Are You a Basket Case?

Clutter is a great distraction.  There are a number of solutions to reducing clutter but the one that I see implemented most often is the placing of “baskets” in those places that tend to collect clutter.  I am fairly organized and as I write this in my office I notice that there are no less than fifteen such containers.  Not all of them are baskets.  I have a couple of wooden boxes, there are metal tins, and two large wooden boxes.  Each of these items were acquired with the intent of organizing my clutter.  I am guessing that each time I have introduced a new container the idea has worked.  The problem is that every time my office becomes cluttered I acquire a new basket of some sort.  This is how I arrived at more than fifteen.   I don’t know the contents of all the containers but several of them are full.

Baskets take up physical space.  Yet, they don’t exist just in our offices.  There are a number of other physical and virtual containers in our lives.  Your email inbox is one of those places.  The Task or To Do List serves as another container and then there are all the paper notes.  There are cloud containers such as Dropbox and Evernote.  These are all wonderful tools but they can be like just another basket.  Just yesterday I decided to clean up the clutter on my computer desktop.  I moved the files to a folder called “Desktop to vet” this sounded very organized when I created it yesterday.  I just checked and there are 102 files.  That is not organized.

I have way too many “baskets” in my life.  This is not a post about getting to inbox zero.  Rather, I am just concerned that we are holding too much stuff.  I am suggesting that we need to empty the containers and I can certainly say that in my case I need to reduce the number of baskets.  

The following is my plan.  First, I am committing to review the contents of at least one container every day.  The goal is to make decisions about where stuff belongs.  Each day I will place the contents in an appropriate long term location which will frequently include deleting, giving away, or throwing away items.  My goal is to reduce baskets and know their contents.  Here are some examples of potential baskets.  Empty the Trash on your computer;  Delete no less than 25 email messages every day;  Remove papers from your briefcase or purse;  Read the notes in your notebook and file them in an appropriate place:  Make decisions about files on your desktop and delete them.  Reduce your cloud storage.  Open an actual basket and get rid of stuff.  Do this every day.  Start today.

Will you join me in assessing just how many “baskets” you have in your life and empty a few?  Hit me back to share your thoughts.