Is clutter boxing you in?

Anyone who has known me personally knows that in my home life I’m not good at putting things away. I’m also a hoarder. I get it from my parents. I don’t know where they got it from because my grandparents always had very tidy homes.

Let me introduce you to when I think I justified this behavior. For most of my 20s, I lived by myself. I was also focusing all of my energy on working in theater. Having a gift for crafting and sewing and a willful need to be poor, I often took on costume design gigs for storefront theaters in Chicago. At the time $200 was that going for you to design and build a show. I hear that nowadays it’s only about $300 which is a GD travesty and something maybe I’ll talk about more in another blog. When I was designing a show, my studio apartment was often my workshop, and since I was only making $200 and usually rehearsing and performing in another show and working some sort of waitressing or office job to pay the rent, I would forgo picking up after myself and my apartment would often look like a tornado passed over it. My floor was covered in piles of clothes and sewing projects with hardly anywhere to walk.

This came to be what I thought to be a trademark for my creativity. I had this notion that if I were tidy and organized I would also suddenly somehow become a linear, rule following thinker. This frame of mind was also challenging to my roommate when I had one. I tried to contain my mess, but her biggest pet peeve is that my shoes would be wherever I felt like taking them off. I would come home from work and find piles of my shoes on my bed about once a week when she got fed up. I was the bad roommate. Thankfully, it didn’t destroy our friendship, but as an adult I look back and see that I was trying her patience. In that way, I was a total jerk.

I did something recently that challenged my perception that I had to be messy to be creative. Yesterday, fed up with how much time I waste trying to find documents and facing an entire workday with only one meeting on my schedule, I set forth to organize my desktop. I have always relied on the search feature to find anything I need. I try to label things with names that are easily searchable. For example, I have a list of questions that I ask almost every potential instructor in a phone interview. I practically have the list memorized, but I still like to print a copy of the question so I can make notes during the call. I have no idea where this document lives on my hard drive. I simply go to the search bar, type the word “phone,” hit enter and it’s usually in the list that comes up. The system is served me pretty well.

But after eight years of working in the same place, it’s overwhelming to look through my files. I have 16 files labeled resume on my Desktop, only six of them are mine. Every workshop I’ve ever presented has multiple copies of the outline, the bibliography, and the PowerPoint. I have a doc that I used as a brain dump and several docs journaling to sort through issues. There are files on people who haven’t worked for me for years. The list goes on.

But yesterday, when I took the time to begin organizing, I became a little addicted. Two things happened. One, I gave gentle contemplation to a lot of my practices as I opened files, decided if I still needed them, and decided what folder they should fall into. Two, I discovered that there is a low grade stress constantly in my work life (and probably in my personal life) that originates from the din of the mess around me. It was almost like there was a constant buzzing from a fluorescent light that suddenly went away, and I didn’t realize that the buzzing bothered me until I felt the peace of silence.

When I think of how much time and energy I’m going to save by being able to go straight to a document or a file to work on it, I realize this newfound efficiency frees up time to express some creativity. Last night, I started my blog instead of catching up on work from the day. Today, I did a GYROTONIC workout. A studious one where I took time with my foundations manual to see if I were missing any details.

Ah, creativity. The precious commodity that I thought could only come out of mild chaos. Clearing out some clutter gave me the space in my schedule to do all the things that I’m always saying that I will do you as soon as I have some time.

So I guess in this case, the messy artist just grew up a little. I’ve become the mature creative, and found a way to carve out space for the real meat of my work.

If you’re one of these people who has brilliant ideas, but never seems to have the time, maybe you should try to cut some of the clutter. Here’s what I plan to do: I’m going to commit one hour each week to organizing my work. I’m gonna put it on my work calendar as a meeting with myself where the agenda is to hunt out clutter in my office, in my hard drive, and my inbox. Feel free to hop on this journey with me. Let’s see where this goes.

Have any thoughts about this blog? Any tips you’d like to share from your own life?

I would love to hear them. Feel free to comment below.