5 Easy Ways To De-Clutter Your Life
To give up something is usually perceived to be a bad thing. But not when it comes to spring-cleaning your life.
By 
Vyoma Nupur
To give up something is usually perceived to be a bad thing. But not when it comes to spring-cleaning your life. Give up the negativity, physical clutter, and mental junk that impede life and happiness.
1. De-clutter Your Physical Space: Clean up your abode. Throw out all the odd and sundry stuff that you collected over the years and is now languishing in your basement/bedroom/mantelpiece/storage space/garage. Your physical space is a reflection of your mental space. Mental junk usually manifests and magnifies into the tendency to hoard junk in your physical surroundings. So every weekend, find time to do this.
2. Create a Sanctuary of Peace and Beauty: Following the cleanup, create a room or nook in your home that is an honest reflection of your personal taste. A flowery fringe in small, earthen pots for perfume and color, some green plants, a tinkling miniature water fall in a stone basin or wind chimes at the entrance to your home, a set of favorite paintings or sculptures — something that gives you a feeling of serenity and relaxation.
3. Remove the Reams of Paperwork: If you are like me, you like to collect a lot of ‘important’ papers that you might need tomorrow as well as a pile of paperback novels that were read many days ago but are still hanging around on the corner table. Unless it is a priceless, classic book or a coffee table tome that you want to keep, give away the additional paperbacks. Sort through all papers, bills, store receipts that you may have collected and keep the relevant ones in a Walmart-purchased storage box. The remainder should hit the disposal bin.
4. Spring-Clean Your Relationships and Friendships: Sometimes we tend to over-extend hanging around with people we no longer relate with, because we do not know how to move on, we are afraid we won’t make other friends or simply because they are available. But it is necessary to prioritize relationships and friendships to be able to do justice to them and to ourselves. Steam-roll away all destructive connections. Nurture and water the beautiful ones. The garden of your emotions will flower blissfully, one day.
5. Simplify Communication and Interaction with Everyone: Say what you mean. Most times, one — or two — honest conversations can bring results more effectively than a score of complexity creating conversations, meetings and e-mails. When faced with any issue, grasp the core points and hold on to them. Frame them in your honest communication, peppered with the level of diplomacy required to deliver the message. There will also no longer be a need to keep track of half truths. This will free up hours of time that one can then effectively utilize toward other priorities in life.
Make space in your life for what matters. Create a garden of possibilities. 
