It’s been often said that if you removed the clutter from your life you will remove the clutter from your mind. So if you want to take control of your life and simplify your life here are some handy tips that you can implement right away.

1. Clear your desk space. The desk is often a magnet for attracting clutter, it starts of small then all of a sudden the clutter starts to amass and before long it takes you several minutes at a time to find anything. You might think that there is some order to the chaos but in reality you will find that productivity increases when you have a clear desk. This means clearing everything from your desk, drawers, shelves everything in your workspace. Then once you have everything all in a pile you can now start by adding only the necessities back into your work space. This gives you a great opportunity to throw away all the piles of paper that you no longer are using and were just gathering dust, take home all the books that you no longer read and remove anything that is occupying space that no longer adds to your daily work productivity. By the end of the exercise you should be able to have a clear desk and much more organized drawers and shelves.

2. Handle everything once. A common way for clutter to occur is when you start to put things into piles so that you can look at it later. Create a new habit to only handle everything once, either take care of it right now or trash it. This ensures that you won’t enable yourself to create clutter as a way to postpone things. Not only will the habit of handling everything once a great way to improve your productivity but it will also deter you to create clutter for the sake of clutter.

3. Set aside time each day to clear clutter. You don’t need to leave cleaning up your clutter to a once a year spring clean. The object is that when clutter starts to amass in your space then this will effect your mental state. By not allowing clutter to amass then you will also be creating a healthier mental state for yourself. Why not set aside a 15 minute block each day to clean up all your clutter in your space. 15 minutes is not much and you will find that there is not anyone who is that busy with their lives that can’t set aside just a mere 15 minutes from their day. Use this time to clean up all the clutter of that day or the day previous. By ensuring that everything is in it’s place you will find what you need more efficiently and create less frustration in your life.

4. Keep only the essentials. The great thing about clearing out the clutter is that it creates space in your life for better things to come into it. If your life is full then how can you possibly take advantage of new opportunities without canceling on your current commitments. It’s not until you clear up your schedule that you have the flexibility to deal with unexpected events and opportunities. The same can be said with clutter in your life. By clearing out your wardrobe for example by throwing out all your clothes you haven’t worn for two seasons then you will find in short order that your wardrobe is back to the same fullness without you really realizing how it happened.

5. Set up an organized filing system. We can all get overwhelmed from time to time with bills and other things that require our attention at a later date. The best method to deal with this clutter is to buy a file system that you can separate into dates. So instead of just seeing a pile of bills you can for instance go to your file for today’s date and see what you have filed in that date to deal with.