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Day Four: Purge

Goal: To continue to sift through your sorted piles with the intent to eliminate any unnecessary items.

 

 

 

Today, your job is to pick up where you left off yesterday, continuing to eliminate anything you can.

Before or during your sorting and purging time today, contemplate the below questions…

 

1. How am I feeling?

 

Feelings bring us to the emotional decisions of what stays and what goes. Paper often represents something else, so sometimes we are particularly attached to paper because of what it represents to us. Today is the day for you to sink into the emotional aspect of your process.

 

2. What emotions or feelings are coming up as I navigate through this process? (Actually answer this)

 

The most common emotion in this situation is frustration, avoidance, resistance of all sorts (I’m too busy, this will never work, why will this process be different).

 

But, you may also be feeling things like freedom, release, lightness.

 

It is a good time to re-visit what paper represents:

  • Information
  • Reference
  • Legal needs
  • Action required
  • Knowledge
  • Security
  • Beauty
  • Inspiration
  • Ideas
  • Nostalgia

 

3. What am I keeping that is not being currently used (with the exception of business & home archive)?

 

4. What do these things represent to me? What am I considering letting go of, but am struggling to fully release? Do I know why?

 

 

The important thing is not whether you decide to keep things or not.

The important thing is to understand your deeper reasons for keeping what you keep and releasing what you release. It is from that place, that the clearest decisions can be made.

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Allow emotions to come up.

Having paper clutter (and all clutter) is a great obstacle to being productive and having a clear mind. Having a clear mind means taking action in your life.

Sometimes there is fear and resistance about taking action in your life, so the clutter is a great “reason” to stay distracted from action. Consider all of that as well.

 

 

Bonus Material

Do You Play the Rearranging Game?

In this archived article from my Space Guru column, I contemplate how our clutter holds us back.

"What if for every minute each of us spent looking for a misplaced object or wading through clutter to get to what we are looking for, we instead volunteered our time, invented something, wrote a book, sang to our children, planted a garden, cleaned a riverbed, made love or even just read a book."

 

 

Copyright © 2015. Susan Shehata. All Rights Reserved.