Declutter Your Life: Make Space for Your Goal

I’m on a mission to spotlight all the elements that lead to real change and contribute to achieving your goals. Some of them are unusual, some are too often overseen. Follow me on this month-long journey to set you on the right path.

Photo by Andyone on Unsplash

Before we embark on a journey of change and goal setting, a common mistake is to set off without clearing the decks. Imagine navigating this journey on a ship so crammed that there is no space in the hull, the deck is littered with piles of junk, the wheel house has barely any room for anyone to reach the wheel let alone clean the windows, 120 tabs are interfering with the navigating systems and no one can find the winch that lifts the anchor. This is a visual representation of our life at the moment we set our goals and start doing the work without clearing space. This is not difficult to see how, very shortly, the journey will become so challenging that we just give up.

Yesterday, I mentioned that we will have to allow in what we have denied ourselves and deny what we have allowed in our life. Overconsumption is a pillar of today’s economy. We buy things that we genuinely don’t need just because we are encouraged to upgrade everything and buy the newly improved this and that. We buy books before we have time to read the previous one; we subscribe to several streaming services, podcasts, newsletters. One-click purchases, next day delivery, free challenges, we have become addicted to ‘more’. If we don’t buy, sign up, watch or click, we feel we are missing out.

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

In truth, we hardly have time for anything we stock in our home, in our inbox, in our devices or in the cloud. We use a tiny fraction of all those things we thought were going to make our lives better, yet we keep buying and signing up, without getting rid of much in the process. Our homes, our brains, our devices, our electronic and physical spaces, our lives are full to the brim.

The reality behind this overconsumption is that we invest our most precious resources — time, energy, money and space — in things that we won’t have time to fully explore even if we were granted several lifetimes. Worse still, we waste some…