Declutterfest – the first step on the road to stress free organisation

You have all heard of OktoberFest, a period of between 16 and 18 days where there is a festival on the streets of Munich. Most people think of OktoberFest as a beer festival, which in fact is only a small part of the whole event, but few would know that the origin of the festival dates back to the wedding of Prince Ludwig in 1810. The citizens of Munich were invited to celebrate the festivities and horse races were held to mark the closing of the event. The following year the horse races were held again at the same time and this marked the beginning of Oktoberfest.

Just like Oktoberfest, there are few that know the background story, the real benefits that come with decluttering. Some may think it is just an activity for housewives who take to their houses with dusters and mops once a year in Spring-time. As you can imagine if a clean space were the only benefit of decluttering I for one would not be writing about it!

A declutter involves ridding your life and your space of objects, thoughts and emotions that no longer serve you, and believe it or not it might possibly be the best move you could make this year. Most will be familiar with the feeling of lightness and satisfaction when you tidy up or de clutter an area of your life, it may just be clearing out the garage but each area of your life that you are responsible for is taking up some mental space as well as the obvious physical space. Somewhere in your subconscious you are aware of all the tasks that are incomplete or the room and drawers and cupboards that are a mess and need attention. This is why decluttering can be an enormous productivity boon. It clears the mind and the physical space for greater efficiency and focus.

Clutter is described as postponed decisions by productivity expert Barabara Hemphill. You leave things lying around because you haven’t decided where to put them. Bills are left on the kitchen table to be paid and get moved from one surface to another. The kids football match time has been changed, will you remember? Your boss asked you on the way out the door on Friday to pick something up for him on the way to work on Monday. Your unpaid parking ticket was left somewhere handy to remember to pay it….. All of these things in your life are clutter, things that have to be done and things that can cause stress and can make you feel stressed and disorganised.

The fewer objects you have and the more organised you are, the easier it will be to find what you are looking for and get whatever you need to do done in a faster and more efficient manner. But don’t stop there, the physical is just one realm. To truly feel the benefit of the art of decluttering and feel stress free , we need to be able to clear the mind as well as our environment. To do this we can do a mind dump or mind sweep. The practice of downloading everything from your mind onto paper or into your computer. This will allow you to enter all of the items that need doing into your calendar or task list to ensure that nothing is forgotten about and you can sleep easier knowing that everything is stored in your system.

To summarise to get to a place of stress free organisation you need to do the following

1. Eliminate all unnecessary objects and practices in your life
2. Get storage containers and sort out a place for everything, this will make it easier to tidy up and sort things out regularly
3. Schedule time daily or weekly to keep things organised.

And once you get started keep up the good work, but no doubt the benefits that you will see and feel will be all the encouragement you need to maintain this positive and useful habit.

You will find 10 useful declutter tips if you click here.

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Comments (4)

I plan on getting started this weekend – thanks for tips

Great tips, Ikea is great for storage containers, all shapes and sizes for clearing the clutter

Thanks for the comments guys, good luck with the decluttering

Howdy! This is my first comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and say I really enjoy reading through your blog posts. Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that cover the same topics? Appreciate it!

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