll never want to go back to wasting an entire day
off elbow-deep in old messes.
These key things helped me transition from gross slob
to functioning 95% clean person.
My mental health has improved significantly,
as I have my finances.
I can now use my environment as an indicator of my mental state
because I have the clarity to recognize when I'm filling up
my usually clean counters with dishes,
or when I'm using retail therapy to justify buying duplicates
of items I already have.
Plus, the lack of impulse spending
allows me to really focus on what
I know to be meaningful to me, and I'm
able to interact with my environment
as something that recharges me instead of embarrasses me.
Staying organized is one of the best ways
to eliminate stress in every aspect of your life.
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