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.](/_q23u/2024/01/20240110_100712-1024x269.jpg)
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.](/_q23u/2024/01/20240110_103034-1024x576.jpg)
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.](/_q23u/2024/01/wp-1705397291529617217716587695929-1024x577.jpg)
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".](/_q23u/2024/01/dans-inner-peace-1024x697.jpg)
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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