5 steps to de-clutter your time

You’re probably familiar with Marie Kondo and KonMari, her method of de-cluttering and minimising belongings.

If you’re not, I’m guessing you don’t use instagram or pinterest a lot — in which case, you’re probably living a less cluttered life than I am anyway, so why aren’t you the one writing this article for me? If somehow you’ve missed this buzz, just picture an elegant young Japanese woman wearing white, standing in her open plan living room flooded with natural light, holding a wooden box or some other home item and asking herself, ‘does this bring me joy?’ to decide whether to keep it or let it go out of her life.

I’m no KonMari expert or elite minimalist (because, yes, this apple corer, pasta drying rack and all the other single use kitchen tools in my drawers each bring me joy. I’m keeping them). But from what I’ve read in the captions under instagram pictures of gleaming pure white interior spaces (oh? Is there a better place to get guidance on how to live my life?), the philosophy is similar to how I’ve approached time management.

Because just like spaces, our life gets cluttered with behaviours and habits. They accumulate over time as we pick them up and then just leave them in our lives, like that painting I bought in Vietnam that I don’t like enough to get framed so it’s just rolled up and left leaning in a corner. We stop seeing them, like they’re not even there, and the longer they linger in our spare room, the harder it is to throw them out.

Thing is, that spare room has value. Instead of housing clutter, it cold be used for things that bring us or others joy. That spare room could be the yoga room, where I could set up my mat and some cushions and make it easy to slide into a crescent lunge after work without a moment of thought. Or we could have foreign students rent it out as a home stay and get to know people from all over the world and share some of the experience of Australian coastal living that we’re lucky enough to enjoy. Or we could set up a deep armchair and those good headphones and make it a listening room (with my whiskey cabinet in the corner).

In case you’ve lost the thread on this stretched metaphor, or you just got distracted by the idea of a whiskey cabinet and a comfortable armchair, I’m talking about your time. The habits and behaviours that have no value which we continue to do anyway because we have stopped thinking about them and we just leave them in our lives without reflection. They are taking up time that could be spent doing something valuable for ourselves or others.

However, you can’t hold your habits to your chest in your washed out living room, wearing your natural fibre kimono, asking, ‘does this bring me joy?’

So, how do you de-clutter your time? (Yes, I’m finally getting to the title of the article. Better eight paragraphs in, than never). There are many ways to approach this, and it is not actually a finite procedure. It is a continual, iterative process that happens as you go through life and that is dependant on who you are and the life you want to live.

But this is the internet, so I’ve made it a list of five steps.

Step 1: Do a time audit

Before you say, “now hold up here, we’ve gone from joy to auditing”, this at least won’t require you to keep receipts. To look at de-cluttering your time you have to know what you actually spend your time on. I did this using my calendar. I use google calendar to schedule my life, and I just recorded the finer details- so, not just my appointments and tasks, I also after the fact blocked in when I had spend two hours watching youtube videos, how much time I spent making dinner, etc.

I have multiple google calendars for different categories which are colour coded, which include ‘work’, ‘social’, ‘life maintenance’ (cooking, housework, paying bills, etc), ‘writing’, ‘creative projects’. I made one for ‘screen time’ (dicking around on the internet on my laptop, watching netflix, reading infuriating news articles on my phone), which was sage green and there was way too much sage green on that calendar at the end of the week. Be honest with yourself and look at what you spend the most time on.

Step 2: Decide what you want to spend more time on.

This is the part that’s like holding on to your behaviours and activities and deciding that they do, in fact, bring you joy. But also, you have to think about what’s missing. What would make your time more joy-filled?

In my early twenties I did a big wardrobe de-clutter and decided I would throw away anything that didn’t fit me well, that didn’t suit me, that I didn’t wear, and/or I didn’t like. After hauling off about 5 garbage bags of clothes I came back to what was left and looked at three black t-shirts, a pair of black jeans, a pair of black converse and and a big grey coat. This is basically what I wear all the time to this day.

What was missing from this process was an identification of what I wanted to wear. I did not identify what was missing in my wardrobe that would suit my lifestyle. If I had, I might have kept some of the pieces that I’d thrown out because they would have complemented the items I needed to add. Instead, I just kept wearing my lazy-goth uniform and impulse purchased more clothes that I never wore because they didn’t work with my lifestyle and meet my needs and goals for dressing myself any more than anything in the five garbage bags of stuff.

De-cluttering your time works the same way. It’s pointless to decide to just stop watching netflix if you don’t have a more meaningful and fulfilling activity identified to take up that time. The void will end up being filled by other meaningless activities which happen to be the path of least resistance, or a slide back into netflix timewasting.

Step 3: Decide what you want to spend less time on, but not what you think you should want to spend less time on.

That makes sense, right? For example, I think I should want to spend less time scrolling through instagram. It’s common sense that it’s bad for me — it’s a time sink, a breeding ground for FOMO and unattainable ideals of thin young figures, flawless skin and hair shining gloriously in the Santorini sun. It’s mostly pictures of people’s lunch. That doesn’t seem like something I should be okay with spending at least an hour in total looking at each day.

But I love it. I want to see your lunch. And your hair reflecting the turquoise glimmer of the Mediterranean. I’m a visual person and I love the stimulation. I follow a lot of artists, great chefs and home cooks, fashion bloggers and crafters, local businesses or businesses I admire. It’s inspiring. I also don’t have any other social media account, so this is where I go to see my friends’ latest overshares of kid pictures and travel gloating. And I have wonderful friends, so they’re inspiring too. It’s not clutter.

Like my three different sized whisks, I’m keeping it.

One thing I’m not keeping is grocery shopping. That shit takes forever. I realised in doing my audit that I was blocking out three hours a week to buy groceries. I usually did it on a Saturday morning, too, so those were the first pure golden hours of my weekend frittered away in the produce aisle. Now, I get fruit and vegetables delivered, which make up the bulk of my groceries, and do a much more efficient series of mini shops at the speciality stores on my way home from work during the week.

The three hours in the produce section was my clutter, but the hour of scrolling instagram is one of my joys. Find what’s important to you.

Step 4: Establish new habits

Okay, so if you’ve been a cooperative reader and you have followed steps 1 through 3, you should have a good idea what you use your time for, what you need to get rid of and what to replace it with. And you may have reached that point and thought, “well no shit, I want to spend less time cry-wanking to Beyonce music videos and more time calling my mum. How do I do that? This article isn’t practical enough”.

The answer to that, my dear reader, is that you need to form habits. That level of practical application is beyond the scope of this story, but it’s out there. Go read about how to break old habits and how to establish new ones (spoiler — your do the former by doing the latter). But basically, if you come home and default to post-dinner chips and TV time and that’s your clutter, you remedy that with the gradual formation of a habit of yoga and podcasts time, or treadmill and music, or sketching or crossdressing, or your side hustle, or more cry-wanking to Beyonce, or whatever it is that you want to find more time for in your life. No judgement from me.

Step 5: Repeat steps 1 through 4 often and regularly.

No, I didn’t just run out if ideas to fill out all 5. Clutter builds. Over and over. You will spend your whole life processing your own clutter.

Because I use my calendar religiously, to schedule work tasks but also my personal projects and social life, I am pretty constantly going through the process of reflecting on how I spend my time and noticing any sage green slumps in mindful living. They still happen. When they do, I have to think about why, what I want to do instead, and work to establish better habits.