This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 37: Declutter Your Life So You Can Write.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner and I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been struggling this week. First and foremost, I need to tell you that I’m not a schedule person. In fact, you don’t ever want me to plan anything for you. I’m bad at planning. I’ve always been bad at planning. I’m one of those people who if I get the chance to go on a trip or a vacation, I’m the person who says we’ll figure out what we feel like doing when we get there. As opposed to other people who are very good at planning and who make up this big itinerary that says, okay, Monday morning, at this time, we’re going to go to this place, followed up by an excursion to this place between these hours and then we’ll come together for dinner at this time and then afterwards, this, this, and this. That is not me. I can’t do it. It is not one of my skills or my strong points.

But in my current position, I have a lot of responsibilities. I also have an extremely terrible memory and so if you combine those two things, obviously I’m not going to be able to uphold my responsibilities very well. So what I did was I started using a calendar. I know, novel concept, right? So I use this online calendar. It’s tied to my email address and on it, from Sunday through Saturday, I have scheduled the things that I need to do blocked off in little colorful blocks across my calendar. If you listened to my last episode, episode number 36, the pressure to be great, I shared with you the fact that I’m going to be writing a book this year, hooray! The downside of that is I needed to find a way to make it work with my schedule and currently, pretty much every hour of my day is accounted for. So I’ve been getting up early.

I get up at 5:30 and I sit down and I write for an hour, hour and 15 minutes and then I start getting ready for my day. I’m a professional so I have to look professional so I can’t just slouch into the office in yoga pants and a sweatshirt, as much as I would love to do that. When someone out there invents yoga pants that you can wear to work, I want you to give me a call because I will purchase all of them. So I get ready, I straighten my hair, make it so work 8:00. Now at work either I have meetings scheduled, so I have an 8:00 to 9:00 meeting with so-and-so and then I have a 9:30 client meeting with this client and then I have a lunch meeting with this person from 11:30 to 1:00and so on and so on.

So either my day is taken up by meetings or I’ve have scheduled in the work that I need to do that day. So oh, okay. I need to make a site map for this client and I’ve scheduled it in between noon and 5:00 PM near the end of the day on Monday and I’ll be wrapping it up the next day from 8:00 to 12:30 after which I have a lunch commitment followed by a meeting followed by blah, blah, blah. So I get off work at five and my employer, Click Rain, is really good about having us go home when the work day ends. They’re very good about only having us work 40 hours a week, which is unheard of in the agency world.

So five o’clock. I start packing up my stuff. I’m usually out of there by 5:15 and then there’s the drive home or the walk home or the bike ride home, depending on the weather, and then starts my round of evening commitments. And they’re not all bad. In fact, I enjoy most of what I do, which is awesome. And which is probably why I have trouble saying no to new commitments. Often my commitments are, oh, drinks with so-and-so, from 5:30 to 8:00, that’s awesome. Or a board meeting that I’m really passionate about, oh boy, I can’t wait to go to that.

So recently I had a checkup and they did a body fat percentage analysis. And apparently my body is like 30% fat, which is not optimal. So I now have workouts, mandatory workouts three times a week. So that was fun to schedule in. And there’s just a lot going on. And then there’s my podcast, again, which I love doing, but also, which takes up a ton of time. Often 15, 20, 30 hours a week. So I’m not kidding when I say that my schedule is literally packed. It looks like, I was going to say, it looks like a successful Tetris game. But if, if you successfully build up your Tetris wall of blocks they disappear and this stuff is not disappearing.

I have a lot going on and maybe you have a lot going on too so I’m exhausted. I’m an introvert. And to recharge, I need time alone. I need time where I’m just hiding somewhere and nobody knows where I am and I have a book and a cup of coffee or tea or a bag of Cheetos, except I’m not allowed to have the Cheetos anymore so we’ll change that back to tea. I’m an introvert and I need recharge time and that’s that I’m not getting.

So it’s Sunday right now and I had a leadership retreat for church yesterday and some other social commitments. And I woke up this morning and realized that my husband had left for church without me. He said he tried waking me up, but I was pretty much unresponsive. I usually don’t sleep in, but I have not been able to stop sleeping all day today. I took a shower and then I fell asleep, went to the gym, fell back asleep, had a nice phone call with a friend, realized I should probably record my podcast if it was going to happen this week. This is not balance. This is not work life writing balance, or maybe it is and it’s just a very cluttered balance. It feel sometimes like I’m spinning plates or performing this magnificent balancing act. But the thing is, if you take one step in the wrong direction, if you catch your ankle and it twists a little bit, all those spinning plates will just come crashing right down.

So today I want to talk about clutter. I want to talk about what’s cluttering your life. What’s cluttering your schedule, maybe literally, what is cluttering your house or your desk or your email inbox. Where is that clutter and how do we clean it out so that we have some margin in our lives. So that everything isn’t just bleeding into everything else and making us exhausted. How do we find enough time, more time or any time at all in which to write during the day? Because I’ve got to admit now that I’ve sort of carved out some time in my schedule for writing every day, I still get distracted, even though it is on my calendar, I still sit down to write and realize that I have 98 new unread emails, or I have a little stack of bills silently judging me on the edge of my desk that I need to pay, or that I have two cats that are batting at the outside of my door because they want to be fed or that I realized I have an important client meeting that day and I’ll need some extra time to get ready. Maybe for you, it’s not finding the time to write, maybe it’s finding the focus. Either way, that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode.

First, I want to start off by asking, what is clutter and more specifically, what is clutter for you? So I podcast from my writing desk and so right now, everything is pushed aside and I have my microphone and my piece of audio foam and my laptop and all this other stuff here. And all around my little ring of audio foam are papers and pens and notebooks and plants and little gadgets that I picked up here and there that I thought would inspire me and stacks of books, so many books. Behind me is a piano and on that piano are candles and flowers and plants. Papers, books of course, business cards. I’m one of those people that when I inhabit a place, I really inhabit it.

The trick here is realizing what is good stuff and what is clutter? What is the meaningless trash that does nothing good for you and only serves to distract you from what you want and need to be doing. Sometimes it’s hard to see those things and I’m talking literally and figuratively. I’m used to having a messy cluttered desk and so when I walk into my office, I don’t necessarily see the mess, but it sure does distract me while I’m trying to write. So since it’s sometimes hard to see that clutter let’s focus on the essentials. Let’s focus on the things that are not clutter. Let’s focus on realizing what is good and important to us.

So what I want you to do is think of five things that are important to you and I want to tell you that it’s okay if writing does not make the top five. That’s okay. So what to you is definitely not clutter? And you can do this in one of two ways. You can write down if you are looking at literal clutter, like my desk. What are five things that are actually important to me and conducive to my writing. Or you can take a broader look at your life. If you tend to be over-scheduled like I am. Take a step back literally or figuratively, write down five things that are important to you.

So for me, this would be my family, nurturing good relationships with friends, having a creative outlet of some sort like writing or podcasting, my job, my faith. Maybe for you it’s your vintage car collection or spending time with your kids or baking or gardening or your wardrobe. Maybe it’s the time you spend volunteering or serving your community. Maybe it’s the plant on your desk that your mother gave to you to remind you to grow and flourish wherever you are planted. Whatever it is, write down five things. Five essential things that are not clutter, but really get at the core of who you are and what you want to do. Now, if you have a schedule or a calendar like I do, I want you to take a look at your list of five things and compare that to your schedule. What do you see? What on there does not align with the items that are important to you?

I can’t tell you what is important for your schedule. That’s something that you need to figure out, but I can tell you that I saw several things on mine that I’m like, okay, here’s a few things that need to go. Here’s where I can start to say no to things. Cut down the clutter and create a little bit of breathing room in my life. Create some time that I can spend getting my energy back. If you find that you have trouble saying no to things, then I encourage you to listen to episode nine of The Write Now podcast. It’s called Saying Yes to Writing, and the premise there is that when you say yes to writing, you’ll need to say no to other things and it takes a look at how you can do that, graciously and without hurting anyone’s feelings.

But maybe for you, it’s not all about your schedule. Maybe you don’t have a schedule or maybe you have a packed schedule and you have time for writing slated in there, but you still find yourself getting distracted during that time. So let’s talk about all of this other clutter that can gum up the works.

One of the things that helps me to identify clutter aside from things that are not in alignment with those five core important things is the feeling that I get when I focus on it. And so I’m looking at my desk right now, and I have this feeling of anxiety and irritation and stress when I see how much junk has piled up. I get the same feeling when I go into the kitchen and there’s dirty dishes next to the sink. It just bothers me because there’s something in me that can’t be at peace, that can’t say, focus on writing fully until it’s taken care of. And so I look at my desk and I say, all right, I’m going to set aside my writing time today to declutter so that tomorrow I can use my writing time to write. Sometimes you need to make a sacrifice for a more successful longterm.

I’m a very torn person. I think that I love minimalism. I appreciate it so much. But at the same time, I’m so messy, I hate it. Sometimes there’s nothing more delightful to me than to walking into my office with a giant trash bag and filling it with items that need to go to Goodwill or filling it with old papers that I’ve been holding on to. Just getting rid of that clutter until I feel like I can breathe until I feel like I can focus and I no longer have all of this clutter poking at my brain.

I do the same thing at my desk at work sometimes and I do find that it helps me to focus better when there’s not papers with deadlines and other urgent things begging for my attention left and right. Get rid of that clutter, tidy it up, put it out of sight and out of mind so that you can focus on writing.

So that’s your literal clutter. Let’s talk for a second about digital clutter, because it’s a thing it’s a thing now. So anytime that I turn on my phone or unlock my phone, I see all of these little icons corresponding to the apps I have on my phone. I have a smartphone and each one of these little apps has this little red number in the upper right hand corner. These are all of my extremely important, in air quotes, notifications. So every time I glance at my phone, I have the series of apps that I go through. So I have two Instagram accounts, one for myself and one for the Write Now podcast. So I go in and I look at my notifications for each account. I do the same thing with Twitter, I do the same thing with Facebook. I go through all of my Snapchats, which is how my siblings and I keep in touch. I go through all of my texts. I go through and look at the day’s Timehop. It’s endless. All these notifications that must be mentally processed and filed away or dismissed.

Every time I pick up my phone and look at it, there goes at least 15 minutes of my time. I know it happens, but I also can’t help it. I know that there’s notifications there and I can’t forget about it and I need to go in and dismiss them all. But then they just build up again. That’s clutter. I will not die or spontaneously combust, or my head will not fall off. If I don’t check my Instagram notifications every half hour. I don’t need to do that. Sometimes I want to do it because it’s validating, which in itself is kind of a sickness. You might notice that I didn’t mention email, even though I have two email apps on my phone. One for work. And one for my personal email, these number badges are very large.

Email is one of those things that extends beyond my phone. Most of my apps are restricted to my phone, but email is everywhere for me. And it has to be everywhere for me. It’s on my phone, yes. But it’s also on my laptop, on my desktop computer. Often I have my email open all day so that I know the second an email comes in and a client has approved something or just so I know that someone has messaged me about a document I’ve been waiting for. Anything like that. I also keep my personal email open just in case there’s a family thing that happens, or I don’t know. So I pretty much live and write with my email open and every time a new message comes up, it diverts my attention from what I’m doing.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of the notion that, say you’re writing and you are pulled away from your writing by a distraction, so I’m sitting here working on my novel and I see a new email come in. Even if I don’t take any action on that email, it still pulled me out of my writing zone and I’ve read that it takes a good 15 minutes to get yourself, once distracted, back into, fully into what you were doing before. So think about that. I have an hour, sometimes a little more than an hour to write every morning if I can get out of bed by 5:30. What happens if I have one distraction? Boom that kills a quarter of my time. That kills 15 minutes of focus. Email is clutter. Useful clutter, but when it comes to writing, when it comes to focusing on your writing, you don’t need that distraction.

For me, it’s not enough just to close out of my email inbox because I still know that all those emails are there waiting to be answered and if you’ve emailed me before, you know that sometimes I let those emails build up and I’m not great at answering them right away. So are you one of those people who has something like 300,000 unread emails in their inbox? I used to be, now I just have less than 20. How I got to that point was I declared email bankruptcy. I learned this from Michael Hyatt, who is a business writer, productivity guy.

He has a podcast called This is Your Life and one of my favorite episodes of his is about declaring email bankruptcy. Essentially, he says, if you’re one of those people who has 300,000 emails unread in your inbox, sometimes you just got to drop the bomb, delete them all. If they were important, people will get back to you. Start over, and then make sure you set a time one time or two times per day, where you go into your email inbox and you process every message and that can be reading it and making a note to take care of something later. That can be taking care of the thing at that time if it takes just a little bit of time to do, or delegating it to someone else.

If this sounds like an amazing sort of idea to you, I encourage you to just Google Michael Hyatt, H-Y-A-T-T, and the words email bankruptcy, and follow his directions because they work really well. I’ve done that for my personal email. That can help you really declutter your life and get rid of some of that dread and anxiety that comes with knowing that you have a ridiculous amount of emails to respond to and process.

So we’ve talked about physical clutter, my messy desk, my unwashed dishes, and to respond to that, I suggested that you take your writing time and sacrifice one period of writing to just get all the things decluttered. Declutter, all the things to make it meme friendly. Or if you don’t want to sacrifice a writing period, then maybe set aside the time to declutter. Go into your office with a big box or a garbage bag, or go ahead and do a dish washing marathon. You’ll feel so much better when it’s done. Take care of that physical clutter.

Take care of your digital clutter. Maybe get rid of some of those apps. If those apps aren’t supporting the things in life that are important to you, if they just exist to be distractions, get rid of them. Preempt the notifications, seriously. Another thing you can do is disable notifications your phone, although then you run the risk of not knowing when something happens. Similarly, you can set aside some dedicated time to cleaning out all the notifications, just like you did with your desk in your office. You can do the same thing for your email, whether it’s just setting aside a chunk of time to go through, get rid of everything so that you can move on and not worry about that anymore as you write.

Finally, maybe the clutter has more to do with how you’re spending your time. Look at that list of five important things that you wrote down. Is your schedule allocated to spending time on things that support those five items? If you realize that you have two hours blocked off one day for something that you don’t even care about, it might be a good time to start thinking about cutting that clutter out of your life so that you can have more time to focus on your writing, so that you can have more focus on your writing, period.

Ultimately, the question that you need to ask yourself is what needs to happen for you to sit down and to be able to write with the focus that you need to write. For me, it’s deleting apps that serve as nothing more than a distraction, leaving my phone in another room, unplugging the internet while I write, decluttering physically my desk and my work area, calming some of those anxieties, easing some of those stresses that can clutter up our hearts and make it hard to focus on what we need to be doing.

So what about you? What’s cluttering your life right now? Literally, figuratively, what’s getting in the way? What sort of junk has piled up that you just need to get rid of? I would love to know. You can let me know in the comments section of the show notes for today’s episode, episode number 37. You can find the show notes for this and other episodes sarahwerner.com. Alternately, you can navigate to the contact page on my website and fill out the little form there and send that to me, or you can just send me an email directly at hello@sarahwarner.com. I really look forward to hearing from you.

Speaking of hearing from people, I got some really lovely emails this week from listeners. The first one is from podcast listener jenny, who is writing in response to episode 35, The Power of a Writer’s Group. Jenny says, “It was just last week that I mentioned to my mom how blown away I am by the writing community. In any other sort of work or talent, it seems that people do not want to help new people in the business and/or give away their success secrets. But I’ve found that authors and writers are the complete opposite of this and it warms my little heart.” Jenny, thank you for your words. I think that is really true and it’s one of the that I love writing. The community is just so strong and so supportive. It’s a really great place to be.

I received another email from podcast listener, Michelle, who was writing about episode 34, Feeling Like a Fraud. Michelle writes, “This episode was probably one of your best yet, perhaps because I relate to it so much. I am a sufferer of imposter syndrome. The thing is, I was not always a sufferer. For most of my life. I was a confident go getter that never took no for an answer and that got me really far until it didn’t and that’s when I developed the syndrome. It was the day I was essentially fired from the place I was working after putting in two years of blood, sweat, and tears, I had failed and there is nothing like failing to make you question your whole existence. What I realize now is that yes, I did fail, but I was also failed by the person who is supposed to be my advisor. It was a two way street and we both crashed into the ditch. It’s hard to cure yourself of imposter syndrome. It lies dormant, ready to show itself whenever you need the most confidence. It rears its ugly head often. But remember, just because you fail does not mean that you’re a failure. XO, XO, Michelle.”

Jenny and Michelle, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. Once again, if you would like to do so, go to Sarahwerner.com, email me at hello@sarahwerner.com, message me on Facebook or any other of the social media platforms that I have set up. I would love to hear from you.

So we talked a lot today about the clutter and the distractions that keep us from writing. I feel like I neglected to say that sometimes you just need to give yourself a little grace. I am particularly bad at this. I’m a very driven person, for better or for worse. I’m very goal and success oriented. I like to make the most of my time so it’s really hard for me to give myself any grace and I think what I mean by that is, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re not going for a 100% clean, clear, distraction free focus zone for your writing because we’re human and that is a wonderful thing.

What I do want for you is to love your craft, love what you do, let your passion for what you’re writing narrow your focus, let it hone your focus and your talents so that you can do what you love and find time to do what you love without distractions that don’t matter or that take you away from doing what you love. But if you fail one day like I did on Monday when I sat down to write and ended up answering emails for 45 minutes, give yourself some grace. Don’t let it ruin your day. Remember that there’s tomorrow and the next day. Remind yourself that email can wait. Turn off your phone. Relocate those bills, just don’t hide them well enough that you forget to pay them. Maybe do a couple of dishes and enjoy being a writer.

I have several people that I would like to thank for helping make today’s episode possible. First and foremost, I would like to thank my Patreon supporters for their generous financial contributions. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that lets patrons of the arts support the creators that they love. So thank you to official cool cat Sean Locke, official bookworms Matt Paulson and Rebecca Werner, official rad dude, Andrew Coons and official caffeine enabler, Mang Son Soo. You all are so wonderful. You cover hosting costs, you do so many things. You allow me to take the time to create this podcast every week. So thank you so so much.

If you are interested in becoming a Patreon supporter, you can do that by going to Sarahwerner.com, navigating to the show notes for this episode and clicking on help support this podcast. I would also like to thank you for listening. You are the reason that I’m doing this and I mean that. I hope that you find this podcast to be a helpful resource and inspiring and encouraging because you are a writer and I want to do everything I can to help you fulfill that calling, that vocation, it’s important. And with that, this has been the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m going to go delete some apps from my phone.