How clutter affects you and what you can do about it

Perhaps ironically, I feel like my Android phone (Samsung GS3) helps me manage clutter much better by letting me arbitrarily arrange my app icons. As a result, each "screen" in my home screen tends to be less than half full of apps, organized in rows of arbitrary length by type (ie. Yelp and Opentable together, Dropbox, Drive and Evernote together).

In contrast, on my iPad, the enforced layout of app icons makes each screen seem cluttered and muddled.

I wish at work I could just focus on one thing, my job invites the clutter of too many things pulling on me. I've always been able to multitask more than most but it's always at a cost. If I can work on one project all day I am far less exhausted than working on many different things on the same day. One day recently I worked on 4 apps back and forth. Our brains are not made for that kind of twitchy thinking. It's not just physical stuff that makes up clutter.

Getting Things Done is so comprehensive in this regard it would be nice if related articles explicitly referred to it. It's a great reference point, in my opinion.

Interesting. I think the fact the home screen is so cluttered with icons is one of the reasons I don't feel comfortable with Windows 8.

Site seems to be down, heres a google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hyo7DgJ...

One way I cope with cluttered environment is to dim the light and only have the monitor as source of light.

So it is all dark but the monitor is not.

I can only look at the monitor and my work is more focused like that.

expected this to be another fluff piece and was pleasantly surprised.