Want to clutter clear your home but don’t have time?

Pick a number between 1 and 10 and write it on a large piece of paper with a thick felt-tip marker. Stick it on your wall, somewhere where you're sure to see it each morning. Before breakfast each day, clutter clear that number of objects from your home.

The items can be large or small but you make a deal with yourself that you don’t eat breakfast until it’s done. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t eat breakfast, choose some other daily event such as before you read your email, put on your make-up, or whatever.

A good place to start is with your clothes. Suppose you've chosen the number 5. Pick out 5 items of clothing you no longer like or wear. Find a large box or bag to put them in. That's it. Now get on with your day. Do the same the next day, and the next day, and keep going until the only clothes remaining in your wardrobe (or closet if you're American) are the ones you love and wear. Be sure to clear the contents of your box at the end of each week, either by donating them to a charity shop, or letting them go in some other way.

Another good area to apply this technique to is collections of books or magazines. It also works well with the contents of your fridge, kitchen cabinets or any kind of cupboards. If you have lots of decorative objects in your home you can use it to whittle these down too.

If your problem is mess rather than quantity, then you can apply the same technique to tidying. Pick up and put away 5 objects each day (or whatever number you choose).

30 days x 5 objects per day = 150 objects per month.
30 days x 10 objects per day = 300 objects per month.
It soon adds up.

The reason this technique is so effective is because you are more focused on the counting than on the objects themselves, so it makes it easier not to get emotionally involved in the process. And because it’s a low number, it feels so much more achievable than attempting to clutter clear dozens of items in one go. It's a tortoise rather than a hare kind of approach, but we all know who got there in the end!

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2008

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An article in the International Herald Tribune recently caught my attention. Titled Picking up garbage to help change a country, it described how a group of Pakistani students from elite private schools, fed up with hearing their families complain about the government, decided to take matters into their own hands by the unusual route of shoveling up trash from the streets. About 40 of them turned out in the 32 Celsius (90 Fahrenheit) heat and set to work in an inner city area.

The article explained that years of weak government and military coups has left poor areas of Pakistan with little or no funding for education, water, electricity, health or refuse services. There aren’t even any garbage bins in the streets. So these middle class students, instead of spending Sunday afternoon watching TV in their air-conditioned homes, decided to spend a few hours cleaning up garbage instead. One passerby, asked by the reporter what he thought, said it was good idea beause it showed that people care.

My perception is that in the same way as clutter clearing raises the level of energy in a person’s home, clearing the litter from streets significantly raises the level of an entire area. Intuitively these students seem to know this.

A study led by Kees Keizer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 2008 confirmed that there is a clear link between litter and crime in an area. Keizer set out to prove or disprove what is called the ‘broken window’ theory, which states that broken windows in a house cause a degrading of the surrounding neighbourhood and can lead to an increase in social disorder. In one of his experiments he left a €5 note sticking out of an envelope posted in a public mailbox and then watched to see what would happen. In an area with no litter or graffiti, only 13% of passerby were tempted to steal the money. But when the mailbox was surrounded by litter, the number of thefts increased to 25%."It's quite shocking that the mere presence of litter doubled the number of people stealing," he said. 

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2009

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Arriving home from a trip is one of the best times to do clutter clearing, especially if you've been away for at least a couple of weeks, and even more so if you have been abroad and spent time in a culture that is different to your own. You see your home in a fresh light. Things that have become clutter stand out and are so much more obvious than before, when you saw them every day but didn’t really 'see' them.

It's a good idea to give yourself at least 24 hours at home after such a trip, rather than rushing back to work the next day or doing whatever it is you do. Give yourself the time to review your life and make changes you want to make. This is when clutter clearing truly becomes a treat rather than a chore.

Start in any room and look around it with new eyes. Which objects no longer fit with your life or with where you want to be headed?

Perhaps you have some pieces of furniture you no longer use or like, but you've become so used to them you no longer notice them?  

Maybe you have some decorative objects that fitted perfectly with your life when you first brought them home but you've moved on now and they have not?

Having too many objects like this keeps you anchored in the past and makes it difficult to create a better tomorrow.

What about your clothes? This is a good time to weed out the ones you realize you no longer like or wear.

Look at your bookshelves. Take out the books that are no longer interesting to you.

Arriving home from a trip is also a good time to sort through any photos you took while you were away. Look through them all, and then keep the best and delete the rest right then and there before they even become clutter.

If you share your home with others and they went away with you on the same trip, they are likely to be able to see things more objectively too, so you can invite them to be involved in the process. If they stayed home while you went away they may not see things the way you are seeing them, so proceed gently, focusing on your own stuff and not even mentioning any of theirs. When you do your own clutter clearing simply because you want to, it has a way of rubbing off on people close to you if you just get on with it and say nothing at all.

And in case you're wondering, yes, I've just arrived home from a trip, and yes, I'm clutter clearing today. Not only that but while I was writing this my husband, Richard, without me saying a thing, clutter cleared an entire cupboard we share that I was planning to do later myself and no longer need to!

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2009

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Here's a question from a woman called Amanda, who asks, "I wrote a diary daily for 10 years and can't bear to get rid of them. Is it okay to keep them? I am preparing myself to let go of impersonal diaries I have kept since the 1990s except sometimes they remind me of what I was doing then and how far I have come. Should these impersonal diaries go too?

I've had many emails like this over the years, so thought it may be of interest to quite a few people to read my reply.

First let me say that I believe journal writing is a valuable process. It allows you to get a better focus on what is happening in your life. However, it is usually what is out of balance in a person that causes them to feel the need to write a journal.

One way you can understand this is to think about when two people who like each other spend time together. They will chatter away until the energy between them is balanced. After that they can experience that magical companionable silence of dear friends, and this is possible because there is nothing more that needs to be said. They are in balance.

My best advice about journals is therefore to write them, extract the wisdoms, and let the rest go. Most people, if they are honest, will find that the majority of what they write consists of processing their 'stuff' (mental, emotional and spiritual clutter) to allow them to get to the essence of what they need to learn at that time.

The art of successful living is to learn from our experiences and move on. If you find yourself needing to keep re-reading journals to find out where you've been, it means you aren't getting to the essence of the experience first time round and then life will need to throw it up again in a different form for you to have another go.

Always write with the intention of getting to the core essence of the matter and having realizations that move you to a new space of comprehension and perception (for those who have taken my Advanced Space Clearing workshop, I am talking here about moving to 'Level 4' consciousness). When you do this, you will no longer feel the need to keep the writings that got you there.

As to keeping an impersonal diary (meaning a list of dates, and what happened when), it's a good idea to keep this as a reference. I have a document on my laptop called 'Life of Karen,' which briefly lists all the major events in my life since I was born. I find it comes in useful for all kinds of things.

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2008

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Here's a fun item. As public awareness has increased about the effects of clutter and the benefits of living a clutter-free life, some catchy new terminology has appeared in the English language. Here are some of my favourite examples, courtesy of the Word Spy website:

CHAOS
An acronymn for 'Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome'

floordrobe
A noun, meaning a pile of discarded clothes on the floor of a person's room (the word is a blend of floor and wardrobe).

carbage
A noun, meaning the garbage that accumulates in some cars (the word is a blend of car and garbage).

affluenza
A noun, meaning an extreme form of materialism in which consumers overwork and accumulate high levels of debt to purchase more goods (the word is a blend of affluence and influenza).

voluntary simplicity
A noun, meaning a lifestyle that avoids luxury, flamboyance and pretense.

soul proprietor
A noun, meaning a business person or entrepreneur who balances work with emotional and spiritual growth.

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2008

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Here's an excellent tip sent to me by a woman called Astrid, who came to some of my workshops in London in 2001. She suggests taking photos of the rooms in your home to discover all the cluttered or neglected areas that you don't normally see.

She wrote to tell me that she discovered this when taking digital photos of her home to send to someone. It was only when looking at the images that she saw "the boxes on the cupboards, the old glasses, the half-alive plant, the ugly curtain," and so on.

I used this same technique when designing my hotel in Bali. If there were any parts of the property that didn't look good in photos, I redesigned them until they did.

Just one word of caution: There is no need to keep the photos after you've used them. Just erase them from your camera, job done. After all, when they build a building, they don't keep the scaffolding as a memento!

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2008

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The new, revised and completely updated version of Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui has been published today. With over one million copies of the original version in print, it was time to bring it up-to-date.

The new edition is has 264 pages compared to the original 197 pages, and is substantially different:

• It has a much more modern style and feel to it (the original edition looks and reads quite dated now)
• It has a new cover that I designed myself (many thanks to my publishers - it's very unusual that they let authors design their own book covers)
• It contains about 15% new text and hundreds of small clarifications and updates (the old edition was about 38,700 words and the new one is about 45,000)
• Some of the contents of chapters have been moved around to facilitate the addition of new topics
• Included in the new text is a whole new chapter about time clutter

The brand new material in the book includes:

• How to establish priorities in your life
• Understanding and overcoming procrastination
• Dealing with interruptions
• How to take control of your email
• Handling information overload
• 7 top clutter clearing tips

Just as the first edition of Clear Your Clutter, published in 1998, was designed as a companion volume to my first book about Space Clearing (Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui), so the new Clear Your Clutter book is designed as a companion volume to the new book Space Clearing book I'm writing, which is due for publication in 2009.

The new Clear Your Clutter book is available now from my UK/European online store, and from booksellers in the UK and Commonwealth. It is currently being translated into Italian and Korean, and will hopefully soon be translated into all 20 of the languages that the first edition was in.

It won't be available in the USA, however. My US publisher has let me know they are not planning to publish it because the old version is still selling well there. So if you live in the USA and would like to get the new edition, you'll need to buy it online from my UK/European store and have it shipped to you. You'll get it almost as fast as buying a book in the USA.

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There were some really great stories from participants of the Spiritual Journey in Bali course last week, so I thought I'd share some of them with you.

One woman told me how her 60-year old mother read my books, clutter cleared everything - including her husband! - and then put on a backpack and went off travelling in America, having the time of her life. She stayed in touch with her family and died 6 years later, a very happy and contented woman, with just a phone call to let them know she had left her will on top of her suitcase. With no fuss at all, she checked herself into hospital and died 4 days later. The daughter said her mother was such an inspiration to her!

She told another story about her brother, who was very unhappy where he lived. She got him to write a description of his ideal home and when she read it, she realized it fitted exactly the description of the top floor apartment of the family home they had inherited from their parents (now both deceased). At first he wouldn't even consider it. He said he had too many bad childhood memories to even want to visit the place, let alone live there. But she eventually persuaded him, and when he walked in, he was amazed at how beautiful the space was. Putting 2 + 2 together, the daughter realized her mother had space cleared before she left for America and had cleared out all the old history.

Another woman who came to the course told the story of how she left my book lying around her home, hoping her husband would read it. He didn't, but her 19-year old daughter did, and was immediately inspired to finish a very dysfunctional relationship she had had for a long time. She bagged up all the items belonging to her emotionally abusive boyfriend and threw them out. The mother had apparently tried in vain to get her daughter to see how bad this relationship was for her, and the book did it in just a matter of hours.

Hearing these stories really inspires me to focus even more on writing new books that I already am. It's very touching to hear how deeply people's lives are touched.

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2008

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I'm VERY happy to announce that I finished recording the Clear Your Clutter audio book today so will have the finished copy within a few days, after it's been checked for clicks, gasps, gulps, tummy gurgles and so on. It will then be sent to Audible.com for publication.

The revised and updated UK printed version is also going to press this week so by November 2008 the book will be available in both audio and printed form. I'm looking into ways to release it as an e-book downloadable from my website too, as well as Amazon's Kindle.

The new book has many updates and about 15% more content, including...

• seven top clutter clearing tips
• dealing with time clutter
• how to prioritize
• how to overcome procrastination
• how to avoid the debilitating effects of constant interruptions
• how to handle information overload

My UK publisher holds the US and foreign rights to this book, so I've asked them to send the new edition ASAP to my US publisher so that they can begin translating it into American, and to the 20 other publishers to translate into their languages too (Chinese, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish & Vietnamese). All these countries evidently have a lot of clutter!

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Many studies have been done on this topic of procrastination over the years. One school of thought says that the main reason people procrastinate is because they fear failure so much they don’t even want to start. Other studies conclude that people put off doing things as an act of rebellion, because they feel the task is boring or unpleasant, or because there is no immediate reward as a result of doing it. If you can identify which of these fits you most closely and watch out for it happening, your days of blind procrastination are nearing an end.

Then there are the people who are good at starting things but get easily distracted so they procrastinate finishing them. A hilarious version of getting distracted is ‘yak shaving’, made famous by blogger, Seth Godin.

Yak shaving is defined as, “Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on." He gives an example of wanting to wax his car, but to get to this he first has to buy a new hose, but to do this he first needs to borrowing his neighbour’s EZpass to cross a toll bridge to get to Home Depot, but to do this he first needs to restuff the mooshi pillow his son borrowed from the neighbour. Hence ending up at the zoo shaving a yak!

Here’s an example that nearly happened to me while writing the updated and revised new version of my 'Clear Your Clutter' book at my home in Bali:

“I want to finish writing this chapter. To do this, I need to search the internet for Seth’s blog, Don’t Shave That Yak! so that I can quote his example.”

“Ah, but my broadband is not working today, so I’ll need to use dial-up.”

“Hmmm… the phone line is dead. The mice must have nibbled through the wires again.”

“Oh dear, the bamboo ladder I need to climb my garden wall to check the wires is broken.”

And the next thing I know I’ve left my computer, loaded the broken bamboo ladder into my car, and spent the whole morning at the ladder repair shop having it fixed.

Being wise to the perils of yak shaving, of course, I didn’t do this. I used my neighbour’s phone to call the broadband and phone companies to repair their services, sent my gardener to the repair shop with the ladder, skipped this paragraph until later, and continued writing.

Extract from the new updated and revised version of 'Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui' to be published by Piatkus in Nov 2008. Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2008. All rights reserved.

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