Make Every Space Sacred Ground

‘One space, one use.’

An old proverb counsels: “A place for everything and everything in its place.”

A good addendum would be: “…and every place for only certain things.”

Every space in your world should be sacred ground, reserved strictly for certain kinds of items and activities.

As James Clear wrote in his book Atomic Habits:

“We mentally assign our habits to the locations in which they occur: the home, the office, the gym. Each location develops a connection to certain habits and routines. You establish a particular relationship with the objects on your desk, the items on your kitchen counter, the things in your bedroom.”

Those locations and things become “cues”: stimuli that elicit specific habitual responses. Clear cautions against muddling those cues:

“Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with another. When you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits—and the easier ones will usually win out. This is one reason why the versatility of modern technology is both a strength and a weakness. You can use your phone for all sorts of tasks, which makes it a powerful device. But when you can use your phone to do nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task. You want to be productive, but you’re also conditioned to browse social media, check email, and play video games whenever you open your phone. It’s a mishmash of cues.”

So Clear advises keeping your cues distinct:

“Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is ‘One space, one use.’

“One space, one use” is an especially useful rule for your productivity system. Every “container” (whether physical or digital) for information—every list, folder, tray, etc—should be designated exclusively for a certain kind of content.

For example, as David Allen explained in Getting Things Done, your to-do list should be reserved for reminders of actual actions that are immediately doable. It should not be cluttered by nonactionable items, like reminders of things that are still vague and need to be clarified (those should go in an inbox of some sort) or information that should be filed for reference.

As Allen wrote in Making It All Work:

“People often avoid making this distinction and allow rather large quantities of things to accumulate in blended stacks. Whenever actionable and nonactionable items are parked in the same location, a numbness develops in the psyche regarding the whole lot.”

We go numb to blended stacks, because they are also “mishmashes of cues.” They are “amorphous blobs of undoability” as one of Allen’s clients put it. Looking at blended stacks elicits confusion, indecision, stress, and avoidance. For more on this, see my Medium post "Why Messy Spaces Make an Anxious Mind.”

As Allen wrote:

“Being organized means nothing more or less than where something is matches what it means to you. If you decide you want to keep something as reference and you put it where your reference material needs to be, that’s organized. If you think you need a reminder about a call you need to make, as long as you put that reminder where you want reminders of phone calls to make, you’re organized.”

Being organized is being kind to your future self by providing clear, distinct, unambiguous cues for repeated behavioral responses. “If I see my to-do list, then I do a listed action.” “If I see my inbox, then I clarify the top item.” With every repetition, the response to the cue becomes more ingrained, automatic, and easy. This frees up cognitive resources for attending to higher-level matters and interests.

When you keep your spaces tidy and pure, life becomes smoother and sweeter.

A place for everything, everything in its place, and every place for only certain things.