How decluttering your home office can reduce stress in your life
Sharon McNulty believes sitting amid constant reminders of stuff needing attention puts a multitasking-type of strain on your brain.
She used a pile of paperwork — laptop lead placed on top — as a barrier to stop the kids getting around the side of the kitchen table that was her work station. With office paraphernalia strewn around the kitchen, the laptop constantly plugged in, she felt her working day never ended.
This mum-of-two is just one among the whole new population of workers pushed by the pandemic to work remotely. “The kids were being home-schooled in the kitchen and they might be arguing at one side of the table while Mum was on a Zoom call,” says Sharon McNulty, professional organiser and founder of Serenity Sparks Joy (https://www.serenitysparksjoy.co.uk/).
“My helping her to de-clutter wasn’t going to keep the kids happy but it did mean one less stress in her life,” says McNulty, a KonMari consultant — she uses Marie Kondo’s de-cluttering method.
McNulty believes sitting in clutter — with constant overwhelming reminders of stuff needing attention — puts a multi-tasking demand on the brain. Based in Co Tyrone but working throughout Ireland, she says most clients — whose de-cluttering impulse was fired by their new working-from-home reality — are parents aged between mid-30s and mid-50s. She has seen very challenging home-office situations: the 19-year-old with his own business moving back into his parents’ house and operating out of a box-room that was essentially a store-room.
But she has also come across scenarios that are actually well set up for home-working but are buried under clutter. “One man had a big office, a really beautiful office desk in front of the window. He used it for 10 minutes the first morning and then moved right back to the kitchen table,” says McNulty, recalling how the desk held hundreds of coin bags, two laptops (one on top of the other), two printers (one not working), loads of pens, paperwork and unopened post.
“Tucked in behind the door was a filing cabinet with plastic bags full of sentimental stuff he hadn’t got around to sorting. The floor was full of books and the room was coming down with leads and cables — he didn’t know what half of them were for,” says McNulty, who worked with him over three sessions, giving ‘homework’ between each session — the first day’s was to shred all paperwork needing shredding.
The psychological difference between pre and post-clearout is obvious, she says, when you see someone whose heart sank at the thought of work to now being highly-motivated to get to that desk.
Gary Wallace is founder and director of Core NI, which mainly works in schools delivering physical activity and wellbeing programmes. His business moved online with Covid-19 and Gary, also a coach, was doing daily PE sessions with schools and wellbeing sessions with companies. He worked from his garden, his living room and a spare room already converted to an office.
“I found everything started to get cluttered in the office. There was lots of equipment we’d use in schools — hula hoops, bean bags, footballs — and lots of old merchandise — kids’ hats, t-shirts. Papers were piling up combined with lots of personal stuff.
“I just felt I wasn’t able to get structure. I was moving around different stuff and feeling the house was too small to hold it all” says Gary, who’s single with a 10-year-old son, who was in the house a lot during lockdown.
Gary says his decision to get professional de-cluttering sessions was an investment in “my mental health, my goals, my business”. It led to practical changes: saying goodbye to books he “wasn’t really feeling so I wasn’t finishing them”, storing merchandise in a space in his son’s wardrobe freed up by donating old, unwanted toys and sorting paperwork into ‘get rid and shred’, ‘file and keep’ and ‘take action’ piles.
“I needed to create new ideas in my business,” he says. “To do that I needed a space where I could be relaxed and creative — my office became that. Now I can move around in there. I’m not looking at things that are screaming ‘do this’. I can focus.”
Sarah Reynolds, professional organiser and founder of Organised Chaos (https://www.organisedchaos.ie/), says there’s certainly a bigger de-cluttering imperative since people began working from home and finding themselves in the middle of “all this stuff coming down on top of them”. Describing her business as “like a fitness coach for your house — you’re losing the clutter weight”, she says having too much stuff around affects productivity.
“It’s hard to concentrate when you have this constant to-do in the corner of your eye — your brain’s saying ‘you haven’t got around to this yet’. And people don’t realise the impact their environment’s having on them until they start de-cluttering and organising. Only when they see the space opening up do they realise how much it was weighing on them.”
Reynolds has seen demand from corporate clients wanting to organise their employees’ remote work stations. “If you’re on a lot of webinars, virtual meetings and video calls and people see a lot of clutter in your background, it could show lack of attention to detail. If it’s ongoing it doesn’t look very professional, so we’ve helped employees organise home offices and especially that background shot,” says Reynolds, explaining that this has involved assisting with good lighting, video angles and generally styling the background space to look more professional.
- Look at flat surfaces on your immediate eye-line. Clearing these is a quick win and will immediately lighten the room.
- Put a time limit on de-cluttering: ‘I’m going to organise the filing cabinet from 10am-12 noon Saturday’. Accept de-cluttering is an investment over time. Clutter didn’t build up overnight so it won’t go overnight. Do a bit regularly, not just once every now and again.
- Don’t zigzag — create a ‘belong elsewhere’ zone outside door of your office and return items where they belong at end of your organising session. This prevents distraction.
Breda Stack (https://thedecluttertherapist.ie/) is founder of Ireland’s National De-clutter Day and author of Declutter Therapy.
She says it isn’t unusual for a crisis like Covid-19 to cause people to re-evaluate and re-prioritise different areas of their lives. “For those who had de-cluttering somewhere on their radar, lockdown was the perfect opportunity to get stuck in. Some felt they had no more excuses. ‘Mad to get at it’ and ‘Feeling really ready for it now’ are statements I heard quite a bit!”
Stack says when it comes to de-cluttering personal items, if we’re held back by heavy emotions (guilt, embarrassment, perfectionism, feeling overwhelmed, sentiment or grief — whether conscious of these or not) we find de-cluttering slow, frustrating and uncomfortable. So the first step before you even start is to gently identify and work on overcoming any unhelpful or uncomfortable thoughts, beliefs or emotions around de-cluttering.
She recommends:
- Plan simple, manageable time-based chunks of de-cluttering tasks in advance; write them down to strengthen commitment.
- Gather up all practical resources you need, e.g. boxes/bags to complete the job. Buy storage solutions only after you de-clutter.
- Learn about your body shape, colouring, signature style and interior/home style preferences to help inform and give you confidence in your decision-making.
- To stay motivated, be clear about how your home and life (including work) will change for the better as a result of de-cluttering.
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