De-Clutter Your Life, Part 2

Last Monday, I talked about de-cluttering our lives in terms of stuff. But it isn’t just knick-knacks, paper, and old clothes that clutter up our lives. Sometimes it’s activities, and yes, even people.

Although it may seem overwhelming at first, it’s actually easy to de-clutter stuff compared to people. We can’t just throw people away, and we certainly don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. We may not even have anyone in our life we want to throw out, but we may find we are overextending ourselves, allowing other people’s wants and needs to fill up our personal time and space so we feel the need to de-clutter them.

If we are not getting enough fun time, down time, or time to ourselves, we may need to de-clutter. We may need to look at our schedules and decide just how much we really can do so we don’t feel overwhelmed by what is cluttering up our lives. It may mean leaving a group or dropping out of an activity, or simply doing less with a group.

Another place in our lives that might be cluttered and out of control is our time spent online. We may want to think long and hard about why we use the Internet. What is the reason why we have Internet service, and are we using it for additional purposes beyond that? Perhaps we have Internet service for work and not to socialize, but we find ourselves being pulled into socializing with it. Especially if we are trying to promote our business online, it’s easy to get caught up spending more time than we want on Social Media sites. We might go on Facebook to see whether people are “liking” our blog, only to end up commenting on our old college roommate’s pictures of her grandchildren. One aspect of Facebook I’ve had to set strong boundaries with is the chat feature. Chats can take a long time and you never know when someone is going to want to chat with you. If you are only going on Facebook for five minutes to post something, turn off the chat feature so you don’t get caught up in a half-hour conversation.

Email is another way people can clutter our lives. I have found that sometimes if you email someone back, he will keep emailing you immediately, and if you reply right away every time, you’ll end up spending all day emailing. When possible, limit yourself to one email per friend per day. And don’t feel guilty not commenting on everything people forward to you. While you want to be friendly and you certainly don’t want to lose friends, you also don’t want to spend an hour looking at photos of sunsets with inspirational verses just to be polite when you’d rather spend your time doing something you would enjoy more. After all, if you are polite, the person will think you really want to look at all those photos and keep sending them.

Setting boundaries with other people so our time does not get cluttered is not always easy, but we can set boundaries with ourselves and stick to them. For example, we can tell ourselves we’ll be part of the group, but we won’t join the group for coffee every week after the meeting; we’ll only go the first week of the month. Or we can decide we will schedule in thirty minutes a day for online activities, but we won’t allow ourselves more than that.

Setting boundaries with ourselves for how much clutter we’ll allow into our lives will help us weed out the activities, people, and relationships that really matter to us so we have more time to enjoy them and more personal space and time so we feel healthy and happy.