Cleaning house

Few things bother me more than a disorderly environment. 

But for the past few years, my digital workspace has been a wreck. Messy desktops, disorganized files, and an out-of-control personal inbox.

And I don’t mean a couple hundred pieces of junk mail that needed to be deleted from the promotions tab. I mean seventeen-thousand nine-hundred and seventy-three pieces worth of messiness. But with a few clicks, it was clean. I didn’t realize how good it would feel until the moment I pressed delete.

(To be more accurate, I archived them... just in case there was something I needed for taxes.) 

It’s amazing what archiving 17,973 emails can do to free your mind. Like the clinking chain of a ceiling fan, it wasn’t an overwhelming burden, but enough of an annoyance.

Looking at the email total felt like the bothersome clank of the fan's chain tapping against the fixture's light – enough of a nuisance to throw off my concentration.

The ongoing disorder was but a strand of straw in a stack of chaos.

Chaos and success never go hand in hand. And that’s why Leonardo da Vinci noted that simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. Because there’s a sense of peace for the mind in the presence of simplicity. 

And peace is created out of order. Benjamin Franklin once said, “For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.” The five minutes spent cleaning my inbox provided countless moments of future relief.