The Clutter Equation

There are plenty of books, websites and professional consultants who would be very happy to tell you about you and your clutter — what doesn’t belong, what should be moved, discarded, downsized or stowed. Trouble is, these experts don’t know you, your stuff or your life.

I don’t know you either. But I can offer a tool that may help you make your own decisions. The tool is called the Clutter Equation:

C(t, a, s, e, m) – V = I

More plainly:

Cost (in Time, Attention, Space, Energy and/or Money)

minus

Value the object adds to your life

equals

Clutter Index

If I is negative, then the item is not clutter. Its presence adds more value to your life than it consumes. Your life is, by definition, richer than it would be if the object were not there.

If I is positive, then the item is clutter — at least for now. It is costing you more than it is worth.

Of course I’m not expecting anyone to put specific numbers into this equation. Most of the costs and values involved cannot be quantified. (Though if you’re spending $45.00 a month on a storage unit for your collection of 1980s Tiger Beat magazines, there’s a cost you can quantify.)

Also, it’s important to remember that there are no “correct” values for any part of this equation. Like everything else about real or so-called clutter, the final decisions are subjective.

The purpose of the equation is to get you to think differently about the stuff in your life. Don’t assume you need to get new stuff, need to keep stuff, or need to leave stuff where and how it is. But don’t assume you have to get rid of all of your stuff either. Instead ask honestly — how much does the stuff enrich your life, and how much does it cost you?

Honesty and clarity are the keys to making this equation work. If you suspect that an object might be cluttering up your living room, be brutally honest about the value it brings. Sure, that SpiderMan snowglobe is nice, but what does does it add to your life? Try to be more specific than “it’s nice” or “I like it.” What do you like about it? What senses are engaged — sight? sound? memory? What about it would you miss if it were discarded or packed away?

Above all, beware of mistaking guilt or a sense of obligation for real value. As a cogent aphorism from unclutterer.com has it, “Guilt is not a reason to keep something.” Guilt is not value, and it is not a good basis for designing your environment. Moreover, a genuine obligation to another person can be served in better ways than keeping stuff you don’t really want in places you don’t really want it.

It is also important to be clear and honest about the cost side of the equation. Think about the space taken up by the object. What other use might you have for that space? Would your environment be more relaxing with nothing in that space? How much does that space cost, as a percentage of your housing costs (or storage space rental for those Tiger Beat magazines)?

The other potential costs make for harder questions, but may be even more important. How much time, attention and energy does the thing consume? How much time do you spend keeping those decorative teacups clean and dusted? Does that telescope on its tripod add to the time and effort it takes to get from your living room to the patio? How many times have you looked at that stack of crossword puzzle books and had negative rather than positive thoughts?

If you spend some time on this process and come to the conclusion that an object’s costs are greater than its value, then it is clutter. That means you’ll be better off if you do something about it.

In Part II of this series we’ll explore options for changing the balance of the equation.

In the past year there has been growing talk online about a “backlash” against the Getting Things Done, the systematic approach to personal productivity espoused in David Allan’s book and across the rest of his coaching and consulting empire. For example, see this post from Chris Bowler’s excellent blog The Weekly Review and this more strident post at The Growing Life.

I can think of a number of reasons for this. Some amount to simple and predictable contrarianism — when something is as popular as GTD, there are people who won’t be happy until they’ve declared it to be crap. But in the most thoughtful responses to GTD, like those cited above, there is something more going on. I’ll consider some of those in this and future posts to 1 Thing Done.

BEYOND PUNDITDOME

One source of this GTD backlash seems to stem from the rise of a newer generation of personal development pundits. Naturally, one way for a new guy to make his name is to call out the big dog – and that’s been Allen for a while now, though others such as Timothy Ferris are quickly emerging as targets. For example, in his blog Ferriss gives a strong and clever response to a pointed example of this kind of sniping by Bit Literacy author Mark Hurst.

Not that it’s necessarily the authors and consultants themselves who start with the chest-thumping. Just as often it’s bloggers looking for controversy who start yelling “Let’s you and him fight.”

One of the most literal and weird examples if this is also from Clay Collins in The Growing Life, in the form of a mock MMA bout between David Allen (representing GTD) and Tim Ferris (representing his 4-Hour Workweek approach). After some amusing descriptions of the pre-fight build-up and “rounds” of comparison between GTD and 4HWW, Collins ultimately tips his hat to both systems and refrains from declaring a winner. Which is a good thing, because I don’t quite see the basis for the conflict.  GTD and 4HWW are different approaches to different things, so a head-to head comparison is like comparing a dump truck to a dishwasher.

The focus of 4HWW is a particular kind of lifestyle design. The very title of the book describes a particular outcome.

The focus of GTD is a systematic approach to making plans, capturing ideas and executing actions to help create whatever outcome you want.

I didn’t get a lot out of The 4-Hour Workweekthe first time I read it. Maybe that’s because I don’t find hammocks very comfortable, and because my idea of a nutritional supplement is the extra shot of espresso I used to get in the giant lattes from my local coffee shop. Recently I gave 4HWW another look, and gathered from it a number of useful suggesting about developing business ideas and markets, managing the inputs in my life, and in general being open and active when it comes to creating opportunities. What I did not find was anything that seems to conflict with GTD.

Certainly the nuts and bolts of GTD can enable an unfortunate amount of system-fiddling for fiddling’s sake. As Ferriss says in his blog, “GTD is a bottom-up approach to time management that — used in isolation — can lead to becoming very efficient (doing things well) but decreasingly effective (not doing the right things).” This is definitely a risk if one obsesses on the the “runway-level” workflow parts of Getting Things Done while ignoring the planning and “altitudes of focus” models that are presented in the very same book.

There are any number of ways to decide how you want your life and world to be. David Allen, Timothy Ferriss and others provide valuable tools and approaches. But in the end it always comes down to wanting an outcome, deciding on an action to bring the real world conditions closer to that outcome, and then taking that action. That’s where the simple heart of GTD pays off.

• Have you decided on an action to take, but you can’t take it right now? Record it somewhere. There’s no sense in wasting time and brain power having to think it up all over again.
• Where should you record it? Someplace you trust yourself to look when you’ll be in a position to act.

There’s GTD in a nutshell.

Now, this glosses over a lot of important topics, such as what goes into choosing an outcome, deciding upon an action, and creating gates and gate keepers to control what you have to think about in the first place. But if there’s some great innovation that improves on these principles — choose an action, then do it now or write it down and do it later — I’d be delighted to hear about it.

Merlin Mann’s excellent talk on How to Blog is one of the things that convinced me not only to revive my blog TETSUJIN.ORG but also to start up 1 Thing Done, which had been percolating in the back of my mind for the better part of a year.

So naturally I’m going to ignore his powerful advice about how to start a new blog. Rather than diving directly into hardcore content, I’m posting this note to explain the purpose of the site and give you an idea of what you can expect to find here.

This post is more for me than for you. Which may prove true for most of what appears on this site. I’m writing this post to help myself sort out the direction for the site.

A number of related ideas have been rising to the top of my thoughts over the past year. Some have been steeping for longer than that. A partial list:

• Systematic approaches to workflow, productivity and creativity.
• Organization — personal and professional, physical and mental.
• Space, stuff and “Decluttering.” Paying due attention to physical environment and the things we allow into our lives.
• Effective living. Bringing together the skills, habits and attitudes needed to live a life in which you can experience, create, learn and above all be happy.

Of course, there are plenty of books and web sites out there already covering these subjects. Many of those are great, but even more are deeply wrongheaded. Too often the discussions stray far afield from the principles that lay behind the systems, and lose sight of the goals they can serve. “Decluttering” becomes making fun of other peoples’ choices and knee-jerk condemnation of “Unitaskers.” “Productivity” becomes a fetish for to-do lists rather than a thoughtful approach to what is allowed onto those lists. Frugality becomes just another way of obsessing over physical possessions. Many wonderful ideas can become parodies of actually living an effective life, if you lose focus on why the ideas matter.

On 1 Thing Done I plan to keep purpose and principle at the heart of things. And this includes the most important principle: effective living means taking action.

No matter how much you plan, organize or mind-map, in the end you have to get one thing done.

Then another.

Then another.

And eventually these small changes in the state of the world can add up to great achievements.