Clean Up the Clutter: Why Your Surroundings May Be Sabotaging Your Success

A messy desk, noisy room, or overcomplicated plan might be holding you back more than you think.

Productivity doesn't start with willpower—it starts with environment. KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA/Pexels

Does it feel as though no matter what you do or how much willpower you muster, you just can’t break through and make progress?

When you feel stuck, consider the ways in which your environment is hindering you. It can be easy to overlook the impact that our surroundings have on our ability to take decisive action and get essential tasks done, but disorder, temptation, distraction, and complexity in one’s environment can get in the way of taking even one step forward.

Here are four ways you can design your environment to reduce friction and support your goals.

Disorder

Take a look around your space and note all the ways it feels burdensome. You might see a stack of mail that you’ve neglected to process, clothing that needs to be put away, dust that needs clearing, dishes that need to be washed, or piles of miscellaneous items that need to be decided on and handled. Force yourself to see and tackle the disorder that you’ve been avoiding and perhaps even denying. While it may cause a sense of unease at first, it also might be the key to breaking through resistance.

When we allow clutter to build and avoid taking responsibility for our physical environment, it’s not long before the consequences of our neglect spill into other aspects of our lives. You want to go to the gym, but your gym clothes have been in the hamper for weeks. You want to make progress on your finances, but you can’t bring yourself to open that pile of mail. You want to update your website, but you can’t find your password. You want to work on a project, but the materials you need are difficult to access.

Whether your space is too dimly lit, your surroundings are too noisy, your things are disorganized, or the ways in which you numb and distract yourself are much easier to access than the ways in which you could make real progress in life—it’s time to bring order to the chaos.

Take the time to begin to dig through. Start small, celebrate small wins along the way, and don’t give up until it’s done. Clearing your space of clutter and messiness and establishing orderly systems and spaces will support your success going forward.

Temptation

If you want to lose 20 pounds but your pantry is stocked with candy and cookies, temptation is going to be difficult to resist. If you’re trying to write but you’ve got social media and news sites open on your computer, temptation is going to be difficult to resist. If you’re trying to get out of debt but you spend your leisure time browsing online shops, temptation, again, is going to be difficult to resist.

Set up your environment in a way that removes temptation to the greatest extent possible. Get rid of the junk food, clear your computer’s desktop, keep your phone out of reach, or cut up your credit cards—do what you have to do to reduce the amount of temptation you contend with each day.

Willpower is something worth strengthening, but you can design your environment so that summoning heroic willpower isn’t totally necessary. If there are no cookies in your house, it will take a lot more effort for you to indulge in cookies.

Design your life in a way that makes it difficult to do what you don’t want to do, and easy to do what you should do.

Distraction

Distraction is a huge problem for a lot of us these days. If you can’t find time to singularly focus on what you’re trying to work on, it’s going to be much more difficult to make progress. You can set up your environment to reduce the possibility of distraction as much as possible.

First and foremost, keep your phone out of reach. Design a work zone that is clear of all but the work at hand. Set up your work schedule in a way that you carve out solitude, free of distractions from other people. When you can set yourself up to focus deeply, you’ll find progress beginning to build.

Strategies such as waking earlier than anyone else in your home, reducing noise, turning off notifications on digital devices, and incorporating incremental breaks between sessions of deep focus can improve your ability to make consistent progress.

Complexity

Might you be overcomplicating things? We often make tasks more complex than they need to be. When the idea of beginning is overwhelming, it’s tempting to avoid the work altogether.

Consider the most essential elements of your work. If the point is to, for example, reduce your spending, that may be too vague and inconceivable. However, if you simply say you want to spend $500 less than last month, then you can look for ways to make cuts that add up to that amount. You’ve clarified and simplified your goal.

Work can seem overwhelming when we aim for perfection and fear falling short, overthink all of the ways things can go awry, overestimate the number of steps it will take, and think about the entire project rather than small, immediate steps one at a time.

Simplify your state of mind—the portable mental environment you’re bringing to the task at hand—and see if your procrastination doesn’t wither away.