Minimalism At Workplaces: The New Cool

Minimalism is becoming the new ‘cool’ of the corporate world. But what is it, you ask? It’s simple (pun intended). Minimalism is the process of keeping things simple for yourself; decluttering to make your brain focus on just the simple and important things. It’s becoming an increasingly popular way of life. More and more people are buying into the idea that the lesser their possessions, the more peace of mind they will have.

Psychology professor, Tim Kasser, describes minimalists as people who choose to earn less and provide more focus on other things in life instead of buying into the earn more, spend more, and go into a debt lifestyle encouraged in today’s era of capitalism and materialism. Minimalism is like a revolution to the materialistic mindset as it encourages people to declutter from the messy lifestyle to have a minimum amount of necessary things needed to get through life; it holds the view that decluttering makes one focus better and find it easier to prioritize important things in life.

The Impact of Cluttering

To understand the science behind minimalism, we need to first look at how clutter is creating a negative impact on your life so that you can decide minimalism is the change you need. The first and foremost negative effect of cluttering is how messy the space around you becomes. The more the clutter, the more you need to clean up. People who use minimalism as a lifestyle report of how relieved they feel when they work in a clean space with little to clean up.

Cluttering has a direct correlation with levels of stress, over-consuming behavior, and a low ability to focus. Some would go on to say that cluttering is the start from where a person goes on to adapt ‘hoarding disorder’; a disorder associated with difficulty in discarding material possessions, no matter the value. Cluttering is used as an excuse by a lot of people to divert themselves from life stressors without addressing the root cause of problems.

Researchers have shown time and time again through their experiments that not only the amount of money they earn but where they’re spending that money makes a huge impact on happiness levels i.e. people who spend money on others tend to feel happier than those who earn a lot but spend them on themselves. Some studies show that there is a strong correlation between low self-esteem and materialism. Reports hold that when a person learns to discard unimportant possessions and be happy with less, they can proceed toward a healthier lifestyle and gain the ability to prioritize the important things.

What Will You Gain with the Minimalist Lifestyle?

Minimalism is basically you scraping off the unnecessary items in your life so that you can focus on your priorities. It’s the reassessing of your daily needs so that you can figure out what you should keep and what you should get rid of. The question that arises is, why should we? What is it that minimalists are gaining from losing their possessions that they keep promoting the idea further? We’ll tell you what!

1. Purpose

When you get rid of all the excess things, you gain a purpose to focus on only what’s important. Minimalism is a lifestyle that reminds us of what we value the most while getting rid of all the distractions. As our intentions become increasingly clearer for us, this results in an improvement in all aspects of our life. Hence, when working on an important project, once you discard all the t.v shows and social sites distracting you, your thinking becomes better and you can meet your goals for the project in a more productive way.

2. Freedom from Materialism

The basic science behind minimalism is the idea that ‘less is more’. Hence, the lesser possessions you have, the better your life becomes because you relieve yourself from the pressures of the materialistic world we’re a part of. This will also entail that we’ll be using less money on things we don’t even need to buy in the first place, resulting in those savings you’ve been planning to do for so long.

3. Internal Peace

While materialism results in external satisfaction by making yourself seem acceptable in the eyes of a demanding world, minimalism results in internal peace. The less you have, the less you worry about, and the lesser the stress on your mental health. Once these stressors are gotten rid of, you become increasingly more calm and content with your way of living.

4. Prioritize

Imagine this, you introduced a bunch of marketing tactics for your brand/client to use. And you ended up implementing all of them. It went well, you started getting a lot of positive feedback and responses. But now you’re in a dilemma because you don’t really understand which tactic did the job for you. And since you didn’t determine it from before, will you keep applying all the tactics all the time or will you stop using them one by one to determine which one it was that did the job?

This dilemma is what minimalism saves you from. Focusing on a single strategy and making that work for you is what you should be doing instead of indulging in a bunch of experiments that will get out of your control sooner than you realize.

5. Individuality

Once you learn to rid yourself of all the needless things, you gain your individuality back. You start doing things differently instead of conforming to what everyone else is following. You become increasingly better at focusing on your goals and implementing your ideas that you know will work best for your projects.

6. Creative Boost

A common stereotype for creative workers is that they can only work in messy environments, but is that really the case with you? Try cleaning up your desk a little and making a checklist of priorities to focus on for a day, and see the kind of open space you will get to think once all the distractions are gone.

Minimalism means adopting simplicity in your life instead of chaos, and this might be the boost you need to get rid of that creative block you’ve been going through. Become a bit organized and observe how everything in your work and personal life changes accordingly!

7. Ability to Focus

As discussed since the start of this blog, minimalism eventually leads to you becoming better at focusing on the things you need and value instead of getting distracted by mundane, unnecessary things that this capitalistic world made you believe you need to survive. Once you’re better at focusing, you will learn to

After reading all this, most people ask ‘isn’t this life boring?’ the answer: no. When you learn to focus on the important, you eventually gain the ability to spend time on the necessary things in life. Tell us how much time you actually spend with your family all the time you’re at home? And we mean, actually spending time with your family, not sitting with them and having your eyes glued to your phone the entire time. The time to be with your family is what you will gain when being minimalist.

This doesn’t in any way mean that you should get rid of EVERYTHING. At times it refers to discarding the time you spend on certain things that you should be giving to other, more important, things. You can have all the things that bring value to your life. But you need to manage how they’re adding value and prioritize them accordingly. Once you learn how to create this balance, you will eventually learn to be better in every life aspect.