Time to declutter your life

Just after Christmas - it’s now the perfect time to look at ways how you can improve your focus by de-cluttering your life.

Go around your house and ask yourself the following questions whilst you are holding each item.

• How often do I use this?

• Do I really need it?

• Does it enhance my life?

• Does it cause me stress as it is part of my clutter?

These questions should put you on the right track.  Now consider our five tips below:-

1. A great test is to put everything that fits into this category into a bin bag. Anything you need over the course of the next month take it out of the bag, at the end of the month throw the bin bag away.

2. Accept that you will not buy anything else at all until you have carried out all these exercises. Moving forward before you buy anything always ask yourself, am I buying this for later, for show, or to really use now?

3. Hang your clothes in the wardrobe all facing the same direction. If you wear anything face it in the opposite direction. At the end of the month address all the clothes you have not worn, get a bin bag and carry out step one again.

4. Moving forward consider choosing experiences over material items. Millennials are growing up in a society where the largest retail store doesn’t actually own any items (Amazon), the biggest transportation service doesn’t own any vehicles (Uber), and the most popular hotel chain doesn’t own any hotels (AirBnB). When you consider this perhaps owning things
   is a thing of the past.

5. Don’t spend too much time telling the world what you are doing, you will lose many of the upsides of experientialism. Psychologists discovered that there are two types of motivation – intrinsic, when you do something for yourself and the enjoyment of the experience, and extrinsic, when you do something to impress others or for some reward at the end. If your motivation for doing something is intrinsic it is more likely to make you happy. With anything that you do, it is vital that you do it first of all for yourself, and for the pure enjoyment of the experience itself. So put down your phone, stop filming and do whatever it is you are doing as if no one else is watching.

For more helpful tips to get out with the old and in with the new, how about you listen to our podcast series Making The Change. For more tips and advice, head to our TikTok channel.