Cleaning out your office is freeing. Clutter slows you down, distracts you, and makes you less efficient.

Less stuff is better.

We all know the old saw about the work expanding to fill the time allotted. I think that’s generally accurate.

There’s another one about space (at least I think this one has been said before, but if not, then I want credit for it).

I think things expand to fill the space allotted.

The Law of Accumulation

Here’s what I mean:

This time of year, I work on cleaning out the accumulated junk in our office. With our limited real estate and conference room arrangement, we have relatively little junk to eliminate. We’ve really cut back on space.

However, we do have enough junk to fill the space allotted.

Over the course of the past year, we’ve sold off many of our bookshelves and other storage apparatuses.

That’s limited the amount of stuff we can accumulate, but we still have some space for junk, and that space is now filled up.

The Process of Elimination

I spent about 90 minutes this morning throwing stuff in a giant trash can and started thinking about whether I’ll have to do it again a year from now. I do it myself because no one else is willing to make the call to ditch the stuff (because they’re worried that I’ll say, “You tossed out that great _________”).

Then, out of the blue, I was hit with a thought (it doesn’t happen often, so it was shocking).

I realized that I can avoid cleaning off these shelves if I get rid of the shelves.

Genius (I thought to myself).

We can put the shelves on Craigslist, and they won’t be here to fill up with stuff.

Some will ask, “But what will you do with the stuff?”

Until this morning, those shelves were filled with three types of things.

• First, there were some gadgets, cords, and the boxes originally containing the gadgets. We listed what we could on Craigslist, and we either tossed the rest or took it a local charity.
• Second, there were about 40 books. We’ve previously scanned most all of our books, but some new volumes accumulated on the shelves this year, and there were a few books that we didn’t scan yet for a host of reasons. We tossed some and sent others to 1DollarScan.
• Finally, there are these big, brown accordion files holding some client documents. These files are fascinating to me.

Why are those files fascinating?

Well, we have storage space in our Raleigh office. We don’t have storage space in Charlotte (three hours away), Durham, or Chapel Hill.

These folders are filled with stuff that we, according to some of our people, “really, really, really need to save on paper.” We have about 20 clients with stuff in the folders.

What’s interesting is that in our other offices, where we don’t have storage space, we don’t have brown folders. Somehow, those clients in the “non-storage space” offices don’t have stuff to save.

How can that be? Well, it can’t be—that’s how.

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We’re allowing stuff to expand to fill the space allotted.

Getting Rid of Your Storage = Getting Rid of Your Junk

That’s why I’m getting rid of the shelving units. We’ve got three of them mounted side by side at the moment. This time I’m getting rid of two of them. Next year at this time, I’ll go for the last one. I hesitate to eliminate them all at once because I don’t want anyone overly stressed by the change (I’ve learned that lesson the hard way).

Soon, there will be less space for the stuff to fill. Soon, I’m willing to wager that we’ll have less stuff.

If your office is filled with junk and you’d like to lighten your load and clean things up, then go for it. But when you do it, don’t get sucked into the need to do it annually for the rest of your work life. Apply a permanent solution and go one step further after you toss the junk: toss the storage.

If you eliminate the space for the stuff, you’ll have really done something. You’ll have cleaned up the stuff—for good. The benefits in efficiency and productivity will more than justify your time spent solving the problem.