Creative Wellness Letters - 🧠 shall we declutter our brains?

📝 I have been channeling my pre-election anxiety into action (highly recommend!) by writing get-out-the-vote letters for Vote Forward - their deadline for sending is Oct. 29, so if you want to follow suit, there’s still time!

Hi Reader, 

If you’re a fellow U.S. dweller, I hope that you and your mental health are weathering the pre-election season. 💗

I have to admit, I wrote this letter weeks ago and it feels a tiny bit silly and inconsequential amidst the barrage of big issues we’re dealing with, but read on to see why organizing our stuff is more meaningful than it may seem on the surface!

On the spectrum between Order Muppet and Chaos Muppet, I’m definitely an Order Muppet, and when it comes to organizing, more on the order side…or I intend to be, and life gets in the way. 😬

I’ve been craving more organization for a while, and a few projects have been on the back burner for at least a year, thanks to all of the album-making madness that started with planning my Kickstarter to fund it last fall.

So, now that I have a little more space to think about these things, I’m leaning into it!

There are so many areas to organize that affect your creative work:

Physical spaces: your desk, office, practice area, any space that helps you practice your creativity

And the digital realm: phone apps, photos, computer folders, the Downloads folder (mine is currently quite scary), email, website(s), Google Drive, social media feed, notifications, the list goes on…

Also, an important form of digital decluttering during this pre-election season can be curating your social media feeds (use that “hide” button whenever you need it!)

Here’s an awesome list / guide on digital decluttering from Brittany Berger of Work Brighter (which is very in line with my philosophies on compassionate productivity).

Why should we take the time to organize and declutter, among all of the bigger, more pressing concerns in our lives?

1) It helps us get to the task at hand more easily (I often get waylaid by trying to find files on my computer)

2) It cuts down on the energy leaks from always searching for things and the stress of being surrounded by clutter

3) It helps us disengage from the attention economy and hustle culture (see the list above for more on this)

I am also a huge fan of decluttering your to do list - all of those “I have been meaning to…” tasks are taking up mental space and also making it harder for you to see the things that you really need and want to do!

I’m going to define “clutter” here as anything that stands in the way of you and your priorities, so maybe you need to take some things off of your list, especially the ones that, if you’re honest, you don’t plan on doing at all (which can be okay!)

I talk more about this in my PDF workbook Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity:

Above all, organizing and decluttering leaves more space for what’s most important to you in your life and creative work, in terms of time, energy, and mental bandwidth. 

That always sounds good to me!

If you’re starting to feel overwhelmed by this huge list (or maybe even feel kind of attacked by it?), remember that you don’t have to do it all at once, do it perfectly, or even do all of it.

You can pick one small area to tackle and it will feel great!

I recently moved a bunch of things around on my office bookshelves, and it feels so much more fresh and functional. This will fade, of course, and its function will change in the future, but for now it feels awesome.

I often feel like I can’t do organizing stuff unless I have a large block of time to tear everything apart and put it back together. But maybe there’s something you could do in 15 minutes, an hour, or whatever feels like a manageable amount of time, and it would have a huge impact. 

Whatever area feels most pressing, you can start there.

You could even treat it like a meditation, making it a way to be present in the micro actions of your everyday life, and not getting swept away in the macro issues of the world - they will be there to engage with later.

I also don’t mean to imply that having a perfectly organized life is the key to happiness, or that there is one monolithic way of Being Organized™. It’s going to look different for each of us at any given time, and that’s cool. We're all out here doing our best!

If you need another brain to help figure out where to start with organizing your brain and your ideas, so you have more space for creativity, I’m here to help!

I currently have a couple spaces open for creative coaching, and you’re always welcome to book a chat with me or ask questions via Voxer or email before deciding to work together - no pressure-y sales pitches, ever!

My next letter to you will be about organizing the structure of your creative practice, which I’d teased a while back, but everything seems to be taking longer than I want it to during this season (or is that just life?!)

Let me know if you have questions about this topic, and I'll work them in!

What area of your creative space (physical or digital) feels in need of a little TLC? I’d love to hear about it, if you’d like to share!

🕸️ Staying on the good side of the internet 🕸️

• How to Tell if You're Overwhelmed (from Catherine Price's Substack newsletter How to Feel Alive) - Humorous, informative, relevant to my interests! Also her writing on the topic of fun is awesome.

• When I feel fragile, I look to sequoias (from Michelle LaCroix's Substack The Webs We Weave) - Utterly beautiful writing on "aging, ancient trees, and familiar fruit".
• Slow Down to Fall in Love Again (Zen Habits) - I can always use a reminder to slow down and be more present, how about you?