Why Declutter Your Home?

If you are wondering why in the world I’m writing a post on decluttering your home, let me first clarify: this blog has not gone Martha Stewart! As unintuitive as it might be, our homes play a very important role in the process of our personal growth. Why is that the case?

In one of my earlier posts on creating an inspirational room, I mentioned 3 reasons why it’s important to put attention into how your room looks/feels like: (1) You spend a large amount of your time there (2) It’s where a lot of your thinking and decision making take place (3) It has personal, emotional significance. They hold the same to your own home too.

These 3 reasons ladder up to 1 thing – the effect your environment has on you.  Your environment and you have an interlinked inside-out, outside-in relationship. Inside-out, meaning who you are as a person manifests itself in how your room/home looks like. Outside-in, because how your room/home looks like affects the way you think and feel. Both reinforce each other. Change one thing, and the other will change as a result.

For that reason, decluttering your home is one of the first steps to creating an organized, positive life. If you want to be organized, it’s hard to think/feel organized if your own home isn’t tidy to begin with. Imagine waking up to an untidy, cluttered place every day. Or coming home after a long-day to a messy place. How will you feel? Chances are, it’s not going to make you feel good. You are probably going to feel a little bothered by the clutter. Even if you do not consciously pay attention or feel bothered by it, on a subconscious level, your mind is taking in stimuli of clutter. These subsequently affect how you think and feel.

Decluttering your home also means a) purging of junk which you don’t need b) stuff is kept in its rightful places c) you have an easier time finding things you need. This goes a long way in helping you be more productive!

Decluttering My Home

There used to be a lot of clutter in my house. It was normal for my living room to have magazines and newspapers strewn everywhere. The toilets had a lot of random haircare/skincare products, many of which were half-used and not touched for a while. The storeroom had a lot of junk. My room had stuff from way back when I was in primary school. My wardrobe was over-packed with old and new clothes alike.

At first, I didn’t pay much heed to decluttering because the effects of my occasional decluttering sessions never lasted. After each session, the clutter would just pile back on. I thought it was a waste of time to keep doing it again and again.

Yet after a while, I realized my environment would affect the thoughts I had in my mind. Because it was often untidy, I would feel disorganized and mentally cluttered too. What’s more, I felt subconsciously repelled by my own home – I wasn’t keen with the idea of inviting friends over. After all, it wasn’t exactly the type of homely environment I envisioned.

So last year after I quit my job, I took the opportunity to turn the place around and tidy everything up. My parents probably felt bizarre when I suddenly turned stepford wife for that one week! At the end of it, I felt really good from the overhaul. Besides being just a physical decluttering process, it was also a form of mental, emotional and spiritual decluttering too.

How to Declutter Your Home

Here are my 8 recommended steps on how to declutter your home. These steps will work perfectly for any place such as your office too:

1. Plan it in your schedule.

Clutter clearing can easily take up hours if you have a huge amount of clutter to clear out. My massive decluttering took me a whole week! Set aside time in your schedule and segment the task into different parts. For example, set aside X amount of hours for your wardrobe, followed by your bedroom, then your storage room, and so on.

When I decluttered my house, I broke it down into phases: first with my room (it was already in shape after the big revamp in 2007, so it was more about upkeeping it), the living room, followed by the kitchen, then my parents’ room, the washrooms, and finally the storage room. This made the whole task much more manageable.

2. Enroll the help of someone.

Many hands make light work. If it’s possible, get a family member or a friend to help out. This can be a very tedious task, especially if you have not been doing it for very long. There were times when I had to shift the furniture around and it was much easier with my Dad and brother around to help out. Besides that, it’s much more fun to be doing it with others than alone.

3. Start with a small area.

If there’s too many things to clear and you are not sure where to begin, start off with a manageable spot. If it’s your room, start off with your table. If it’s your wardrobe, pick one of the smaller compartments. Before you know it, you will be done with the area and you are ready to the next.

4. Let go of things you have no use for.

In the past, my default action was to keep something just in case I needed it in the future. Over the years, it just resulted in a huge pile of junk. Not only that, I never had an occasion where I needed that thing. Now, my principle is to ask – ‘Am I going to need this in the foreseeable future?’ If the answer is no, I’ll throw it away. A lot of clutter comes from keeping things that you think you’ll use, but never do in the end.

Whenever I declutter, I will use a huge garbage bag to dump everything I don’t want. It makes it much simpler to discard stuff. You might want to try it for yourself too.

5. Finish clearing first, then organize.

Some people try to clear clutter AND organize at the same time. Personally, I feel that this isn’t very effective. I prefer is to finish clearing the clutter first (within the area), then organize the stuff inside. It’s much easier to arrange when you know what are all the things that need to be sorted. Not only that, it can be both mentally and physically disruptive to change back and forth between ‘clearing’ and ‘organizing’.

6. Make use of effective furniture and tools.

Filing systems, storage boxes, magazine files and multi-compartment wardrobes are just some of the many great tools to help you organize your stuff.  Ikea is well-known for having many furniture and accessories which streamlines organization. I particularly am a big fan of storage boxes – they provide an easy avenue to pack things in a compact manner, and the boxes fit perfectly under the bed.

7. Designate spots for common items.

I have fixed spots around my room to put commonly accessed items – such as my handphone, necklaces, accessories, bags and so on. These items are placed in their respective spots every time, which eliminates the need to go into a mad search for them before I leave the house each time.

8. Schedule a regular clutter-clearing session.

After you finish clearing out the clutter, schedule a quick 30 minutes session every week as a form of maintenance. your home and weed out whatever clutter has gathered in the past week. With continuous maintenance, you will get to reap the benefits of a clutter-free home.

Once you are done clearing your clutter, you might want to move to creating an inspirational home environment, which you can read in my guide on how to create an inspiring room.

Related Posts:

• Does Your Room Inspire You?
• Increase Your Mental Clarity in Just 15 Minutes
• 101 Ways To Live Your Life To The Fullest
• Create Your Life Handbook
• The Howling Dog Story
• 101 Most Inspiring Quotes, Part 3
• Sneak Preview: The Personal Excellence Book (Pre-Order Starts 18 July, Sunday)
• How To Be A Dean’s Lister – Part 2

Leveraging on your environment is one of the strategies I outlined in Part 4: Strategy of my 7-Part Goal Achievement series. This is one of the most important strategies you can utilize in achieving your goals.

Why Environment Plays A Role in Achieving Your Goals

Some people have no problem setting goals, but they do not rope in strategies to achieve their goals. They think goal achievement is all about relying on (a) brute force and (b) sheer desire. While both factors are very important, they can only get you that far, especially for larger goals. There are two reasons:

Firstly, motivation is a fleeting quality. Your motivation fluctuates within a certain median, depending on your level of consciousness, who you are with, what you are doing, the experiences you are faced with. While you may experience moments or periods of peak motivation, this peak motivation does not last for an extended period of time. More reliable methods are needed to achieve our goals.

Secondly, your environment largely determines how your energy is utilized. For example, suppose you have water, a mug and a basin. What happens when you pour the water into the mug? Water, having no definite shape, takes the shape of the mug. How about when you pour it into a basin? The water will take the shape of the basin. And what if you pour the water onto the ground? It will become a large puddle, with no particular shape.

In this analogy, your energy is like water; Your environment is like the container holding the water. If your environment is well structured, your energy will be channeled into appropriate avenues. If you have a environment that has no structure, your energy will probably be randomly scattered all over the place. With the right environment/platform, your energy becomes effectively utilized such that you achieve your goals much faster.

If your environment is not conducive towards achieving your goals, you will be wasting a lot of energy trying to go against it every day. If you are trying to lose weight, an unconducive environment will be one where you are constantly surrounded by fatty food, fast food restaurants, people who like to eat, people who don’t exercise and gourmet magazines/TV programs. You might be able to get through 1 day unscathed based on discipline alone, but beyond that it is an excessive waste of your energy to have to overcome the same stimuli every day. Rather than doing that, it is more effective to change the environment/stimuli altogether and replace it with environment that aids you in your goal, such as joining weight loss communities, exercise programs, stocking up your fridge with healthy food, etc.

The same applies whether you are trying to cultivate good habits, earn more money, increase your performance, get promoted, gain more sales, improve time management, wake up early, quit coke, improve your posture and any other goals.

For those who have read my previous article on 21 days to cultivate good habits, you may have experienced a spike in motivation when you first read the post. Maybe your intended habit was to wake up early at 5am. So for the first few days, you relied on the motivational high to wake up early. 1st day, woke up at 5am. Felt absolutely awesome. 2nd day, woke up at 5am. Felt terrific. 3rd day, 4th day, 5th day… you started to slip away from your goal. Then gradually, you got to the point where the initial motivation dissipated. Your sleeping schedule became exactly the same as when you first started. Dejected, you decided to sign off on that goal altogether, thinking you were not meant to be an early riser.

If you only planned to accomplish the 21 day program through sheer motivation, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you were unable to nail down the habit in those 21 days. Relying on the initial burst of motivation can only get you so far. You need to use that spike in the beginning to create the environment to ensure your success.

How I Use Environment For My Goals

For example, when I wanted to try out being a vegetarian 2 years ago, I spent a few days setting up an environment that is conducive for my goals. I went to buy a blender, so I could easily make my own fruit smoothies. I went to the supermarket and stocked up on vegetarian food so I would have a constant food supply at home. I did up a goal sheet for my vegetarian goal, writing out my motivations for trying out the vegetarian diet and plastering the sheet with pictures of nice, appetizing vegetarian food. I set my desktop wallpaper with a picture of a whole variety of juicy, fresh fruits. I told the people around me that I was going to try out vegetarianism for the next 1 month, so they would be walking reminders of my goal. I joined vegetarian online communities to acquaint with like-minded folks. I placed bookmarks of vegetarian sites in my browser.

All these were done so I would be able to stick to a vegetarian diet for the entire month. And because I created the right, conducive environment to achieve my goals, I was able to hit my goal, surprisingly easy. And I never looked back ever since.

Here are other examples where I created/leveraged on my environment to achieve my goals:

• In my ongoing plan to improve my fitness level, I joined weekly kickboxing classes, frisbee sessions and badminton sessions with friends. By joining these groups which have recurring, weekly activities, I’m reminded and compelled to join the sessions by virtue of my membership.
• I joined Vipassana 10-Day Course because I wanted to nail in my habit to meditate. Being immersed in such an intensive environment, with the proper facilities and people to guide me along, enabled me to easily integrate the habit into my life when I came back.
• Being self-employed, it’s easy to slip into a mode of stagnancy if I’m not watchful. As countermeasures, I join my partners in their office to work there once a week, I regularly meet up with people in the industry as a source of inspiration and ideas, I lock in my coaching commitments for rolling 2 months so I will need to commit myself to these coachees in that period, I make announcements of my plans at my blog/at events so there is an increased level of accountability, among others.

Create the Best Environment

Even with an environment enables you to achieve your goals, there is always room to improve it such that it’s letting you achieve your goals in the fastest possible manner. For example, if you want to reach the 20th storey in a building, the facilities in the building will affect how fast and how much work you need to put in to get to the 20th storey. If your building only has stairs, you need to climb through 20 whole storeys, perspiring and panting, before you can reach your destination. If your building has escalators, you can reach the 20th storey with minimal movement on your part. If your building has an elevator, you can sail your way up to the top in a matter of minutes.

Likewise, if your goal is to have a toned up body, the degree to which your environment is conducive to your goal will determine how successful you are. If you are just going to sign up for a weekly abdominal class at the gym, the results you can see is going to be lesser compared to if you sign up for the class, sign up for another aerobics class, get a membership at a gym with good body-training facilities and get a personal trainer all at the same time.

There are many different components in your environment you can play around with, such as the following:

• Your physical environment. This includes your workplace, your office, your home, your room, places you go to or even the country you live in.
• Your computer – specifically, what you have on your desktop, your favorites/bookmarks and your post-it notes, since computer has become a staple in our lives
• Communities you are a part of, both online and offline
• People you hang around with
• Anything that’s part of your routine, such as classes you join (recreation or for self-improvement purposes)

By changing any of the variables, you will see experience different results even when exerting the same energy. Change all of the variables, and you will experience dramatic results.

Creating your best environment includes any one or a combination of the 3 steps below. The better your environment is, the better it can help you in your goals.

(1) Using existing environment.

Say you decide to lose weight this month. You have a blender you normally use to make milk smoothies. Rather than using the blender to make your usual smoothies, you use it to make healthier, fruit and vegetable smoothies instead. You may also have a swimming pool at your house which you never use. Now, you can leverage it by swimming regularly there.

(2) Modifying your environment.

Using the same weight loss goal example, modifying your environment includes: Encouraging your friends to join you in losing weight. Stocking up your fridge with healthy food. Putting up posters of thin, athletic people around your room. Setting your desktop wallpaper with an aspirational model. Writing out your goal and placing it in front of you. Throwing out your larger size clothes and filling out your wardrobe with right-sized or smaller sized clothes in preparation for your new weight.

(3) Moving yourself to a new environment.

Sometimes, this method is the most effective if it’s too troublesome to modify your environment. Join a weight loss club. Join exercise programs. Get a gym membership. Move to a new neighbourhood where there are only healthy eateries and no fastfood.

Think about one of the top goals you have currently and ask yourself these 3 questions:

(1) What are the ways your current environment can support you in your goal?

(2) How can you change your environment in such a way that it best helps you achieve your goal? (Read: Does Your Room Inspire You?)

(3) What other environments can you leverage on to generate the best momentum towards your goals?

By strategically using your environment for your goals, your goal pursuit process will become much more seamless. Have fun creating the best environment for your goals

Related Posts:

• Does Your Room Inspire You?
• Goal Achievement: Strategy
• Create Your Life Handbook
• Is Your Goal Worth 30 Minutes of Your Time Every Day?
• Not Getting What You Want? Time To Change Your Actions
• Declutter Your Home in 8 Easy-to-follow Steps
• Goal Achievement: Introduction
• 21 Tips To Wake Up Early

How is your room like? How do you feel whenever you are in it? Is it a place that inspires you?

The Importance Of Your Room

Many people don’t spend too much energy or time setting up their room. They see it as just a place which shelters them while they sleep and do their activities. However, your room is actually a place of significant importance, for three reasons:

Firstly, you spend a huge amount of time here throughout your life. Factor in the approximate 1/3 of our days which we spend sleeping and the times when we hang out in our room during weekends and after school/work on weekdays, and it becomes clear that your room is one of the places where you spend the most time in.

Secondly, a lot of your important thinking and decisions are made here. Chances are a lot of introspection, goal setting, planning, self evaluation, studying, working take place inside your room. This can be when you are conversing with friends on the phone/internet, emailing, surfing the net, working, etc.

Thirdly, it holds emotional significance. This is the place where you have your personal space and privacy to do what you want. It’s your safe alcove which you know will always be there for you to return to at the end of every day. It is where you grew up and will continue to grow up in

Improving Your Room

Given that, it is actually highly valuable to invest time and energy to make your room a place which inspires you. If you are going to spend so much time here, wouldn’t it make sense to make it a place where you will absolutely love to be in? In that sense, your room becomes a very vital goal achievement tool which sets you up in the right frame of attitude and mindset.

Some people have a separate study room and bedroom. Even then, the same principles apply that you should be creating a conducive environment for a place which you find yourself spending a lot of time in and doing a lot of thinking/decision making.

What Is Your Ideal Room?

What is your ideal room? A room that enables you and is conducive for your well-being can have varying different qualities. Here are some checklist questions you can use:

• Do you enjoy spending time in? Do you look forward to going back here at the end of every day?
• Does it make you feel excited and exuberant just being in it?
• Does it provide you with a peace of mind, absent of mental stress or anxiety?
• Does it enable you to be effective when doing your tasks?
• Is it conducive for the left brain aspect of yourself in thinking logically and rationally? Does it trigger the creative, right brain visionary aspect of yourself?
• Do you see your aspired self living here?

Based on the above, visualize your ideal room. How is it like? As you do that, factor in the following aspects of your room. In your ideal room, how will they be?

1. Area space of the room
2. Layout (positioning of furniture, objects, etc)
3. Type of furniture (your bed, wardrobe, bookshelf, desk, bedside table, etc)
4. Objects inside your room (lamp, fan, books, clothes, bed, bedsheets, stationery, amount of clutter, etc)
5. Free space (for walking around, moving in)

Now, take a look at the current state of your own room. Is it the same? Is it different? If it is different, how different is it? What are the immediate changes you can make to move towards your ideal vision of your room? What are the changes you can target to make in the long-term?

#1 and #3 tend to be changes you can effect in the long term, while #2, #4 and #5 can be worked on in the short-term. In particular, #4 – amount of clutter is something that can be addressed immediately. This can be in the form of removing old books, random junk, infrequently worn clothes, anything that you do not have a use for but is around ‘just in case’ you need to use it in the future. Many times, we keep a lot of things which we think we’ll use in the future, but never do.

How I Totally Turned Around My Room

My room in the past

My room used to be highly messy and disorganized. Clothes, things and books were just strewn everywhere. My worn clothes would typically be piled up at a random surface area. My textbooks and notes (I was still studying in university then) would be stacked up on the floor. My table was quite untidy. While it served its function well as my study/bedroom, I never did feel completely homely in it – It didn’t feel in sync with my self-identity. It wasn’t a place I would jump with excitement to be in, save for the fact that I get my own privacy to do what I want inside. There would be times when I felt emotionally and mentally stifled inside. I was not very proud of it and it wasn’t a place where I would openly invite my friends to come and hang out in.

Making the decision to change my room

In mid-2007, I was setting up a working space in my room for my office work, since my ex-company had a work-from-home option where we could spend one day a week working from our own homes. At that time, I thought I might as well be take this chance to re-do my whole room. After all, if I’m going to be spending a good portion of my life for the next few years in this room, why not invest proper time and energy to turn it around into a place where I would deeply relish every single moment of being in it?

Executing the change

With that, I set the vision in place for my ideal room which is exquisite, uplifting, pretty and homely.

I started off with a massive spring cleaning. I threw out a huge volume of unwanted things including clothes which I don’t wear, books (I couldn’t believe that I was still keeping textbooks and notes from back in secondary school), my old table which were not conducive for my work, random junk, non-working stationery, clutter, and so on. For the old books, letters, cards, miscellaneous things etc which I wanted to retain as keepsake, I put them inside very convenient storage boxes and placed them underneath my bed.

Then, with the help of my dad, we shifted the remaining furniture around to a layout which fully maximized the space in my room. I bought new furniture (table, lamp, printer, bedside table), new stationery, among many other things. I got a bedside table because I always thought it would be nice to have one where I can both fall asleep to and wake up to nice flowers as well as photos of me and my best friends. I placed flowers, potpourri, curtains and decorations all around the room to create a homely atmosphere. I exhibited all of my favorite gifts from my friends over the years. All these decisions were made based on what matched my ideal room vision.

Since I was busy working in the weekdays, I could only work on my room during the weekends. All in all, this whole change took about 2 months to complete.

An end result which completely paid off

The net result is a completely overhauled room and my own haven where I absolutely relish spending every single moment in. Just spending time in my room makes me feel extremely vitalized, inspired and exubrant, on top of my normal self! In fact, I was so proud of my accomplishment that I even threw a room warming party where my friends came over to celebrate and hang out

Pictures of My Room

Here, I will share with you selected pictures of my room They were all taken in Jan 1st 2008, but generally everything still looks pretty much the same as in the pictures.

This is my work desk. This is where I’m at when I’m using the internet, the computer and/or working on the site My laptop is now a pink Dell which I bought late last year at a computer fair. The mushroom at the back is the mushroom from Super-Mario Brothers, a classic game which I enjoyed playing from my childhood It’s actually a tissue paper holder. The globe you see to the right of the mushroom can be lit by a switch. I use to mark the places I’ve been to and to serve as a reminder of other places I want to visit someday in the future.

The lamp, which I bought from Ikea, is quite flexible – it can be rotated around and shifted up/down. There’s a full length mirror on the left of the table, which is not very visible in this picture. The printer on the right has been shifted to below my desk so I can have more space to put other things.

This is my notice board in front of my work desk It’s a corkboard which I use it to pin up inspirational quotes and articles which interest me at the moment. Two of the articles on right now are ’10 Tips To Become A Water Walker’ and ‘Seven Characteristics of Top Talent’. All the background and flowers you see on the noticeboard were actually manually stuck on by me.

The chair I sit on to work. The pink back cushion is a birthday gift from my friend last year. The little puppies underneath the bed are my bedroom slippers.

These are the outer doors of my wardrobe. I put up photos of all my best memories, my best/good friends, my colleagues, my oversea travels, birthday celebrations, and so on. Since this picture was taken in Jan 2008, there are actually about double the photos now than you see here. Whenever I looking at these pictures, I’m instantly reminded of all the wonderful moments in my life. It makes me grateful for everything that has transpired and excites me in what’s to come on next

Some ornaments I hang around to decorate the room.

My clothes, organized and arranged by segments inside my wardrobe. I have folded them to make them more compact and save space.

One of the shelves of my bookshelf. These are my graduation photos. (The left one is my graduation photo from kindergarten – with really short hair! The right one is from university).

The tortoises are birthday gifts from my friends (back then we were totally addicted on Gunbound which is a multiplayer 2-D side-scrolling shooting game. One of the bots I used very often was the turtle. The chain you see hanging around the tortise reads Kawaii – my nickname.)

My bed That’s two Elmos you see on the bed – the big one, which is a birthday gift from a friend when I was 15, and the small one on my pillow, which I had since I was born.

A closer look at the table beside my bed. The lamp is a touch-based lamp which I really like. It lights up to varying brightness with each touch on the metal base. I got it at a night market a few years ago and always thought it was quite a steal for the price it was selling at. The photos here are with my group of close friends from since secondary school days whom I’ve known for almost a decade.

I also have my journal below the glass surface of the table. However nowadays I just journal in my computer since it’s more efficient.

The ceiling of my room where I’ve stuck over 60 stars! These stars glow in the dark, so every night I fall asleep to a simulated starlit sky I wanted to get a picture of stars when it’s dark but my camera wasn’t able to capture the light.

How Can You Make Your Room More Inspiring Today?

Should you reduce your clutter? Should you shift your furniture around? Should you get furniture and objects that fit you better? How can you be taking little steps today to make your room more conducive? While this time and energy may seem to be huge investments in the beginning, bear in mind that this will become a very worthwhile investment which will pay off in spades in the long run

Related Posts:

• Declutter Your Home in 8 Easy-to-follow Steps
• Create Your Life Handbook
• Using Your Environment to Achieve Your Goals
• 101 Ways To Live Your Life To The Fullest
• How To Be A Dean’s Lister – Part 2
• Get Your Big Rocks In First
• You are the Average of the 5 People You Spend the Most Time With
• Is Your Goal Worth 30 Minutes of Your Time Every Day?