[Bloganuary] Clutter

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Where can you reduce clutter in your life?

Oh, everywhere.

A cluttered desk.
I’d love to claim that my desk isn’t always so chaotic and that much of this mess resulted from a recent shelf collapse1, but it’s rarely much better than this.

But perhaps the most-valuable place I could reduce clutter would be… in my head!

Dan, a wry smile on his face, pointing at his own head.
Y’know… in here.

If you were to open up my head and look inside, what you’d see would probably look a little like my desk2: remnants of dozens of half-finished or in-progress projects, all piled on top of one another in a chaotic muddle that’d take some kind of wacky radical mind to reverse-engineer.

An extremely cluttered room: shelved board games line the walls, heaps of boxes fill all the floor space and are stacked chest-high.
Of course, some of the physical clutter in my life right now relates to the fact that we’re having our attics converted right now, and so everything that was formerly stored in them (or otherwise would be in the way of the builders) is now stacked… well: here.

That’s not to say I’m disorganised (although I am at least some of the time!), but it does mean that I’m perhaps more-prone to distraction and context-switching than I might prefer. Compared to times in my life that I’ve been less “clutter-brained”, I find it harder to gain and maintain focus.

A person in an orange jumper holds a cardboard box labelled "BRAIN", which completely covers their head. From outside the image, an hand above the box is holding a piece of paper labelled "DAN'S INNER PEACE".
“It turns out your inner peace was inside you all along, sandwiched between a murder mystery game concept and an idea for a social network for dogs. You couldn’t find it because this half-baked idea for a content management system was on top of it.” Also, does this image seem familiar to you?

One of the goals I’m going to be proposing to my coach this year will include an examination of how I clutter my thinking (and whether my environmental clutter is a reflection of the same), and what I can do to get better at channelling my creativity into fewer things at once3.

But perhaps I could stand to do a little decluttering in my physical space, too.

Footnotes

1 True, but that was a while back and I haven’t found time to put it up again, so I oughta take some responsibility.

2 This is, of course, a metaphor. If you actually open up my head you’ll see, like, brains and gunk. Also, it will invalidate my warranty, so don’t do it.

3 Note that I said at once. I still want to keep those bajillion projects on a go. I just want to be more organised and disciplined about compartmentalising them so my energy’s less-divided when I’m trying to focus on a single thing for a while!

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