Our environment is essential to our success in many ways, which is why it is so important to control our environment to the best of our ability.
Environment is arguably one of the most important factors to success, productivity, and your overall state of mental wellbeing. Many of us have goals that we want to achieve on a given day, but when the conditions to accomplish these goals are not ideal, we can face setbacks due to a general clutter of distractions around us.
There are deep psychological connections between our levels of production and physical cleanliness. When we have a set of goals in our mind that we want to accomplish, we subconsciously think of them as hurdles that we need to cross or messes that we need to clean up before we can be in the relaxed state of having everything done.
Smaller and more metaphysical messes around our house, for example, may not be the reason we are not earning enough money or doing a good enough job of staying in shape, but they do act as distractions. A Princeton study found that having a more organized living space leads to better daily productivity in tasks that go towards our larger goals in life. Eliminating visual stimuli in the form of not having our lives squared away (even if they truly are not a big deal), can go along way in creating the tunnel vision mentality needed to stay focused on daily tasks.
Aside from the psychological connection that we as humans subconsciously draw from not being in a clean environment, keeping tidy also enforces a disciplined mindset that will be necessary for productivity. Think of cleaning and organizing your home as practice for your more imminent tasks. Generally speaking, when one aspect of your life starts to slip, others may soon come with it due to the fact that we are no longer prioritizing aspects of life that we need to to stay physically and mentally healthy. They say that how you do one thing is how you do everything, and there is no better example of this than the impact of having a clean home (or working environment) is on our focus towards our larger and more important goals.
