Part 1 : De-cluttering a Screenager’s Desk

First things first —

Screenager = a person in their teens or twenties who has an aptitude for computers and the Internet.

Adding a bit more to the definition, screenagers are a special kind of teenagers who sometimes has not just aptitude but a deep addiction to computers and internet !

This leads to a lot of behavioral problems amongst these teenagers such as need for instant gratification in every task they do, dis regard for boring chores such as cleaning up or organizing things, unable to maintain habits etc.

This particular screenager in our experiment has no interest for cleaning and has a total dis regard for organizing !! Hence decluttering for this screenager began with the question of Why declutter at all.

Though the screenager understood the need for organizing and the potential benefits, three things stopped her from getting onboard the journey —

1. Not knowing where to start.
2. Not knowing how long it will take.
3. The huge pile of stuff sitting on her desk making her overwhelmed

To tackle these I suggested a strategy — We do the decluttering in 20 min sprints and a 10 min break afterwards. She can decide how many sprints she wanted to do at a time / per day and that’s all there will be.

This solved for 1 & 2 and also gave her some motivation because she had the feeling that she had control over the process, instead of somebody else making her clean her desk !!

To solve for 3, we decided first decided on our end goal and then defined the the process of decluttering to reach this goal.

The Goal

Convert this desk into a place where studying and creative work happens.

The Process

1. Pick a portion on the table and Run this item through the following flow-
2. Do I know what this is ? Yes — Do I need it ? Yes — When did I use this last time ? or is it more than 3 months that you’ve used this item ? Yes — Is it in usable condition — donate. If not — trash. ( This is a simplified form of decision making to suit the understanding of a teenager. If this is for an office setup or for an adult, there would be lot more layers of decision making on items) .
3. Once decided to keep something, sort it into a group. No looking into the details of what’s in it at this point. Eg: If a pouch containing a lot of pens, pencils and crayons came up, its added to stationary group instead of emptying it and seeing what else is in it.

Well, we repeated steps 1–3 for sprints spanning 2days.

Once all items we wanted to keep were sorted into group, we revisited our goal and removed those groups which doesn’t fit in. Eg: There were a bunch of fancy items as well as ear rings and bangles that came up into groups. We decided to move them out of this project and add them to a different one.

Next we jumped into the details — each bag, pouch,box etc were opened, emptied and steps 1–3 was ran on these again.

Everything that we decided to keep needed a place on the table. If they won’t be used on a daily / weekly basis, it’ll be archived and gone out of sight but in reachable places.

The Outcome

And finally ended up with this :

Some interesting insights & data from the process :

1. It took 12 sprints ( each of 20min + 10min break) to get the lazy screenager to get to what is shown in the final pic.
2. Left alone, the screenager wandered off by spending too much time on each item, sometimes completely going off track or getting back to whatsapp/youtube/<whatever gives instant gratification>.
3. When we took over some part of the decluttering, the screenager became indifferent to that portion and the next day we found out that this particular portion was not maintained.
4. From 2 & 3, the insight was that the decluttering process needs to be hands on with the involvement of both us and the screenager. (If he/she prefers, involve the parent too. But sometimes, being a teenager, they might not prefer it).
5. When asked to purge certain items since they don’t use it anymore, the teenager was reluctant. But when the word purge was replaced with “donate” to somebody in need of the item, she happily let go off it.

And finally, I had two bags — one to the trash dump and the other for giving away.

Once everything was done and dusted, she took one long look at her table and finally felt a huge something has been taken off of her mind. She was unable to explain it in words but one could see it on her face !!