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Clearing Clutter and Chi
By Roy Law of Systems Studio
or how to reduce your entropy Twenty years ago, in 1990, Declan Treacy invented the International Clear Your Desk! Day and officially declared a one-man war on unnecessary paperwork. That battle still rages, like the Battle of the Sexes it is an eternal contest – a few local victories or truces but no overall conflict resolution is ever likely. Two thousand years ago, polo had already been played for six hundred years but another century would pass before paper would be invented by the Chinese. History does not record when ‘filing’ systems for papers were first formalised, although Declan says that vertical filing was invented for the Chicago World Fair in 1893. As well as solving some problems, that invention created yet another problem – because mis-filing a document can effectively make it lost. “Filing is for Finding” should be the motto for everyone, don’t file just to get it out of sight, file for ease of retrieval. Sadly, only lip-service is paid to this principle in most organisations and the filing clerk is usually at the very bottom of the administration food chain. Filing is in fact just one example of a far more fundamental principle – the need for “places to put things” which is the prerequisite for any form of “tidying”. Incidentally, the origins of the word tidy would seem to relate to the regularity and orderliness of the tides. So here’s an unsuspected application for the trite Victorian saying “A place for everything and everything in its place”. It is also essential that before you start any clearing or tidying process you should have assigned a definite destination for everything. The KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle should be used to minimize the number of such destinations. Clutter is not confined to paper, clothes and unwashed dishes can also be major contributors, especially for flat-dwellers. Why does everything get in such a mess so easily? The answer would seem to be that more than one item constitutes a critical-mass for clutter and thereafter that ‘clutter centre’ positively attracts more items. Furthermore, in the terminology of Feng Shui, every additional item increases negative Chi and so creates additional disharmony in the room. In its turn, that very disharmony will discourage you to do anything about it! So a classic Catch 22 situation results. Feng Shui, was also invented by the Chinese, but antedates paper by about two thousand years. As T Raphael Simons has said “ … clutter is a negative expression of the element Earth, it indicates worry and neglect.” Tackling clutter might be regarded as the antithesis of “writer’s block” and the scariness of a blank sheet of paper; here you’ve got the disharmony of an over-crowded environment and your goal is to see a blank floor or a clear surface. A degree of paralysis is natural, take comfort from the fact that most tasks will suddenly take “a life of their own” sometime after you’ve started them, so get started anywhere! Where you start your de-cluttering process doesn’t matter, actually starting does. Starting is the only priority, you’ve got to take the finite risk that you’ll actually enjoy the process. How do you prevent yourself getting cluttered again? You probably can’t, but you can cross clutter off your paranoia suspects list. Oh, that bit about entropy? Well, entropy’s a useful concept from theoretical physics. One definition of entropy is “a measure of the disorganisation or degradation of the universe”, so decreasing entropy makes your universe more organized. That’s exactly what you wanted, isn’t it?
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This intel was contributed by Roy Law
Roy Law
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May, 2012
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