Editor's Note: We all have clutter in our lives. In aviation, clutter is dangerous. Get a loose item caught under a rudder pedal and landing in a strong crosswind may become impossible. But the everyday clutter we find in our lives is just a nuisance with nothing risky about it, right? Perhaps not.

Clutter can drain our souls. It may not seem perilous to day-to-day living, but junk in our homes, noise in our minds, and relationships that don’t sustain us, erode our inner being. Clutter elevates stress levels and dampens our creativity, which ultimately limits our potential, blocking us from the lives we were meant to lead. Today’s post is by Lessons from the Cockpit contributor Sara from On Simplicity, a website about having less and enjoying more. Sara gives us sound advice for removing the clutter that keeps us grounded:

Here's the thing about clutter: it starts off harmlessly enough. You just need that one extra item in the cockpit or the house. It won't get in the way. You'll make sure of it. You might have a tiny pile of things sitting on your desk. It's not much; you could knock it out in about a half hour if necessary. But you'd rather not, so it builds up. That's the story of clutter. It starts small and grows upon itself.

Here's the other thing about clutter: mental and physical clutter are interconnected. Every time you pass a pile of stuff, whether it's laundry, bills, or that ugly piece of paperwork your boss is waiting for, you have to think about it. "I should take care of that. The next time I have five minutes, that pile is toast!" But once one pile or task grows into three or four, you're spending quite a few moments a day walking past your clutter thinking, "I should take care of that." Not only is your time wasted, your mental bandwidth is being taxed for no good reason. Creative thoughts, fresh projects, and brilliant solutions are all being pushed aside in favor of clutter-borne guilt.

As the pile of physical and mental clutter grows, your incentive to clear it up fades. Now it's no longer just a 10-minute task---it's going to take a whole weekend to get back to normal! Face it: you're grounded.

Take Back Your Space a Project at a Time

While the outlook may be ugly, there's good news on the horizon. Just as clutter starts off small, it also ends one small piece at a time. If you're overwhelmed by clutter that's sucking you dry, here's one method you might consider.

Start with the physical clutter in your life. Pick the smallest pile and take care of it. Put it away, process it, find it a home, or face it full-on. Then pat yourself on the back. The next time you've got a spare minute, handle the next smallest piece of clutter. Don't worry about the big, scary project yet. You also don't need to worry about making it all go away at once. Consider this a reverse snowball effect. You can start to clear all the things that cause you stress, a little at a time. From these little things, you can build the kind of momentum that moves mountains.

Remember how mental and physical clutter are intertwined? As you clear the physical clutter out of your life, you create room for creativity, joy, and original thought. This is why it can pay to start with the small things instead of the big rocks. As you make space little by little, you naturally create room to think clearly. The big solutions to mental clutter are going to be much harder to find when your brain is packed with trivial worries. By clearing your day-to-day clutter, you free up bandwidth to handle the real sources of mental clutter that are bothering you. And on a good day, you might even find that the mental clutter has taken care of itself and you're free to fly.