Get Organized: Don't Let Digital Clutter Ruin Your Life

Digital clutter, physical clutter, emotional clutter…It's all taking a toll on your life. June Saruwatari knows about clutter. She's an organization and productivity expert, as well as the author of a new book called Behind the Clutter: Truth. Love. Meaning. Purpose.

She's a woman after my own heart. Many of her guiding principles for being organized are similar to my own, rooted in common sense practices, like trusting your system and eliminating distractions.

I arranged to interview Saruwatari by Skype, but I screwed up the dates and times of the interview not once, but twice. When you have a column and a book about being organized, as I do, and you screw up something as simple as the date and time of a meeting with another organization expert, well, the irony of it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.

The reason I screwed up—and this is all pertinent to Saruwatari's work—is I had too much going on in my life, too many things in my head to remember. Something had to give. I'd recently moved to a new state, started a new lifestyle, and am currently preparing to move to a new country. Saruwatari might say I'm in need of a mental dumping, a daily practice where she writes down every to-do that's on her mind, regardless if it's already on her task list. That purging, she believes, frees us to be not only more productive, but also at peace with ourselves.

When we finally did connect by Skype, Saruwatari was bubbly, yet calm and she laughed often, even when describing the more mundane procedures of getting organized. She began our interview by answering my first question before I even had a chance to ask it.

June Saruwatari: My philosophy about clutter, whether digital or physical, is that it's the same issue. People tend to accumulate digital clutter because they can't really see it.

Clutter is unfinished business. Clutter stays in the conciseness, and you carry it around with you. If you have digital stuff, and you haven't let go of it, and it's not serving a purpose, and you've determined that it's not useful, then that's clutter.

The unfinished business of, say, any to-dos in your mind that you haven't taken care of, or the un-forgiveness in your heart, or anything—thank-you letters that you haven't written, the gratitude in your heart that has not been expressed—that's all clutter, too.

So there's emotional, there's mental, and then there's digital clutter. There's a correlation between them and the physical clutter, too.

Jill Duffy: Talk a little bit more about the cost of clutter, whether it's digital or physical.

JS: People feel disempowered, not energized, not optimistic, like they're in a downward spiral in their lives. People tell me that they physically feel they're suffocating when they have too much clutter. And that can be not just physical clutter, but clutter in your head. It's overwhelming. You can't move forward! People feel paralyzed, immobilized, de-energized.

Whether it's physical or digital clutter, it's connected to the emotional and spiritual clutter.

JD: In your book, do you go into the time-cost of clutter?

JS: Yes, I do! I'm super passionate about it. I've been teaching time management, I call it time expansion, for years. It's all connected.

When you have clutter, it takes you twice as long to do something or get somewhere. If you think about being inside a house, if the pathway is cluttered with stuff, it's going to take you twice as long to get through the door. You can't even get to the door if there's a lot of clutter!

In the same way, the pathway to doing an activity can be cluttered. For instance, I'm talking with you, and I want to have an engaging conversation, but if there's clutter, there will be clutter in my head. If I'm thinking about something else, I'm not really present with you in the moment. So that's preventing us from having an engaging conversation. The hundred emails in my inbox make me think, "Oh my goodness, what's in there that I haven't got to yet?"

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. If someone were to give that same number in dollars, so $86,400, on one day and told you, "You can't roll it over, you can't decide what to do with it on another day," what would you do? You would invest it wisely. You would start building a foundation.

A lot of people who are into productivity and are passionate about technology get caught up in new apps and new programs, and they forget that first they have to start with a foundation. The 86,400 seconds per day, or 168 hour per week, or 24 hours a day—what do you want to do with it?

I start with roles. I start with the foundation. What are the roles in your life? Now think about it like a pie chart. How much time do you want to spend playing each role? Then you look at your time like a puzzle and move stuff around.

There's always a depreciation. People think they have 300 hours in a week, but really, it's 168.

JD: What's that saying? You have as many hours in a week as Beyonce?

JS: Obama, Madonna, Ghandi, Buddha, Jesus—everybody has the same amount of time in a week! When people complain that they don't have enough time, I say, "Stop it," because they're fighting the truth of what is.

Truth, love, meaning, purpose. When I work with people on their time, I ask, "Truthfully, what are you doing with your 168 hours?" First they need to figure out why they feel they have a deficit and why they feel overwhelmed. Then I ask what's the ideal? Where do you want to be with the 168 hours?

Here's the philosophy: When you create clear boundaries on your time, you're boundless within that space of time. When you create clear boundaries on stuff, you can be boundless within that space.

What we do is set an intention. So for example, "In this hour, I'm going to prepare my to-do list for going to India." And what happens is it doesn't take five hours. It takes that one hour because you set that intention.

JD: So it's about giving yourself a realistic limit, and then working within that limit.

JS: Yes. Realistic limit, or whatever is your idea of realistic. Everyone has her own idea of what that means. When you create that time and you're dedicated to it, you're laser-focused on it.

JD: What do people see as an area where they want to spend less time, once they actually look at how they spend their time?

JS: Some examples are going into the rabbit hole of social media. Also, checking emails throughout the day. It's better to do it once in the morning, maybe once in the afternoon after you get back from lunch, and once at the end of the day.

Another one is interruptions. In an office, a lot of people get interruptions if you have an open-door policy, and I always say you have to teach people how to treat you. I joked with one of my clients that everybody needs to take a number before they come into her office, instead of just barging in.

It's all about having systems. If you have interruptions at work, and you're a manager, you need to teach everyone who works for you to respect your time, maybe by shutting your door. You could have office hours, as if you were a professor, maybe saying between 10:00 and 12:00, I'm open for anyone who has questions, but between 2:00 and 3:30, I'm going to be doing reading and research.

Set aside your own time as if it's a meeting with someone else.

JD: That's a great tip, to treat your own time as if it were a meeting.

JS: Yes, or a doctor's appointment. It's just as important.

JD: Some of my favorite apps and online services are those that work invisibly and without me needing to take action, such as IFTTT, RescueTime, and EasilyDo. Do you have any favorite apps that help you maximize your time or keep your time precious?

JS: Reminders are great. It's like having a virtual personal assistant. Outlook, too. It's a tried-and-true system. You can set an alert. You can snooze it. You can forward it to somebody else to take care of it. I love it.

I try to keep it as simple as possible and not have too many programs. As you can probably tell, I'm like a child in some ways [laughs], and if it gets too complicated, I get bored, and my mind goes somewhere else.

Here's an example: scanning apps. All these wonderful scanning programs are coming out every day. I had four that I was investigating, and I just wanted to find something so I could get rid of one of my devices [a desktop scanner]. I found one immediately, so with the other ones, I didn't take too much time to try them out. When I tried the other ones, as soon as I realized it wasn't for me, delete!

If you're investigating different apps and different systems, and you find something isn't working for you, you need to delete it, even if you paid money for it. Focus on the one that you feel is resonating with you, and take it all the way through. What happens to a lot of people is two weeks later, they try something else, and then once again they have digital clutter.

JD: I've noticed that same pattern. People who love technology want to try everything new rather than pick one app and be dedicated to using it. They don't look at it as an investment in their time.

JS: They don't let it go! I'll look at someone's cluttered phone, and they'll have apps that they downloaded a year ago and never used. I tell them, "Delete, delete, delete!"

People are afraid to delete programs they purchased. But it'll come back up again if they need it.

Another program that I love is PaperKarma. If you get actual physical junk mail, you just take a picture the mailing label with the barcode, and they get you off the list. Then it comes back to you and says, "Success!" when it works.

JD: I want to go back to Outlook for a second. You said you use reminders a lot. Can you give an example of a day and what kinds of things you put in as reminders, what the blocks of time are for, and so on?

JS: Yes, let's start with how those reminders get in there. At the beginning of each day, you want to do a mental dumping of all the things in your head that you have to do. Don't categorize just yet. At the end of two or three minutes, you might have 25 things on there. Then, based on your intuition and where you are today, assign a to-do date to each one, so you're making a commitment to it. Then, you have to have some categories set up for your task list, and you're going to assign a category to each one. That's one part of it.

Then the other part is when you do set up your schedule, you have to have clear boundaries for your time. At the beginning and end of every day, you want to look at your to-do list and prioritize which ones you want to get done. Let's say for you as a writer, you have "Write or Research" as a category. You might not do that category of task every day. You might only do it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

JD: It seems like the mental dumping is meant to free up the brain clutter, to get those things off your mind, off your chest, get them down, and then deal with them one by one in a very organized and systematic fashion.

JS: Yes. And this is the most important thing: I don't want you to go and check whether you already have that task on the list. The whole point is mentally dumping. If you write down something and see it's already on your task list 10 times—and that's crazy-making!—it shows just how many times you're thinking about it. Now it's about developing a system for remembering the task and getting it done, and trusting that the system is going to work for you, that you can rely on that system, that you can count on it.

The number-one thing is to figure out the system that works for you. Forget about what everybody else is doing.

I wish that people could do a digital detox for a week to figure out what's truly important. What happens when you're inundated with stuff is that everything becomes "important."

What's your legacy? Why are you here on Earth? If you're a manager at a company or an entrepreneur, what's your goal or mission statement? You get so caught up in being productive for the sake of being productive that you lose sight of the intention, the why you're doing something.

It's so simple! Do you love the time that you're spending? What's the truth of that role that you're playing? What's the truth of the time that you're spending? Does it have meaning to you? Sometimes we spend time on things that have meaning for other people, and we have to know what purpose it serves. Truth, love, meaning, purpose. It's so simple.

JD: Why do you think it is that so many people have a hard time coming back to their mission statement or their purpose?

JS: Because they're inundated with clutter.

I tell people to stop, and check in with their truth, love, meaning, and purpose, and have constant vigilance. Without clutter, everything becomes very clear.

JD: If you could encourage busy professionals to give up one kind of clutter or one thing that clutters their life, what would you advise them?

JS: Having your inbox at zero.

JD: You would advise them to have zero messages, or you would advise them to give up on that goal?

JS: I told one client, "If you can clear out your inbox and have it at zero messages at the end of the day, you will feel like a million bucks." What I mean by that is having a system so that you can look at a message, touch it, and decide if it's something you're going to respond to, or decide that you're going to read it later and put it into a Read folder, or decide that you're going to unsubscribe from a list—I think that's the one thing for digital clutter. If professionals can get their inbox to zero, I think that's a great goal. And I don't mean that you're going to be taking action on every single thing. I just think it will help you clear yourself mentally so that you're prepared for whatever the day holds for you, or going home and being fully present and engaged in your family, or if you're going on a date, being fully engaged with your partner. It's a spiritual, mental, emotional practice.