Just FART Your Clutter Away

Today's entry was submitted by a friend and brother, Anthony Green. He shares some valuable advice today and tomorrow on how to create habits to help us unclutter our lives. Enjoy...

I have been struggling with clutter from age 1-30! I just got tired of searching for my keys and wallet every single morning.

I began reading plenty of books and magazines (including Good Housekeeping, RealSimple, and Family Circle) to understand the fallacy of my bachelor ways. In these resources, I found some tips on good organizational habits that I could apply to my life.

Today’s tip deals with Handling Paper.

So, for all of you that have piles of paper everywhere, you may want to adopt the FART system. Here’s how it works:

When I receive a sheet of paper, I must either:

1) File it; or
2) Act on it; or
3) Refer it; or
4) Trash it.

The goal is to handle each sheet of paper only once and to get as much paper into the trash as possible.

I went through this exercise everyday for 21 days. I took very small baby steps to remove the bad habit of letting paper lay around and eventually pile up.

Each new habit must be repeated for 21 consecutive days to replace the old bad habit. Apparently, Benjamin Franklin discovered that it took repeating something 21 times before it became ingrained in your brain synapses as a "new habit" or "way of life".

So, stop procrastinating and start FARTing.