Five Places You May Not Realize You Have Clutter

So far this month, in our quest to help you with your New Year’s resolution of de-cluttering, we’ve focused mainly on your home. But if you’re prone to clutter and “stuff” hoarding, there are actually plenty of other places you may want to consider in your de-cluttering effort. To help you wrap your head entirely around it, today we’ve got a quick list of five other places you may have clutter that should be cleared but not realize it.

1. In Your Car (Which is Not a Gym Locker!)

In our experience, the most common place that clutterers accumulate clutter that isn’t the home is in the car. Especially in a society where commuting is the norm and many people spend literally hours per day in their car, the clutter can add up quickly. In this case, it’s likely that the clutter in your car isn’t necessarily tied to emotional or mental issues with “stuff” and it’s more about just finding a way to get organized about regularly clearing the clutter from your car. Chances are the majority of what you need to clear out of there would fall into the trash or recycling sortable pile!

Our Pro Tip: Make it a once a week, scheduled task to clear out your car. If you do it that way, it will probably only take about fifteen minutes. The key is putting it on your calendar and sticking to it!

2. And Then There Actually Is Your Gym Locker

Or your school locker, or your work locker. Lockers of all kinds can be the center of clutter in a person’s life. After all, they are designed to be storage facilities. The problem is that many of us continue to store and store and store in them and never clean them out. What’s the downside (aside from possible grossness when your sweaty gym clothes start to add up)? We don’t want to fall back on the cliché that “A cluttered desk equals a cluttered mind” but there is some truth to it. The more you reduce clutter in all areas of your life, the less you’ll feel that you need to accumulate it to begin with.

Our Pro Tip: You have a gym bag! Use it! Take things home regularly (don’t leave them in your bag or car) instead of letting them build up. Even a bit of locker clutter can get out of hand quickly.

3. Oh, And About that Cluttered Desk.

The sad truth of the matter is that many of us spend more time at work than we do at home. Even if you work a minimum eight hours a day for five days a week, that’s almost a full two days of time at your desk (assuming you work an office job, which we’re assuming since you’re reading a paragraph about cluttered desks!). Even if you don’t have an office job with a desk or cube, most of us have home office desks for our personal paperwork and projects. And all those desks, across the board, get cluttered. And not just cluttered with trash and recycling – cluttered with mementos and knick knacks that we bring from home. Hey, we like pictures of our cats and kids, too, but there needs to be a limit!

Our Pro Tip: Organizers are your friend here. Use them to sort what you really need and make sure there is a trash can right next to your desk for quickly disposing of trash. Finally, no more than 25% of your desk space for personal kitsch.

4. Your Crafting or Upycycling Area

You’re probably thinking that it’s ironic that we even have this one on here given how much we often advise you to reduce clutter by using items you can’t bear to get rid of in upcycling and crafting projects. But the risk of that solution is that you’ll simply transfer your clutter to a different area that’s labeled as a crafting or upcycling project area. Just pause for a moment and think of all the crafting or upcycling or project areas you know of and how cluttered they can appear to the casual viewer. Now think truthfully about whether that applies to your area at all.

Our Pro Tip: Give yourself a schedule of crafting or upcycling projects and, if you don’t meet it, get the items you were saving/hoarding for that project out of your house. We all save items for projects that, truthfully, we never get to.

5. The Most Important Location – Your Mind

Remember earlier when we quoted the cliché “A cluttered desk means a cluttered mind?” We do believe that very strongly – even if it sounds cheesy. And we think it extends to more than a desk. And we also think that it can go in the opposite direction. A cluttered mind can lead to mental and emotional practices that result in stuff clutter as well. And overcoming clutter in your mind can be much more challenging than just sorting out a closet. It’s so challenging that, while we’ve definitely got a pro tip for you, we won’t pretend to give you all of the solutions here and now. Instead, we’d like you to just take a moment and think about whether the idea of clutter in your mind applies to you.

Our Pro Tip: Even if meditation isn’t entirely your thing, be sure you’re getting at least some quiet, down, “me” time each day. And that, very clearly, means time without media (audio or visual) running in the background.

Did we miss a place that clutter builds up that you want to share with us? If so, just tell us about it on one of the social media channels below.

Photo Credit: Denise Krebs via Flickr