While giant piles of mail, clothes and stuff is an eyesore, the more dangerous effects of clutter can be on your physical and mental wellbeing. Stress levels soar, dust and dander makes it hard to breathe and the emotional anguish can leave you tired. Cut the clutter in these five areas of your life to promote a happy and healthy Organize & Create Discipline lifestyle.
Calendar
– Keep it digital. Easily change, delete and organize your schedule from your phone, tablet or computer. No more scribble marks that are hard to read, no more missing appointments.
– Color coordinate your calendar. Work meetings in blue, personal time in red, exercise in yellow and so forth. Look back in a month. Did you dedicate enough time to exercise? Is your work schedule overloaded with appointments? Your calendar is your tool to a well-rounded work/life balance.
– Set appropriately timed reminders. Five minutes before you need to arrive might not give you ample time to finish up your current task and get to a meeting on time.
Desk
– Get rid of the piles of paper and superfluous tchotchkes on your desk. Maintaining a clear area allows you or the cleaning crew to easily clean once a week, reducing the presence of allergy-causing dust.
– Personalize your space. A glimpse of your favorite mug from Paris or a picture of you and your loved ones in Hawaii can immediately make you smile. Just don’t overload your space so your personal life becomes a distraction from your work.
– Toss the Post Its. While the mosaic of colorful squares may seem like a good idea, they more often lead to sticky situations. Meetings can float away, lists get buried under more pressing notes and the chaos of pink, blue and yellow around your monitor becomes stressful.
– Keep one notebook on your desk to take notes on the fly. Loose leaves of paper lead to disorder and can easily get lost.
Food
– Organize your home pantry with healthy meal and snack choices at eyelevel. You will naturally gravitate to those options first.
– Reach out to the office manager. Suggest the communal fridge gets emptied every Friday. A clean fridge at work encourages people to bring healthy lunch options from home.
– Get new Tupperware once a year to carry your lunch and snacks. Scraggly, plastic containers are just plain unappetizing.
Mail
– Sort through the mail the minute you grab it out of the mailbox. Shred or toss what you don’t need and file only the important stuff. It’s an easy “To Do” to cross off the list.
– Start paperless billing. Less mail equals less stress.
– Electronic mail also contributes to clutter. Take 5-10 minutes a day to unsubscribe to e-mail newsletters, flash sale announcements and membership updates you don’t want.
Personal Time
– Declutter your friendships. Weed out friends that are emotional taxing and dedicate time to those that lift you up.
– Schedule time for exercise. Whether it’s a 20 min run, a power walk around your neighborhood or a good old fashioned pillow fight, exercise is vital to relieving stress and staying healthy.
– Treat yourself! Whether it’s a trip to the spa, a manicure, playing video games or watching football set a personal appointment every week.
– Don’t cancel on yourself. If you don’t think these personal appointments are important, no one else will.
About Justin Klosky, Founder/Creative Director of O.C.D. Experience
As a child, Justin Klosky loved to count, analyze, and categorize everything in sight. Eventually diagnosed with OCD, he found ways to tap the benefits of his condition rather than see it as debilitating. Today’s he’s founded a successful firm, the O.C.D. Experience, building on his principles of Organize, Create, Discipline to help high-end clients get control of their lives through time management skills, getting rid of clutter, simplifying their habits, and rethinking storage solutions and systems. The O.C.D. Experience also teaches them the discipline to maintain their serene new sense of order.
O.C.D. has now made its mark in New York City, Los Angeles and Florida and other top US Cities. Justin Klosky is the Organizational Expert on The Talk, has appeared on the Today Show, Anderson Cooper and has been featured in US Weekly, Real Simple, People, New York Times, and more
Justin’s high-profile clientele include Sharon and Jack Osbourne, Julie Chen, Paul Feig, Bryce Dallas Howard, Topher Grace, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and Saks Fifth Avenue.
Justin graduated from New York University and just finished his book titled Organize & Create Discipline: An A-Z Guide to an Organized Existence being published by Penguin in 2013.
For more information on the O.C.D. Experience please visithttp://www.ocdexperience.com.
Check out Justin on The Talk!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QyLfbyp306c#!
