Hasta La Ideas

My alma mater is currently ranked number one in all of the college men’s basketball rankings. They’ve been in the top spot for 11 of the 14 weeks of the polls, and were number one in the preseason. There are five games left in the regular season, and all of the teams Kansas has left to play would love to see the Jayhawks lose.

Colorado, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, and Missouri fans aren’t the only ones who want to see Kansas mess up their record in the last five games. Fans of the other ranked teams would be happy to see Kansas take a tumble, and, after watching some of the games this year, I’m pretty certain there are a few referees that would be glad to see Kansas lose, too.

In competitive sports like basketball, a game has to end with a winner and a loser. If you’re on top, it’s because you beat other teams to get there. You make enemies quickly when success after success stacks up beneath you. Other people don’t like to see you succeed when it was at their expense. In fact, other teams and fans watch you in hopes of experiencing schadenfreude.

In our work lives, however, very few things are like competitive sports. If someone does well, it’s usually not at the expense of someone else. Many people can do well at a time. Everyone on a project can be successful. Just because someone receives a promotion today doesn’t mean you won’t ever be promoted. Even though this is the fact, it is easy to lose sight of it. We quickly clutter up our minds with jealousy, envy, and hope for some schadenfreude in our immediate lives.

If you want to be productive and manage your time well at work, you need to let go of the belief that your workplace is a zero-sum game. If a colleague is praised for his or her work — even if you feel it is unwarranted — be genuinely happy for that person and then immediately return to your tasks. Getting caught up in office politics, sabotaging your colleagues, and focusing on anything other than your work is a waste of your time. Engaging in such negative behaviors causes people to believe you can’t be trusted, you’re a bad team member, and you’re only out for yourself. Even if you aren’t outwardly expressing your frustrations, obsessive negative thoughts can decrease your productivity. Believing that someone else’s win is your loss is clutter, it keeps you from being productive, and only damages you professionally in the long-run.

Today is Presidents Day in the U.S., and over the past week I’ve been re-reading James Flexner’s Washington: The Indispensable Man in preparation. I’ve been fascinated by George Washington since I read his first inaugural address my junior year of high school. It was his desire not to be president that captivated me then and continues to interest me today. He wanted a simple retirement after the Revolution, not the responsibilities of leading a nation that his friends guilted him into doing.

After serving out his two presidential terms, Washington was finally able to retire to his home at Mount Vernon and live at a more relaxed pace. In Flexner’s biography, he discusses Washington’s daily routines starting on page 361:

Washington rose with the sun. “If my hirelings are not in the places at that time, I send them messages expressive of my sorrow for their indisposition. Then, having put these wheels in motion, I examine the state of things further,” always finding more “wounds” in his structures that needed to be healed. At a little after seven o’clock breakfast was ready. “This over, I mount my horse and ride round my farms, which employs me until it is time to dress for dinner, at which I rarely miss seeing strange faces, come, as they say, out of respect to me. Pray, would not the word curiosity answer as well? And how different this from having a few social friends at a cheerful board!

“The usual time of sitting at table, a walk, and tea, brings me within the dawn of candlelight, previous to which, if not prevented by company, I resolve that as soon as the glimmering taper supplies the place of the great luminary, I will retire to my writing table and acknowledge the letters I have received, but when the lights are brought, I feel tired and disinclined to engage in this work, conceiving that the next night will do as well. …”

I have to laugh aloud at Washington’s candor in this passage. He grumbles about people coming to see him “out of respect to me,” when he knows they’re just coming to visit because he’s famous. He longs to have his home filled with actual friends, instead. Then, he admits that when he has a candle brought to his desk so that he might respond to letters, he procrastinates and puts it off for another date.

Washington struggled with his desire to live a more simple life even in his retirement from public service. He certainly wanted fewer social obligations, and I think we can safely infer what his opinions would have been about modern e-mail. His biography is a nice reminder that the problems and aggravations we face currently, and our desire for a more simple life, are often very similar to those experienced by the people who lived before us.

Sentimental clutter plagues our attics, basements, closets, garages, and desks. These sentimental trinkets can keep us from moving forward with our lives physically and emotionally. If there is so much of the past taking up space in the present, there isn’t room to grow.

The article “What is nostalgia good for?” from BBC News discusses a recent report from the financial services firm Standard Life, the book Get It Together by Damian Barr, and research conducted by psychologist Clay Routledge at North Dakota State University that may provide insight into why we accumulate so many sentimental items and have even greater difficulty letting them go:

“Most of our days are often filled with with routine activities that aren’t particularly significant — shopping for groceries, commuting to work and so forth,” says Mr. Routledge.

“Nostalgia is a way for us to tap into the past experiences that we have that are quite meaningful — to remind us that our lives are worthwhile, that we are people of value, that we have good relationships, that we are happy and that life has some sense of purpose or meaning.”

Unfortunately, keeping everything from the past can have a negative impact on the future. From the article:

But Mr Barr warns the past can be fun in measured doses and for the right reasons.

“You shouldn’t revisit it as a way of avoiding the present or not thinking about the future. If you spend too much time thinking about the past, you are simply not going to be prepared for the future socially or emotionally.”

While highlighting the benefits of nostalgia, a 2006 report in Psychology Today magazine has warned that “overdoing reminiscence” risks an absence of joy derived from the present, and a reliance on past memories to provide happiness.

Thinking about the past could also trigger painful emotions, such as grief for lost loved ones or feeling like a has-been if recalling a distant career success.

Since we get a bump of happiness from sentimental items, it’s okay to keep a few of the prized possessions. Make room for the handful of valuable-to-you pieces of nostalgia that aren’t actually clutter. Get rid of the rest of the stuff that holds little-to-no value, though. A quilt from your grandmother might be an object you keep, but a stick you picked up one day in her yard might be something you should trash. It’s impossible to keep every object that comes into your life, so keep what is truly important (not clutter) and clear the rest (clutter) to make room for your present and future.

A few tips for ways to let go of sentimental clutter:

• Snap a digital photograph of the item and keep only the image. Save these pictures securely online in a program that allows you to keep notes about the image (like Flickr or Picasa).
• Write a journal entry about the item before you get rid of it. The act of writing down the memory will let you think about the experience, which is usually more valuable than the object itself.
• Invite friends to a Nostalgia Night and video tape your conversations about the items. If your friends wish to take any of the items home with them, let the object go to a good home. What is left afterward can be recycled, given to charity, or thrown in the trash.
• Make a deal with yourself to only keep sentimental items that will fit in a specific acid-free storage box or scrapbook. Deciding what will make it into the box or album can be a new happy memory itself.

Be sure to check out the full article for more insights into nostalgia.

In September, we reported on The New York Times article that discussed the current state of self-storage in the U.S. The Self Storage Association reported that unit rentals were down about “2 or 3 percent” across the country.

The article in the paper didn’t talk about what was happening to the stuff that had previously made up that 2 or 3 percent. Were people finally sorting and dealing with their possessions?

Unfortunately, after listening to a recent segment on the NPR show This American Life, it doesn’t sound like people are really dealing with their stuff. Hard economic times mean that a lot of people are falling behind on payments and their self-stored items are being put up for auction. The 16-minute segment “Act One. Needle in a Crapstack” is a fascinating look into what happens after people abandon their belongings in a self-storage facility:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=399

After you listen to “Act One. Needle in a Crapstack,” I’m interested in reading your reactions in the comments. I found the piece to be incredibly insightful, but also heart-breaking. I had no idea what happened to the abandoned stuff until I heard this fascinating segment.

I don’t know if it’s the cold, gray weather outside, the fact that it’s dark before I finish work for the day, or a combination of a million other factors, but I have had very little desire to leave my house this month. When 6:00 pm rolls around, I want to put on a pair of slippers and be a home-body. Forget my friends, I can see them in February … or March … or this summer when I won’t need a coat, boots, and mittens to brave the outdoors.

Monday night, however, I forced myself to go out into the world and see Gretchen Rubin talk about her book The Happiness Project at the Borders in the Friendship Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C. I’m glad that I went — I got to see Aviva Goldfarb who is the awesome brain behind The Six O’Clock Scramble, as well as a few Unclutterer fans — and Gretchen’s presentation gave terrific insights into her book.

One of the topics Gretchen discussed was how during her year working on her happiness project, she discovered that she is better at abstaining from an undesirable behavior than she is at moderating it. She says that there are two types of people — abstainers and moderators. Abstainers can easily quit something cold turkey. Moderators can easily reduce the number of times they do something.

I used to be an abstainer, but now I’m a moderator. When I quit smoking in my 20s, I decided one day to do it. I didn’t even smoke a “last cigarette.” I just walked away from it and didn’t think about cigarettes again. Now, if I try to abstain completely from something, my thoughts become obsessed with it. Instead, I am more successful and happy if I impose rules for moderation (for example, my resolution to eat at restaurants twice a week or less).

Which one are you? Are you an abstainer or a moderator?

Knowing which camp you are in can help a great deal with living an uncluttered life. Is there a behavior that is cluttering up your life? To resolve the issue, would you do best by ending it completely or setting moderate limitations?