When it comes to decluttering something I have found very challenging over the years but that I am making good progress in is not to defer decision making. In so many areas of life I can be very decisive and I don't waver all over the place and in fact indecisive people have often been a bigger irritant to me than I care to admit. However as I mull things over and get to know myself better I have realized that I can be very indecisive in some areas. The one that I have struggled with for a long time is figuring out what to order in a fast food line. But as I don't go to fast food very often and it really doesn't matter that much if I take a few more minutes (I let people go in front of me) I don't care about this one. But the other area I do care about.
Through the years I have really struggled with being indecisive about my stuff. Something comes in the mail and I look at it or maybe I don't truly have time to look it over well and then I set it somewhere to be looked at and considered another time or maybe 10 more times. I have actually gotten way better at this and now I do tend to just chuck stuff in the recycling pretty quickly and I have come to realize I don't even have to open every envelope that comes from a political candidate or some charity asking for money. I don't have to give them any time at all if I don't want to. And I don't have to feel guilty about not doing that.
So mail has been a big area but other random stuff is even bigger and messier. And this is the area I still struggle with more. In my office especially, with craft supplies particularly. Whenever something doesn't have any easy home that I have set up already it is easy to just keep moving it from place to place and maybe back and forth when I really just need to take the time to figure out it's permanent home (quite possibly away from our house) and not have to keep shifting it, keep feeling guilty about needing to do something about it. I need to stop deferring with my decision making.
Another area I have struggled with this is dealing with e-mails. An e-mail needs to have some action taken on it but I don't feel like taking the minute required to figure out what action is needed and to do it so I defer it and then I keep noticing it over and over again and quite possibly I keep deferring it. When I do that it just causes me to feel (a little or a lot) stressed about it. It is much simpler if just as often as possible (I know that it isn't possible 100% of the time) I would just make the decision and take the tiny action right now and get it out of my hair and off my mind.
So if you want to have less clutter either physical or mental than stop deferring decisions. I hope to join you in that!!!
2 comments:
It is a problem that I have too. Especially with envelopes that come in the mail that I just don't have the time to deal with. I don't want to read four pages of print just to discover it was a routine letter and didn't really mean that much at all. They make so many things look official and urgent that are just junk, it becomes very stressful.
Mail can be hard. Some of it is easy but some is like you say hard to tell without spending time on it. I am quite blessed because all of that mail I put on Ken's desk and he, with much more background with official documents than I, can and does go through it quite efficiently and get rid of junk. He doesn't like a messy desk so I don't have to worry about it piling up there. :-)
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