clean house, clean mind
With marginal OCD, it shouldn’t come as any surprise to either of us that every time something is done to the house it pricks my conscience to tidy-up, clear the decks and declutter with gay abandon. Last week, as the decorating drew to a close, the impulse kicked in with a vengeance and it turns out I’m not alone. YouTube and Netflix sensation, Marie Kondo, is busily packing it into her pension by telling us to, essentially, ‘clean-up your room, you mucky pup’.
Marie’s reasoning is one I can easily buy into: a clean house is better than a messy one and by achieving this, the zen of ordered tidiness will impart the same uplifting effect on the rest of your life. Many of us are embarrassed by our clutter, be it our homes, our desks, cars or lives, seeing them as the living embodiment of our inner chaos. And, as a self-declared neat freak, I fully get the pleasure of imposing my will on my surroundings. But there’s a catch and it’s that we’ll never achieve it, the closer you get to nirvana the less satisfaction we draw from it.
Productivity research now shows that ‘pilers’ do better than ‘filers’. The tidy filers amongst us can’t wait to tuck things away, create a lovely ordered space and rest on our perfectly manicured laurels but, in doing so, we miss out on the most important thing, the actual knowledge imparted. In our haste we don’t take the time to fully understand the nature of the message be it from book, letter, file or document. Outta sight, outta mind. Pilers, on the other hand, paradoxically, tend to actually save and keep less of the stuff as they read it, digest it, understand it and (eventually) throw it away. In the immediacy their system is messy, but it works. Damn them!
Furthermore, sometimes the problem you’re trying to control won’t have any of it. Think toddlers and teenagers. Think how the dust and dirt always returns to annoy you. The more you try and control, the more exacting your standards become and the harder it becomes to achieve the same level of gratification. In a messy room, a casually discarded pair of pants is no big deal; in a fully Kondified/Carlified one, it’s a stress-inducing, hassle-causing, heart-attack-of-the future waiting to happen. It’s only on a spotless, polished granite surface that a breadcrumb registers.
Take five. And breathe. Knowing when to stop tidying-up is the beauty of the process and accept you’re never going to be completely in control of the clutter, whatever that clutter may be in your life.
