Today’s IORG Guest Post is from Ingrid Pope, executive coach and professional mind de-clutterer. Ingrid’s mission is to de-clutter the world of everything that gets in the way of our effectiveness, our focus, and our life by creating space to think, to work, to live. https://creatingspacecoaching.co.uk/
Our lives are a whirlwind of activities, running from one thing to the next, working to tick everything off the to-do list, and just generally trying to stay sane in our very fast-paced world. In my last piece, we looked at digital clutter. Here are my top tips for de-cluttering for creating some mental space to think more clearly again.
De-cluttering: top 10 tips for creating mental space
- Get everything out of your head. Overwhelm comes from trying to hold too much and worrying about forgetting something critically important. Putting everything on paper (or any other preferred material or device) will take away the pressure of having to remember things.
- Start the day with intention: every morning, as you wake up or stand in the shower, identify the 1-3 things that you want to achieve that day.
- Keep the focus: throughout the day, come back to the 1-3 things you set your intention on and do those first.
- Eat that frog! (based on the book by Brian Tracy of the same name): do your most dreaded task first thing in the morning. That will get it out of the way and you won’t be thinking about if for the rest of the day.
- Control your tech: as already mentioned in my top 10 tips for decluttering our digital world, reduce the distractions by turning off all notifications from all your device, and only let emergency calls through.
- De-clutter your assumptions: we often spend a lot of time thinking and/or worrying about all manner of things and creating colorful scenarios in our heads, which might have nothing to do with reality at all.
- Quieten your inner dialog: listen out for the mental noise and unhelpful chatter that you are creating yourself, acknowledge it, and then set it aside.
- Simplify, simplify, simplify: at every opportunity, go for what is the simplest option and remove everything that causes unnecessary complexity.
- De-clutter everything that’s not yours: we can devote much energy worrying about things that are nothing to do with us, and all to do with someone else and their clutter which you can do little about.
- Go outside: taking a break in the fresh air is hugely restorative and takes our head out of the detail for a while.
Do continue to share your tips with the community too by commenting below. And in the meantime, happy de-cluttering!
Ingrid.