This post was updated on March 28, 2025
Throughout my career, I have explored how effectively decluttering can boost productivity and mental clarity. After all, clutter isn’t just about clearing physical disorder—it’s about relieving a significant mental burden that distracts you and affects your well-being.
Multiple studies have found that clutter in your home office has many negative impacts, including:
- Heightened stress
- Increased emotional exhaustion
- Decreased productivity
- Reduced job satisfaction
In this article, I’ve outlined some of the best strategies you can use to quickly declutter your physical and digital workspaces, and then get organized. Following these systems can help unleash your productivity in service of achieving your most significant results.
Clearing Your Home Office
When embarking on a decluttering journey, look at each item in your workspace and ask these three questions:
1. Is it serving you?
Determine if an item continues to add value to your life. Items that haven’t been used or enjoyed in the past year are often unnecessary and can be discarded. Maybe you have a small glass paperweight on your desk that serves no purpose but makes you happy because it has sentimental value. Keep that. But all those containers of paper clips you never use and stacks of sticky notes? They can go.
2. Is it easily replaceable?
Many possessions are inexpensive or easy to replace, suggesting they may not need to be held onto. Almost everything we might need is digitized these days, so if you have stacks of business cards, a paper bank statement, or a printed user manual for your computer, you know you can find these online. Shred or recycle and make mental space for new ideas in your life.
3. Would it help others?
Donating items offers them a new life while benefiting those in need. Think about when the last time was that you used/wore/enjoyed this item? If it’s been a year or more, it should get canceled/sold/donated/given to a friend. If it’s hard for you to part with things, think about how much good it will do in the hands of someone who doesn’t have very much.
These three questions remain central to effective decluttering of your physical workspace. And keep reading, because the strategies below will also help with physical clutter.
Getting Rid of Digital Clutter
Although it may not be as readily apparent, digital clutter can be just as destructive to our mental health and productivity as physical clutter. After all, if you have to wade through hundreds of emails to find the one you’re looking for, you’re accruing unnecessary stress and wasting important time that could be spent pursuing your most significant results.
Where to Look for Digital Clutter
There are several places where the digital clutter that can drain your energy and derail your productivity tends to accumulate. These are your email, social media platforms, computer desktop, team communication tools, and, of course, your phone.
If you don’t have a strategy for dealing with the constant influx of messages and posts vying for your attention, you’ll soon be drowning in them, and you’ll expend valuable energy searching for those that really matter. In other words, it’s hard to find the signal in the noise.
Just like with physical clutter, you need a plan for managing digital clutter. My free guide called “Control Your Tech” will show you exactly how to make your technology work for you, and not the other way around. Click the button below to get it now.
Once you’ve decluttered your physical and digital workspace, you’re likely to feel relieved and more easily able to focus on your most important tasks. But to maintain this productivity advantage in the long-haul, you’ll need a system for processing clutter.
Keep your home office organized with T.E.S.S.T.
One reason clutter might accumulate in your home office is because you’ve deferred making a decision about what to do with it. Maybe you think making a decision is going to take more time than you have to devote, or you’re afraid you might need the item later. Or perhaps you just don’t feel like dealing with it.
Enter the T.E.S.S.T. decision process, which helps you efficiently process things so that they don’t create clutter in your world. By “process” I mean examining something to see if it needs to remain in your life.
More than a decade ago, I designed T.E.S.S.T. to help my clients declutter, accomplish more, and be their best selves. I wrote about the process at length in my book, Personal Productivity Secrets. (You can download the first chapter and start reading for free.)
Despite the acceleration of our digital revolution, the process continues to help my clients manage their attention and get back in the driver’s seat of their lives and work. I am such a deep believer in the power of T.E.S.S.T. that I wrote about it again in my books, From To Do To Done and The Happy Inbox.
Each letter in T.E.S.S.T. stands for one of the steps in the process:
Step 1: Take Immediate action
This step involves asking yourself whether an item requires action, and if you are able to take action now. A natural response is to decide that you need to address the piece of clutter, but you tell yourself you’ll figure out the details later. This is often procrastination disguised as indecision. Sometimes, however, there’s a valid reason you can’t take action now. An example of this is an event invitation (physical or digital). Don’t defer making a decision unless you expect to receive new information later that will impact this decision.
Step 2: Empower yourself and others
When you get to this step, it’s time to ask yourself, “Can someone else do this for me?” If so, empower the right person to do the job. This could also mean hiring someone to do it, like a professional, or a provider on a service like Taskrabbit or similar sites. If you’re the best person to handle the task, ask yourself if you can process it using the two-minute rule (which does not always mean to “do it now if it’s quick.”).
Step 3: Suspend it to your Next Actions
If you don’t have all the information you need to deal with an item, put the item on the category of your task list called “Waiting for,” and note the missing information you need to receive before you can move forward. If this doesn’t sound familiar, you might find it helpful to read the book related to the task management module of Empowered Productivity, From To Do To Done: How To Go from Busy to Productive by Mastering Your To-Do List.
Step 4: Store it for future reference
When you determine that an item does not require action, then your next processing task is to determine whether you should keep it. In my experience, most people keep more than they need. If the item is easily replaceable or available online, then it’s time to let it go.
Step 5: Trash or recycle it
If you feel an item from your home office is too valuable to give away (even for the tax deduction), there are so many outlets where you could sell it for a little extra cash, like Craigslist, Next Door, Facebook groups, etc.
If the reason you haven’t used it is because it’s broken, there are lots of options for getting it repaired, reused, or recycled, including the outlets mentioned above, plus others like TaskRabbit. Many cities have a “bulk pickup,” where anything that can be reused or recycled gets diverted from the landfill.
Together, these steps form a comprehensive approach to preventing the distraction caused by clutter.
Reduce distraction through attention management
When you couple the decluttering framework of T.E.S.S.T for your physical and digital environments with a comprehensive productivity system like Empowered Productivity for managing your attention, your tasks, and your communication, you’re primed to accomplish more with less stress.
To learn much more about how to maximize achievement and be your best self, visit the Learning Center on my website.
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