Dina Climatiano

Creativity Challenge, Day 3:

Decluttering my desk (and my mind)

TL;DR: I cleaned my desk. Here’s a cat.

I was going to needle felt a small animal puppet today but realized I needed supplies I would not be able to get before January 8th, so that was out of the window.

Then I thought “well maybe I’ll just write a haiku”, but then I researched haikus to make sure I wasn’t missing anything about this short form, quickly realized I was totally missing several things, and put a pin in that as well.

Then I looked at my desk, or rather lack thereof and decided maybe tackling my clutter early in this month-long challenge might serve me better later on.

See, I’ve recently listened to How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising by KC Davis, and I wanted to try out some of her suggestions.

I started by dividing the stuff on my desk into the 5 categories Davis describes in her book:

1. trash

2. dishes

3. laundry

4. things that have a place that are not in their place

5. things that do not have a place

I tackled the first three with ease since I’ve kind of done this earlier this week and there wasn’t a lot. Then I put the things from the fourth category in their place, one by one, struggling not to go on side quests as I went.

As I was finishing the fourth and starting on the fifth category, I immediately recognized a problem: there’s lots of stuff that I need to have in front of my eyes for me to remember to use them regularly: medicine and supplements, water, hand cream, day planner… There was also a poetry book that I knew that if I put back on the shelf, I will never pick up again to complete another part of the creativity challenge – translating a poem.

In her book, Davis talks about making house chores and organization systems work for you, even if the end result is not picture perfect. I accept still having a few things on my desk if it means I remember to take a sip of water every once in a while, moisturize my winter-stricken hands so they don’t bleed, and take my medicine regularly. Tidying up is a kindness you do for yourself, not a moral obligation that makes you worthy.

She also talks about containing chaos in baskets. Now, I may not have baskets handy, but what I do have is a bunch of “good boxes”. You know the ones… You get a gift or you buy a product and some feline part of your brain goes “that’s a good box!” Well, today is their time to shine. They’re pretty, they’re finally useful, and it’s a lot easier to move a box containing a dozen small items than it is moving the small items individually. An added bonus is that in a home with 5 cats who all love to steal my pens and roll them around the house, a closed box poses a pretty big hurdle.

Whatever was too useful to be put away in some distant drawer elsewhere in the house but too small to be independent got put in a box. I ended up with 4 boxes (admittedly because I really only had 4 boxes): medical stuff, small essential crap (charging cables, batteries, pins, hair clips, etc.), pens, and tissues/wipes.

I also found quite a lot of paper that wasn’t quite worth filing but had too much sentimental value or usefulness to throw away (old conference name tags, business cards, Christmas/birthday cards, etc.). These got their own giant envelope that I now keep with the rest of my files.

Not bad. Not bad at all. I don’t know how long it will take for me to mess it up again, but at least I can fit a sponge mat and some felting needles and wool on this desk now without dropping a pen and three chargers into oblivion. And that poetry book is staring me right in the face.

Beyond the immediate relief and jolt of dopamine for a completed task, it’s also making me reconsider what works and what doesn’t about my space. It’s especially relevant now that we are decorating our new home, and I’m forced to make decisions about what my office is going to look like and what I need.

And hey, at least I got Freia’s seal of approval.

So anyway, now I’m sitting at my clutter-free desk writing this post, wondering if I hadn’t stretched the definition of “creative endeavor” a little too much.

Nah.