Whether it’s the physical or mental – when we work in clutter – we never achieve our best work.
Think of an athlete, a soccer player, trying to pass on a field littered with garbage – they can’t setup a pass because the ball keeps bouncing off of a garbage can and going the wrong way.
Now think of your office, books and manuals strewn around the floor and on your desk while you try to focus on what is in front of you? It’s a little hard when you have 17 sticky notes around your monitor with things you need to be doing when you are trying to focus on the current task now.
Now in your mind, how many different projects are you working on, how many can you keep separate without requirements on one not spilling into the other? Is one project nagging at you the most but you don’t want to work on it because it’s going to take too long to get started on it?
Whatever the reason we want to use, one of the primary reasons for failing to achieve our goals is clutter. We have too much going on and can’t focus on the one or many that we need to do to move forward. Maybe we are trying to do too much in too tight a timeframe or maybe we are trying to do too much with the limited amount of resources we have.
There is a reason that so many of us look forward to “Spring Cleaning” – it’s the time of the year where we all commit to throwing the garbage, the clutter out, so we feel unencumbered and free to move forward and focus on what we really want to achieve.
