It has been taught form our childhood days that we have to keep our surroundings and environment neat and clean. However, we seldom follow what was instructed during our childhood. To keep our surrounding and your home neat and clean is not alone good for our neighbors but is necessary for our health and mental peace.

When your mind and place is organized you can work more productively. If everything is organized even smallest error can be observed easily, and you can really start working on exceptions. On the other hand, if everything is in a total mess, even a grave mistake will never be noticed. Keeping this in mind, having a clean office or home not only increases your efficiency, but also essential for your career development.

De-cluttering an office or home is not an end; it is only beginning of leading an organized and civilized life.

It is quite a simple task, but the difficult task is to realize that you are a disorganized person and that realization should result in correcting yourself. The simple task of deciding on items to be de-cluttered can be broken into three different parts:-

What is required to be retained? When you start your de-cluttering exercise every item need to be categorised as what are the items to be retained. You may be having certain personal or emotional attachment with the items which you have preserved. May be is a gift from someone, who left you long back. You need to decide if you want to keep it or can be trashed. Also check if an item which you want to retain, can you get it readily from elsewhere. If you have taken a print of a research paper, in this world it may be available on the internet. Do you still need to keep it as a hard copy of it? You need to remove the emotions you have on the items and clear it off.

What is required to be gifted or donated? You need to look at the items in your house or office. You may be having items like books, stationery which you have read, used and may never be using it any more. But you still retain it for some unknown reason. Just pickup of these items, gift or donate to someone who deserves it. You may be having toys which you had brought for your baby or kid, and had kept it on your loft for many years. You should decide to gift away these items to someone who can use it. Try it out and see the satisfaction what you will gain by gifting things to charity and you will get more breathing space in your house.

What are the items to be thrown? If you have selected items which need to be retained and items which need to be donated or gifted, then you will be left only with items which are to be thrown or trashed. Never feel upset with parting your things which you had considered precious once in your life time. You will be surprised to see you were able to clear at least 30% of the items which were cluttered in your life time. This means you were able to regain at least 30% of the space which you had lost for so many days.

Main reason due to which things get de-cluttered is mainly because of procrastination. You may be a person who has the habit of deferring things on a regular basis. The reason may be you are too busy, or you are not able to prioritize your things. Even this de-cluttering exercise should never be deferred; you have to do it immediately right now. You should also ensure that every item from now on when it enters into your home or office need to be decided whether to be retained, gifted or thrashed.