CCIO Table of Contents > Introduction

Have you ever felt so discouraged, your life so out of control, the universe so unresponsive to your needs and desires, that you couldn’t help it: you just had to clean up? When you feeled stressed, do you find it soothing to fold the laundry, dust the furniture, or wash and dry the dinner dishes by hand? Perhaps you’ve responded to the end of a relationship by cleaning out a closet, or felt a compulsion to reorganize all your books or DVDs to put them into better order.

It’s as though by shifting the arrangement of our belongings we hope to rearrange the molecules of our emotional lives as well.

By paying attention to these impulses we recognize the deep connection between our personal environment and our innermost selves. Our spaces both reflect and affect our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. When our homes become cluttered and disordered, other aspects of our lives tend to feel chaotic as well. It’s a chicken-and-egg kind of situation. Not only does a cluttered home reflect a distracted and cluttered mind, it also makes it hard to focus and think clearly. It gets easier and easier to stop making the item-by-item decisions that could put you back in control of the mess and help you to feel more in control of your life.

Eventually, we give up. The task seems overwhelming, and the clutter is so pervasive that we can’t figure out where to begin. We slog through our days thinking “someday when I have the time I’ve got to clean this place up.” Clutter clearing becomes an abstract goal that awaits some mythical future time when our calendars will be free of obligations. We tell ourselves that we will awaken one weekend morning well-rested and energized, and through some unseen grace we will have acquired the focused clarity and enthusiasm that will finally inspire us to dive in and get it done. We wait for the moment to be right before we begin, so beginning never happens.

We’re approaching the clutter challenge backwards when we think this way. Regaining a sense of clarity and order is more easily achieved by putting our space in order than by trying to order and control our thoughts in a disorganized space. The defeat, fatigue, and depression that you feel when you think about your clutter will start to evaporate as soon as you put yourself into action. The hard part is getting started, but once you do the magic will begin.

This book is for you if any of these conditions describe how you are living right now:

• You feel overwhelmed and exhausted every time you look around your office or home.
• You want to deal with your clutter, but don’t know where to begin.
• You’ve started to clean up a million times, but never get very far before giving up.
• You’ve spent days—or even weeks—over the past few years organizing and reorganizing your storage and filing systems, but you still can’t find things when you need them.
• You can’t seem to get rid of anything.
• You live in a small space: there just isn’t enough room for your stuff.
• You don’t invite people over because you don’t want anyone to know you live like this.
• You do have people over because the public areas of your home are presentable... but you are terrified that a visitor will open a closet or bedroom door and see where you are keeping the mess.
• Your family circumstances have changed in the past few years due to a marriage or divorce, a newly “empty nest,” or the death of a loved one—but your space has stayed exactly the same.
• There’s at least one room in your home that you don’t use for anything other than storing “stuff.”
• It takes you more than 10 minutes to find and retrieve seasonal items like holiday lights and ornaments.
• You pay extra to have purchases gift-wrapped at the store because you aren’t sure where your gift-wrapping supplies are or what you have on hand.
• Your family hasn’t eaten at the dining table since the last major holiday.
• Somewhere in a closet are several shopping bags full of stuff that you cleared off the dining table before the last major holiday.
• You have multiple file folders or boxes labeled “miscellaneous” or “to be filed.”
• You have multiples of things like scissors, nail-clippers, and flashlights because you can never find one when you need it and it’s easier to just run out to the store to get another one.
• You have a guest room, but no room for guests.

Aren’t you tired of living like this? Everything that surrounds you should be working for you in some way. If the things in your space are not supporting you and contributing to the positive quality of your life, it is time to do something about them!

Click here to download your copy of “Clutter Clearing from the Inside Out” today!