I sat there and stared at the piles of paper, books, magazines, and just plain junk that had accumulated on my desk over the past few months. I put my head down in my hands and almost started to cry.
“I hate clutter,” I cried out to myself. This time I didn’t know what to do. I had a big project to do and nowhere to do it. That pile of junk was keeping me from taking action.
Right then, I did something that would change my life forever. I grabbed a large cardboard box, took five minutes, and sorted all the junk into three piles. The first pile was trash and went into the trash can, the second was important stuff that required action like bills and correspondence. This stuff went into an inbox. The rest of the stuff, that I didn’t know what to do with, went into the cardboard box.
I put the cardboard box under my desk. This became a recycle bin, a temporary holding place for all the stuff I didn’t know what to do with.
This bin saved my desk.
I now had a clean desk, that I hadn’t seen in months.
I made a pact with myself that day, to keep my desk clean no matter what. As things came in they went one of three places… the trash, the in-box, or to the recycle bin.
As time went on, the recycle bin filled up. To fix the problem, I would take the bottom half of the bin, and sort it again. Since the stuff had been there for over a month, it was now much easier to throw away or shred.
This recycle bin gave me a buffer and made it much quicker to deal with the daily onslaught of stuff.
I’ve put together a video that shows the process and the tools needed to accomplish it. The good news, once you have the simple tools, it only takes a few minutes to gain control. And you can purchase all the tools for only a few dollars.
Watch the video and regain control. Take your life back from the ravages of clutter!
