Clutter

Clutter is suffocating. Every day I wade through ads, emails, notifications, paper, and other stuff. Is clutter a problem in your life too? Are you a better husband and father, a better employee, or a better neighbor because of clutter? Have you stopped to consider the negative impact of clutter on your life? How much time do you waste every day because of clutter?

I published my first article (Rad Dad) on January 3, 2020. However, as my wife and others are well aware, it was my desire to start a website years before. There are many excuses for why it took me so long to take action. However, the crux of the matter is that I allowed clutter into my life. My hope is that you will avoid my same mistakes, or make the same changes I made to escape the suffocating clutter of life.

Americans, myself included, tend to have too much stuff. This article indicates that “in 2018, there was an estimated 23,404,300 individual self storage units in the United States. This equates to 14 people per storage unit based on the U.S.’s population of 327,200,000.” We live in a rich country which affords us the opportunity to purchase and thus accumulate a lot of stuff. However, I wonder if everything that is being stored in those 23 million storage units actually matters…

What Matters

What actually matters? Each of us must answer that question in our own unique way. I looked at how I was spending my time, and then I decided that God, my wife and children, my health, and serving others are what matter the most to me. This newfound clarity brought me a tremendous sense of power. I took control, and I determined that I would no longer let items of irrelevance control the way I spent my precious time and resources.

Do you desire this same clarity for yourself? The list below outlines four categories of clutter that I am eliminating from my life:

• Subscription Emails
• Smartphone Apps
• Credit Cards
• Miscellaneous Paper

Subscription Emails

How many emails do you receive every day? A number of months ago I received at least 30 subscription emails each day. Some of these emails contained valuable content while others were a waste of time. But regardless of the quality of the emails, with so much information entering my inbox every day, I would take a high level glance at the content, and then store it away in one of my numerous Gmail folders.

This exercise was costing me valuable time – so, I unsubscribed. I unsubscribed from the grocery stores, the credit card companies, the deals websites, and even the influencers. I figured if I really missed some of these subscriptions in time I would simply subscribe again. But you know what, I didn’t miss them. I remained subscribed to a handful of influencers who move me, and I filled the extra time focusing on God, my wife and children, my health, and serving others.

By unsubscribing from these emails I estimate that I am saving on average 15 minutes per day (91 hours per year). I can’t tell you how many times I would say to myself – “when I have a bit more time, I’ll…” Well, the thing is, I won’t ever have “more” time. All of us have a finite amount of time available to us – 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. What I should have been saying all those years, and what you should be asking yourself right now, is “what can I eliminate so I have more time?”

Smartphone Apps

Screen time is an interesting issue. Sometime during 2019 I decided I was spending too much time on my phone. Since then, when I arrive home from work, I put my smartphone in my closet. I didn’t think I was addicted to my phone, but boy was I wrong… Even today I still feel an itch from time to time to check this or that. However, even if I’m doing something productive or worthwhile on my smartphone, my boys don’t know that. All they see is that dad’s ignoring them again. They don’t always express it, but that is something I have determined I want to avoid.

As I started using my phone less, I noticed that there were a lot of unused apps on my smartphone. So, I deleted them. Then, once I had deleted unused apps, I looked again and decided to delete apps that were taking up too much time. I can’t recall everything that I removed, but I know that Facebook and ESPN are no longer on my phone.

Now, this is where I need to insert a disclaimer… I’m not saying that Facebook and ESPN are bad. Rather, I’m saying that the time and energy I was spending on these apps was taking me away from what matters the most to me in life. And you know what, just like those emails from which I unsubscribed, I didn’t miss the apps that I deleted either. Rather, I filled the extra time focusing on God, my wife and children, my health, and serving others. Facebook and ESPN are my examples, but I’m sure you have apps and other distractions on your smartphone that are draining your time and pulling you away from what matters most. Are you willing to remove them from your life?

Credit Cards

How many credit cards do you use each month, and how frequently do you use them? My wife and I have four credit cards. In the past, we purchased everything on these cards to get the points or cashback that they offered. Because we paid our cards off each month, we never paid interest. The problem with our approach, however, is that I would spend time on the last day of each month paying off each of our credit cards, wondering what we bought. This was a major source of stress and tension in our home.

So, (and I’m sure you’re beginning to see a pattern now), we quit using our four credit cards. Now we use our debit card for virtually every transaction. We still have the credit cards, and we use them in certain situations (paying them off immediately), but this has reduced our financial stress immensely by not having to pay off these cards on the last day of each month. Additionally, we spend a lot less.

In Dave Ramsey’s book The Total Money Makeover, Dave says: “I have met with thousands of millionaires in my years as a financial counselor, and I have never met one who said he made it all with Discover Card bonus points.” Now, I am not discussing credit card perks in this post… I will probably dedicate a post to that in the future. But rather I am showing an example of how credit cards were cluttering my life. Now that I don’t have to spend time and become stressed out at the end of each month to pay off these credit cards, I can focus my newfound time and attention on (you guessed it) God, my wife and children, my health, and serving others.

Miscellaneous Paper

Are you drowning in paper? I have boxed, filed, and stored ‘important documents’ for years. My wife and I have purchased binders, shelves, and other containers to store our paper. Our kitchen has a junk drawer… well, three junk drawers. Paper is proving to be my greatest source of clutter. Please ask yourself two questions: 1) “How can I stop receiving all this paper?” and 2) “Why am I saving all this paper?” Below are ideas that you can utilize to answer these two questions…

How to stop receiving paper:

• Go paperless. Credit card, insurance, mortgage, and utility companies have online platforms where you can elect to “go paperless,” meaning all statements and notifications will be sent electronically to the email address of your choice.
• Take control of your mail preferences. A company called DMA can help you to manage the direct mail that arrives in your mailbox (i.e., no more credit card offers!).

Should I save paper?

• If you can access a document via an online platform, then in my opinion there is no reason to store a hard copy of that document in a box in your house. Throw out all of the old bills and statements – these don’t matter anymore anyway.
• Tax documents are more important… Assuming you are an honest individual, the IRS indicates that in most situations you should only keep tax records for three years. Personally, if I receive tax documents in the mail, I save them electronically and then shred the hard copy.

Clarity… not Clutter

I want to revisit my earlier question – “What actually matters?” Just like pounds and debt, clutter will come into your life unless you deliberately keep it at bay. Start now to remove the nonessential from your life – the four categories above are a great place to start. Identify what matters most to you, and then do everything in your power to make the time for whoever or whatever that may be. Enjoy the relief and the clarity as you spend more and more time on what actually matters and less and less time on items of irrelevance. And, as the Minimalists say: “Love people, use things. The opposite never works.”