Confession: I own an unreasonable number of pens.
At any given moment there are five different pens on my desk that I rotate between for no defensible reason. At least seven spiral notebooks stacked in front of my keyboard. Sticky notes with half-formed ideas scattered across every surface.
I usually laugh it off. But honestly? It's a little embarrassing and for years I never connected it to why I felt so scattered the moment I sat down to work.
What I noticed after hundreds of client calls
Part of my job is being on Zoom with entrepreneurs, digging into their websites and business strategy. Which means I get a peek behind the curtain. I see who's actually selling, what their numbers look like, how many customers they have, and what their days really look like.
After a few hundred of those calls, a pattern got impossible to ignore.
The people with clean desks, organized schedules, and simple routines were consistently doing better than the ones who couldn't find their notes under a pile of paper.
Not because tidiness is a virtue. Because clutter costs something real.
Clutter isn't a tidiness problem — it's an attention problem
Your eyes process everything around you, whether or not you're thinking about it.
You're not consciously considering the five pens, seven notebooks, and thirty sticky notes. But your brain registers all of it in the background, and every unfinished thing in your line of sight is a small open loop quietly asking for attention.
You don't experience that as "I'm distracted by pens." You experience it as brain fog. Mental fatigue. Walking into a room and forgetting why. Being weirdly indecisive about something that should be easy.
It's also why clearing one drawer can feel disproportionately great... you closed a loop, and your brain rewards that with serotonin for making your corner of the world measurably better than it was ten minutes ago.
Decision fatigue: why productive people wear the same thing
Ever notice how many notably productive people wear a version of the same outfit every day? Steve Jobs and the black turtleneck is the famous example, but it's everywhere.
That's not a quirk. It's decision fatigue.
You make hundreds of small decisions a day, and your capacity for them isn't infinite. Every trivial choice you eliminate (what to wear, where things live, what happens first in the morning) frees up bandwidth for decisions that actually matter.
If your space is chaotic, your brain spends the day quietly cataloguing it. Clear it and you're not just tidier. You have more room to think.
The inconvenient convenience
Here's the idea that changed how I approach all of this.
When I finally took on the clutter in my life, I realized almost everything around me was an inconvenient convenience.
Case in point: I kept a bottle of lotion on my desk. For convenience, in case I needed it while working. Perfectly logical.
But what happens when I'm not at my desk? Where do I go looking for lotion? Not my office. So the thing I placed there for convenience became an inconvenience everywhere else in the house and added one more object to the visual noise of my workspace.
Most clutter is exactly this. Things placed where they were handy once, now living permanently in the wrong place.
The three-step fix
Step 1: Give everything a spot. Just like the silverware drawer holds silverware, every item needs a defined home. If you can't think of a spot for something, that's information. Either create a spot, or seriously consider letting it go.
Step 2: Put things back when you're done. It takes a few extra seconds in the moment, and it saves you both the energy drain of looking at the pile and the bigger cleanup later. This is the step I tend to struggle with.
Step 3: Keep optimizing. Notice what you actually reach for. My favorite pens live in a cup right beside me. The three-hole punch I use twice a year lives in the very back of the bottom drawer. Most-used closest, rarely-used furthest.
Why "just declutter everything" never works
Because it's a project, and you're already depleted.
Someone tells you to overhaul the whole house, you look at that mountain, and your dopamine drops through the floor. A goal that big and far away gives your brain nothing reachable to chase. So you don't start, then you feel worse about the mess, and the loop continues.
The fix is a smaller finish line.
Try this today: clear the one surface you stare at
Not the house. Not even the room. One surface. The one in your direct line of sight while you work.
Ten minutes, timer on.
Then notice how the next hour of work feels. You were never scattered because something's wrong with you. You were asking your brain to think in a room full of unfinished business.
Clutter is one of the things that quietly drains your brain's fuel. Learn the whole system in The Basics of DOSE →, or grab the free Daily DOSE Checklist — four tiny habits that refill the tank.
About the Author:
Julie Lewis
Nutrition Coach | Gamification Expert | Online Business Strategist | Tech Explorer
Julie helps solopreneurs turn grind into flow — building momentum in life and business using the science of engagement. [More about the FROG method →]
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