Spring Cleaning Tips For Writers
It’s that time of year again where people feel the need to deep clean their homes, including myself. It’s more than just taking a mop and broom around the house. Spring cleaning also involves going through everything and chucking useless stuff. Spring cleaning for writers comes similarly and can help declutter your home or office and help get those creative flows moving again.
Reorganize Your Workspace
Having a clean workspace is best for writers to stay productive and creative. Reorganizing your desk, or simply moving a few items around will help your brain get out of that familiarity. It’s kind of like tricking yourself into thinking you’re in a new space. This newness can help you feel revitalized and refreshed when you are ready to approach your writing again.
Deep Clean
In the midst of your reorganizing, take the time to deep clean or dust. Use a calming scented cleaner, like lavender or sage, to leave your desk smelling fresh and inviting. Add something new to your clean space, like a house plant, scented candle or the new books that have been inspiring you. If want to really revamp your desk, try creating a muse board featuring pictures that centralize your ideas or elements of your current writing project.
Image from pinterest
Trash Unused Papers and Notebooks
While you’re reorganizing and rearranging your workspace it’s also time to go through all those papers laying around. Whether it’s research or ideas, it’s best to trash all the useless papers that you thought you would need but you no longer do. If you feel like you’re going to use it, actually going to use it, then put it in a pile for later.
The same goes for your writers’ notebooks. If you haven’t touched them in over two years do you even need them anymore? Are the notes going to be useful at all? It will most likely take a long time to go through every entry in all your notebooks so it’s best to just get rid of, or store somewhere away from your workspace, anything that hasn’t been touched in a while. Decluttering is the key to spring cleaning!
Make it Digital
Transferring papers to digital will clear up and declutter your space in your work area. Before you take the time to move things from paper to digital, there’s an important question to ask yourself before you start. Are you going to use this? If the answer is yes, then proceed to transfer whatever it is you feel you need from paper to digital. If the answer is no, maybe, or possibly someday, get rid of it. Many writers want to keep every idea they have, but the truth is if you haven’t used it after a year, chances are you’re not going to use it at all.
These four simple ideas for spring cleaning for writers can be done within a day. A newly arranged workspace and a good pile of decluttering trash can go a long way towards helping writers stay productive and creative.
About Chelsea Wolfe
Chelsea Wolfe is a writer and mother from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She has a bachelor’s in Creative Writing & English and is currently working towards her master’s. Chelsea is an avid reader of mainly YA and Adult fiction, she writes book reviews on her site and keeps track of her reading through Goodreads. She’s written articles and stories for several sites and posts most of her work on Instagram, Wattpad and her lifestyle blog, Coffee, Children & Chaos.