When you think of recycling, what comes to mind? Collecting paper, metal, plastic, etc. and then ditching it into the right bin? Or do you sometimes wander around your home and collect random “superfluous” items to give to a charity shop?

The kind of items you are recycling tend to be things that have overstayed their welcome or are simply no longer “good enough”, right? But if you really think about it, it’s simply a way of avoiding putting stuff in the bin, and maybe making sure landfills don’t fill up quite as fast.

Are you having trouble staying focused on the tasks ahead of you? You may have tried a series of practical tools like planners, task managers, lists, Kanban boards, Asana, Evernote and many more.

And yet you still find yourself pulled off track by distractions like your phone or email demanding attention all the time, obligations to family and friends, and even standard household tasks that seem to build up beyond belief?

If you are surrounded by distractions, or have a lot on your mind, you may find it hard to focus on anything. That could be a noisy office, your family not giving you enough time and space to concentrate, or a level of sensory overload you cannot deal with.

All those situations – and many others – can benefit from your own kind of positive distraction: i.e., not distract you from the tasks at hand, but from the things that pull your focus away from these tasks.

Sometimes we start working and soon find ourselves in the zone. Nothing can reach us, we are in our bubble and chip away at a task without engaging at all with the outside world. And before we realise it, a productive day has gone by in a flash and we find ourselves fresh, yet hungry, as we had forgotten to eat during the day.

I know: it's the perfect circumstance to get things done, but it doesn’t always happen, especially if the task is not exactly our most favourite thing to do. So let’s look at ways to get into the borderlands of the zone and focus on the task at hand.

Being productive with any task depends on our ability to focus and how easily we allow ourselves to be distracted.

There is one typical example of distraction that I regularly encounter during decluttering sessions: my client comes across a photo album and immediately they sit down and start looking at photos. I get it, they have not seen those in a while and it’s tempting to open the album, but in the meantime they completely forget about the task at hand.

Have you ever found yourself saying “yes” to do something and you immediately knew you really didn’t want to do it but felt obliged to accept anyway? We are all primed to say “yes” from a young age: “be polite”, “don’t be rude” and “help those less able” are phrases that have been hammered into children’s heads from a young age.

As adults, we often find ourselves in situations where that choice between “yes” and “no” can become difficult to navigate.

I’m sure you’ll agree that being prepared for emergencies is better than running around like a headless chicken when disaster strikes.

I suggest having an ‘emergency box’ that contains the stuff you would want to grab if you had to leave at speed. That does not need to be a box, any portable container will do (a box, backpack, or a small suitcase) as long as it can hold whatever you have decided is something you need in an emergency (a health crisis, a fire, flood or any other reason you’d have to leave in a hurry).

Consider this: how much time and energy do you spend beating yourself down instead of lifting yourself up? Imagine what your home could be like if you stopped being a perfectionist, people pleasing and comparing yourself to everyone else.

Self-sabotage often goes hand in hand with a lack of self-awareness or a disconnect between a person’s desires and their actions. People may unintentionally sabotage themselves because of low self-esteem and fear of failure.

When it comes to dealing with clutter, we often focus on the status quo: the stuff that sits in our space and – maybe – how it affects and is affected by the mental health of the person living in that space. While this is an excellent starting point, there are other elements to the physical clutter that is often overlooked, but that have a huge impact on understanding what is going on and the necessity to deal with it sooner rather than later.

Once the last child leaves the family home, parents tend to experience a sense of emptiness and a certain amount of nostalgia called “empty nest syndrome”. What now?

Downsizing might be on the horizon, but before you trade your four-bedroom for something cozier, there’s one big question: what do you do with all their stuff? Who gets to decide?