Warning: self-improvement experiments can be contagious.

Can a decluttering experiment be complementary to a new career path experiment?

I’m smack in the middle of a monthly experiment to focus and grow my brand as a writer after having hit 1,000 posts in 1,000 days. But my experiment is only one of many that are going on the month of August. The founder of Monthly Experiments, John Muldoon, has set up a private Facebook group and it’s been very active with new experimenters sharing their progress (and challenges) and helping with accountability–which is the most helpful part of it.

But a funny thing happened on the way to my own experiment … you see what other people are doing and it’s, well, fun! Most people are doing something with self-improvement: waking up early, decluttering, editing their life in general. Of course, you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew and disrupt your own challenge, but if experiments are complementary, maybe it couldn’t hurt.

Can you catch “Decluttering Fever” from someone in a Facebook group?

I’m working on focusing my work, my brand, my writing. How am I supposed to focus and find clarity when my office is a disaster? Don’t get me wrong, I’m very aware of not following some other experiment so I don’t have to do my own experiment. I see them as complementary. Decluttering my life, my office, my brain, will help focus and declutter my professional life.

In case you can’t tell, I’m a big fan of these monthly experiments. I’m also becoming more and more of a fan of what I see as something of a secret benefit of them: the side effects.

What might happen if you do this? Let’s look at it another way: what might happen if you don’t? That answer is pretty easy: not much different. But having read about, for example, Darcey Rojas’ decluttering experiment and then listening to almost the entire Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up just yesterday, I’m seeing clutter in a new light.