Chaos to Peace with Conny: Clearing Clutter & Organizing with a Spiritual Twist for Busy Solopreneurs Who Work from Home

208. There Is More To Clutter Than You Think (Decluttering and Organizing Your Life and Business)

• Conny Graf

Share episode

Today I go back to the basics and talk about what clutter is. 

A messy house, an overflowing closet, a garage or basement filled to the brim, a messy office, a chaotic desk, an overflowing inbox, overdue bills, non-existent financial overview.... those are all examples of clutter, but there is so much more to it

I cover 4 categories of clutter and within these categories I talk about 6 different types of clutter that can occur in your life and business. Some are more obvious and others is more sneaky. We all have clutter in our life and business, the question is, are we dealing with it or avoiding it? 

Together we dive into the world of clutter beyond the physical mess, tune in for transformative insights!

>> I'd love to hear from you, send me a Text Message ;-)

From Chaos to Peace Consulting Inc - https://connygraf.com

Get notified of the next live round of Chaos to Peace Jumpstart

Conny Graf:

Welcome to my podcast from Chaos to Peace with Conny. I am Conny Graf and your host, and I will explore with you how a few minutes a day can keep the chaos away. And with chaos we're talking about the physical, digital, social, financial, mental, emotional and spiritual clutter that can accumulate in our life and business. In every episode, I want to make you aware how clutter is so much more than you think, how it affects your finances and how clearing your clutter leads to more time, more money and more peace. Let's go Well. Hello, my friend. Welcome to another episode of From Chaos to Peace with Conny. Thank you so much for allowing me back into your ears Today.

Conny Graf:

I want to go back to basics and talk about what clutter really is. You hear me say a lot that clutter is actually way more than you think, but let me ask you first what comes to mind when you hear the word clutter. Do you think about a messy house, an overflowing closet, or a garage or basement filled to the brim? Or in your business, for example? Do you think of a messy office, a chaotic desk, an overflowing inbox, overdue bills, non-existent financial overview? Well, my friend, those are all examples of clutter, that is true, but then there is so much more to it. There is a quote from Elianor Brown, an internationally recognized inspirational speaker, writer, self-care coach and workshop leader, and she says clutter is not just physical stuff, it's old ideas, toxic relationships and bad habits. Clutter is anything that does not support your better self, and I love that quote so much. This is also why I say clearing your clutter is self-love, because clutter doesn't support your better self, just like Elianor Brown says. Another definition of clutter is from Karen Kingston, the author of the best-selling book Clear your Clutter with Frank Shui, and she says clutter is a things you don't use or love. B things that are untidy or disorganized. C too many things in too small of a space and d anything unfinished Okay. And so, again, even reading this or hearing this in this case, some might only think of the physical clutter in their house, garage office or in their car, or in their closet or in their computer. But again, there is so much more to clutter. These are the levels that come to my mind, the types of clutter that I help my clients with and that I sometimes struggle too with. So, with the physical clutter, that includes all the paper clutter, and even though we have now computers, and we were always promised to have a paperless world or a paperless business. We're all still struggling with paper clutter.

Conny Graf:

Then there is digital clutter. That's any chaos on your computer, in your iPad, on your tablet or in your smartphone, right, financial clutter have you thought about that? Your finances could be cluttered. It has also to do with not having a budget, no overview of revenue or expenses, no cash flow overview and spending without purpose and so on.

Conny Graf:

But then we dive into mental clutter, which is limiting beliefs. Negative self-talk over stimulation is also one, reading too much, taking in too much information and multitasking Aren't we all guilty of that? And then I have a category that is also called social clutter, which involves people pleasing, having no boundaries, no time for yourself, an overflowing calendar and no purpose and no direction. Then we go into emotional clutter. Emotional clutter is all those stuffed down feelings resentments, anger, fear, worry, regret and guilt all these challenging emotions that we actually really don't want to deal with, but then, because we don't, they end up as clutter. And there is also spiritual clutter, but that's a whole different ballgame and I leave that for another time. So now are you surprised when I talk to people, they understand physical and digital clutter pretty much, but haven't heard of mental, social, emotional clutter or even financial clutter.

Conny Graf:

To give you a little glimpse into these different kinds of clutter, let's explore each of the categories that Karen Kingston defined, with the levels I came up with. So the first category that Karen Kingston talked about was things you don't use or love, and in the physical clutter, that's probably the easiest and most obvious All the physical things that you own and that you don't use and you don't love, that are just laying around because you haven't taken care of them yet. And this includes, as I said earlier, paper clutter. And paper clutter includes books, magazines, clippings, documents, flyers and etc. Etc. A thing that lays around in your home as a physical item. Pretty straightforward, right? So then we go into digital clutter.

Conny Graf:

Digital clutter in things you don't use or love is also the digital footprint that you leave behind, so having accounts everywhere, even though you're not using them anymore, everything that exists about you online or on your device, like emails, photos, digital files, services you're signed up for, online banking, can also be clutter, especially if it's an account that you should actually close but you don't do it. Medical records can be clutter, and the list goes on Saved files and emails that you never will need to refer back to and unread. Emails that are older than one, or one to three months and I'm pretty generous about that because if your email is three months old, probably even the sender forgot about it. So those emails are definitely digital clutter. Thousands of photos that clog up your phone or your computer drive, that you haven't organized, that you probably have duplicates and three different variations, or some people even have 20 variations and you never went through it and weeded the things out and properly labeled them. This is all digital clutter. Still fairly much straightforward, right.

Conny Graf:

Physical clutter I call paying for subscriptions that you don't use anymore or that you forgot you're even paying for. Some people I meet and help them declutter. We find money in their books. They're complaining they don't have enough money, but then we find subscriptions that they're paying for that they even forgot. They're paying for them because they don't have any overview or the finances. Or then other people are paying, still for services that they're not really aligned with anymore, that they're not using or they moved on from, whatever it is Like. Sometimes a gym membership can be something like this and you still haven't canceled it, and that is financial clutter and it's sad, yeah, but it also could be something you signed up for that you are actually not ready for yet. Like that has happened to me early in my business, when I thought I wanted to do webinars and before I was even ready I paid for a webinar software just because it sounded like a good deal, but then I only did one webinar with that webinar software. So it was basically financial clutter. I paid for something that I wasn't using. So these are some examples of financial clutter.

Conny Graf:

Then we go into the mental clutter, and mental clutter is such a huge topic. I give you some ideas here, some ideas, some examples here. Mental clutter is really like old ideas that have nothing to do with your current life. It's also a negative self talk, telling yourself that you can't do something even though you haven't really tried. All this mental chatter that our brain produces day in and day out that drags us down and makes us feel like shit. Sorry my language, but that's true. That's all mental clutter, right.

Conny Graf:

Then I have social clutter. A lot of people haven't heard of social clutter, but that's actually like old friends or acquaintances that you have nothing in common anymore, but then they call and you meet with them, even though you actually wanted to do something else, and you end up feeling drained or empty after seeing them. They're like I call them little vampires. They're pulling us down and they're pulling our energy out, and it's not their fault. It's just that we're not aligned with them anymore, that they're not our, our perfect people anymore, so we can lovingly let them go and protect our energy and protect our, our time right. And then emotional clutter is hanging on to anger or frustration, staying in victim mode instead of working through the challenging emotions in order to let them go. So these are a few examples of the category things you don't use or love.

Conny Graf:

And then we go to the second category that Karen Kingston mentioned. This is things that are untidy or disorganized, and this is also very common in the physical realm, like when we just have chaotic office, chaotic desk and we have no systems in systems or routines in place that fixes that and we're just dealing with it instead of doing something about it. So they're in the physical clutter type is, even if you use and love your stuff, they don't really have a home. They, they, they. It's hard to find them. You know you have it, you know you need it, but you it doesn't have a home and you didn't put it back to where it belongs, so you, you can't find it. It looks messy, the you clutter up, mostly your surfaces because you have nowhere to go with it, or you say a very dangerous sentence to yourself I put it here for now which is very dangerous, creates often a lot of clutter.

Conny Graf:

Then in the digital clutter area, it's some things that are untidy or disorganized is, even if you don't have useless files on your computer, you have no system on how to save it, and so you always have to pull your hair to try to find it again. Or you just have everything saved on your desktop screen and you clutter up that screen instead of having actually a proper, very simple doesn't need to be complicated but a proper system, how to save these files right, and so it just looks untidy, it's unorganized, disorganized, uses a lot of energy and to find the files and yeah, it's just untidy, right, digitally untidy. In the financial clutter type, even if you don't waste money in your business, like I mentioned before on services you actually don't use or that are not aligned with your business anymore, and untidy. Untidy finance financials are when you have no simple budget, you have no simple cash flow overview, you have no simple system on how to stay on top of your finances, on your expenses, on on your revenue. You're just neglecting, basically, your finances all year long until tax season comes up and then you freak out. So that is a lot of untidy and disorganized finances.

Conny Graf:

In the mental realm we talk about bad habits and too much information aimlessly put into your mind. That creates really a thought chaos and you lose focus of what's important and what's important for you or what's important for your business. The result is you get frazzled and overwhelmed and then you don't do anything or you might do the wrong thing. The things that actually don't make a difference for your business, things that are untidy or disorganized in the social clutter category or types, is yeah, and this is a little bit harder to spot. But I'd say if you don't know what priority or relative or friend, no, I'd say what if you don't know what priority a relative or a friend has in your life, and so then you can easily fill up your precious time with the wrong people. You, when somebody, for example, that you care about, needs your support and help, but you have no time for them because you don't have your priorities straight and you gave your time away freely to people that actually don't matter that much to you.

Conny Graf:

And emotional clutter, I would say, is if you have no routine or practice to sort your emotions on a regular basis, to make sense of them Right, when you just shove them down or push them down and you never actually process them. And we don't learn processing emotions. And it's really hard because we all don't want to feel like shit or we don't want to feel bad, so we try to push those feelings away, but then they come back up. And they come back up. And if we would just go through those and and and feel them and make sense of them and then let them go, that would actually be way healthier and it would free up a lot of energy from us too, for us.

Conny Graf:

And then we have the category too many things in too small of a space, physical clutter. That is when you or your family or your business has grown out of your current home, like the physical home, or the home was never big enough or the office was never big enough, and you just push everything in there, like you have maybe a little closet office and you just put everything in there and it's really crammed, and or your house is really crammed and you can hardly breathe because so much stuff needs to be in there. That is too many things in too small of a space. When we talk about digital clutter in this category is when you don't have enough memory on your computer, in your cloud or on the phone to safely store your data. Now this might not seem so important anymore, especially since data digital data got fairly cheap, but a lot of people still procrastinate and then they may not upgrade their space or upgrade their computer Also, maybe because they can't afford it and you have stored so much unnecessary stuff on there that actually the stuff you would need has no space, and then your computer is slower, your iPad maybe crashes or is slower, your phone doesn't work properly anymore because you're at the max of the battery, not of the battery of the space you can store stuff. So that is too much stuff in too small of a space.

Conny Graf:

In the digital realm, financial clutter is when your expenses exceed your revenue and you don't even know it. Maybe when you rob Peter, dupay, paul basically that's a lot of people when they don't have an overview over the finances. That's what they do. They rob Peter, dupay, paul. They spend revenue, future revenue, to pay past bills, for example. Most people might not even notice that because, again, they don't have an overview and they may only notice at the end of the year that they actually haven't made any money and they just went by like just made, or just made enough, but actually didn't. Their business didn't grow and their revenue didn't grow because their finances, their expenses, grew so much more than their revenue and they didn't notice because it just they just looked at their bank account, thought, oh, I have money, and then they spend it, right.

Conny Graf:

So mental clutter when we talk about too many things in too small of a space in the mental with mental clutter is when you're overwhelming your brain with too much information, and that's really really easy to do these days we're bombarded with information, and when you're, like me, very curious about everything, we can really really easily overwhelm our brain and then, and then it's kind of like we also lose focus of what is important, what's important in our life, what's important in our business, because we're so overwhelmed with all the information we don't see. How do you say we don't see the forest for the trees, or we don't see the trees for the forest, one or the other right, I never know which way around. You have the saying goes, and in the, when we talk about social clutter, then you have way too many appointments and commitments on your calendar for the day or for the week and your calendar has no wiggle room for unexpected stuff that can come up, and so you get completely stressed out when things don't go smoothly, which you often don't right. So I heard once to only fill your calendar or your day with 60% up, not 100%, right. So I don't know whether 60% is right, but what I try to do is I try at the beginning of the week or actually beforehand, before I actually commit to more things that I say I will do. I look at the calendar and look what all I have on it already and I ask myself if everything would take one and a half as long or twice as long as I'm estimating, would I still have wiggle room, yes or no? And we can. We always have some kind of a to-do list that we can add more things in if we would get bored. But most of us we don't have that problem, right, we have too much in our calendar and that can be clutter in the end social clutter, I call it. And then emotional clutter in that category is when you again, when you try to suppress emotions, you don't want to deal with them and then, because the space is cluttered inside of you, the emotions, you just shove emotion over emotion or challenging emotion over emotion. You're exploding most of the time in the wrong moment, most of the time when you're having a stressful week because you put too much on your calendar right, then you explode also because you haven't processed these challenging emotions before. So everything comes up in one swoop, but not just like appropriate for the situation, let's say like that. And then we have the last category of Karen Kingston's four categories, and that one is anything unfinished, and that is actually also something that most people are very surprised when I say.

Conny Graf:

Anything unfinished is clutter, and it's not just unfinished. So in the physical clutter room we're talking about any repairs around the house or in your office that need to be done and you haven't done them. Or like if the batteries need to be changed out because the battery is dead and you haven't done it. That can create clutter right. Or, again, little repairs that you didn't do a leaky faucet, for example, or clothes that you can't wear because buttons need to be sewn on or some all these things. You may. You may get the point right. Just anything that isn't in working order is is physical clutter.

Conny Graf:

In the digital clutter room, I would say anything unfinished is all these ebooks or e-courses and also anything that you saved there and maybe haven't even started looking at it, but mostly you have started looking at it and then wanted to finish reading it or finished going through it and you never did. But you still have it kind of on your to-do list and you want to still do it. But the list gets longer and longer and longer. It's also emails that you want to answer, that you actually looked at before, but you haven't answered. You haven't processed them, you haven't done something with them. You still need to do it, and that is also digital clutter in the anything unfinished category. And then financial plodder is maybe a bit more difficult. There might not be so much unfinished stuff other than the obvious thing not turning in tax reports. Right, that is anything unfinished. Not in turning in anything that has to do with finances, if your accountant asks for, or your bookkeeper asks for, information and you're not turning it in, not not doing the books right, like waiting till the last second and not doing your tax report or not doing your overviews.

Conny Graf:

With mental clutter we're talking about anything, anything that you need to make decisions on and you procrastinate. You hear me say a lot that clutter is unmade decisions, so we're often are afraid to make decisions and then we don't do anything and don't make decisions. That is mental clutter. And then that's not only creating mental clutter in your life and in your business that weighs really heavy on you, but it is also a way to make a decision in a way right, like and, but it's often the worst decision, because no decision is also a decision. No decision is I'm not making a decision. That's the decision. And oftentimes the consequences of not making a decision is worse than whatever you're worried about. That the negative impact could be of making a decision. So that is in the mental clutter part.

Conny Graf:

And then social clutter is when you have friends or family members or even clients or service providers that you don't want to deal with anymore and you avoid them instead of actually clearing the air between them and like you just leave it unresolved the issue. And so I'm not saying that you can't break with a client or break with a service provider, or break, oh my god, with a friend or a family member if you need to, because you feel like they're not respecting you or whatever. I'm talking more about. You're just like passively aggressive or not doing anything instead of actually putting a clear stake in the ground and say I don't want to be treated like this and I will end this relationship. So if this is just hanging in the air and un unresolved issues with any other human beings in any capacity, I would call that social clutter in the um, anything unfinished category. Yeah, and then lastly, again emotional clutter, and it's still all this unprocessed stuff, often unprocessed grief, because we're so, um, scared and I just Last week had an episode, so episode 207 was all about grief, so you can go back and listen to that one.

Conny Graf:

I have other ones I will link in the show notes that also talk about grief. Clutter has a lot to do with grief, and grief is actually something that clutters us up emotionally. And what we don't understand often is that we can't avoid grief in our life. Even if we're not losing loved ones because they're dying, there's still grief in our life. And if we don't deal with the smaller grief, then we're completely overwhelmed with the bigger grief. So, yeah, so maybe go and listen to these episodes and just start learning to deal with it and instead of just pushing it down.

Conny Graf:

And again, there is no timeline for how fast you have to process grief. I'm more talking about if you're not even willing to look at it, if you're dealing with it for a little bit and then you leave it be again, and then you deal with it a little bit again when you have the mental capacity or the emotional capacity that is processing grief. I'm talking about when you're just not want to look at it. And yeah, so those are all the category and types of clutter. Are you surprised about this long, long list? And have you thought of these kinds of things that I was just talking about as clutter?

Conny Graf:

Because most people don't think of it as clutter, but it is all clutter and it is all weighing on us and if we're not dealing with it, then everything takes longer or we may stay stuck, and so another thing that I often say is anything in the end is somehow mental clutter, even physical clutter, because the physical clutter is in our life, because we're not ready to make a decision mental clutter right and making a decision to deal with the physical clutter or the digital clutter. So that's why, in the end, everything could end up being mental clutter, which has an effect on our emotions, so it also weighs on us. An emotional clutter, and again, also everything that is clutter related has a financial effect, and a lot of people may be surprised, but finances and clutter have a lot to do with it. You either spend money you don't have, or you spend money to buy clutter, or you spend money to maintain clutter, which is also sad, or you waste money by not paying attention to your finances, all those things. So, yeah, just look in your life and again, I always say a few minutes a day keeps the chaos away. You don't have to address everything at once and use also something that you're never going to be done with. It's like taking showers. You have to take a shower every day or every other day or however often you take showers. It's not a one once done and and never again deal. So it's the same with clutter. You just want to keep all these things in the flow, like, if you can keep your physical things in the flow, let go of what you don't need anymore. Get in what you do need Same with digital, same with finances, same with mental, social then you're in a much better position than if you're just trying to avoid it all.

Conny Graf:

So in past episodes I have been diving deeper in each one of these categories and types. Just for today, I just wanted to give you go back to the basics and give you, in one episode again, kind of an overview. But all is clutter, especially for those of you who haven't listened to my episodes four years ago when I started. So I wanted to give you an updated episode on all the kinds of clutter there is.

Conny Graf:

Okay, my friend. That's it for today. Thanks so much for listening all the way to the end and have a beautiful week. Talk to you next time. Take good care and spread peace. You can bring your chaos to me. Use the link in the show notes and sign up for a complimentary 30 minute Chaos to Peace Jumpstart call where we will address your most pressing pain point around clutter and chaos and how to solve it in a few minutes a day and, if you're ready, we can also discuss options for moving forward together and how I can help you out with on your journey from chaos to peace. You find the links to sign up in the show notes.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Conny Graf

Host