How to Get Rid of Office Clutter

I came across this idea I was reading Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?: An Easy Plan for Losing Weight and Living More. It is fascinating to me the possibility of the link between clutter and fat. But it was a new way of looking at things.

In the book Peter Walsh pointed to a method of deciding what each area of your life would be like. I extrapolated that to “decide what each area of your house will be for”. And then it hit me. The way to determine clutter was to decide a purpose, then find everything that didn’t suit that purpose and either put it away or get rid of it.

My Office: Its Purpose

I decided, for the sake of starting easily, to start with my office. The purpose of my office is to be the place where I write, program, study and scrapbook. I also do correspondence here, writing emails, letters and creating greeting cards. I journal here. I sometimes work here. In order to be these things, it must be tidy, and have minimal decoration.

Deciding What Supports This Purpose

The next part was made much easier by deciding the purpose. Following Michelangelo’s lead, “The statue is already in the stone, has been in the stone since the beginning of time, and the sculptor’s job is to see it and release it by carefully scraping away the excess material.”, I was able to decide what stayed and what went. The memory box from my daughter’s infancy found a new home. Old stereo equipment got donated to the thrift store. The scrapbooking magazines and books were grouped together.

It was fairly easy to do this in my office, so I decided to extend it. More about the bedroom next week.