If you’ve ever had the chance to see Michelangelo’s David in person at the Accademia Gallery in Florence, you understand the importance of environmental context. If the sculpture were placed in a room amid piles of clutter, it might detract from its beauty. In a simple space with minimal distractions, however, the artist’s craftsmanship truly shines.

That’s the power of decluttering—it enables you to appreciate what matters and eliminate the rest. Whole industries have sprung up around decluttering our homes and personal lives. But decluttering your work life can be just as powerful, creating more time and mental space for meaningful work, while leaving you less frazzled outside of it as well.

As CEO of a growing software company that recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, I consider work-life decluttering to be as important as tidying the kitchen or mowing the lawn. Here are five strategies I use in my own workday to help you declutter your work life today.

In the average workday, we have to absorb a ton of information—but we forget a lot, too. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus introduced the concept of the “ Forgetting Curve ” to explain how quickly we lose newly learned information if we don’t actively review it. Our memory of new knowledge can drop by about half within days or weeks unless we make a conscious effort to revisit and reinforce it.

Automation can serve as extra memory when our own brains are overloaded with clutter. You can start by identifying the busywork items that are taking up too much of your mental hard drive, like updating task lists or sending follow-up reminders. Then, search for AI or automated solutions. For example, Asana or Trello to organize your to-do lists; Calendly to organize meetings and integrate with your emails.

It’s a scalable solution, which is especially important for growing companies. As your team and users grow, memory-clogging tasks multiply. Automating tasks like payroll or even calendar reminders of employee birthdays can help you keep things running smoothly and show people that you value them.

Declutter Your Creativity

The biggest clutter to creative work is the constant stream of interruptions and quick-win tasks throughout the average workday. The truth is, no matter what level you are in your organization, whether you’re an intern or a CEO, each of us is responsible for drawing boundaries to protect time for creative work. And it’s more important than ever in an age where manual tasks are increasingly automated. People who continue to hone their human skills, like creativity and empathy, will be the ones who stand out.

Declutter your path to creativity by religiously block out time for deep work—the term coined by author and Georgetown professor Cal Newport. It might sound straightforward, but in reality, it’s not. Constantly ticking items off our to-do lists has come to feel like the hallmark of productivity. “The very type of deep work that provides the nutriment for remarkable results also defies all our instincts for how a productive day should feel,” Newport writes .

Proactively override that instinct by scheduling uninterrupted time for deep work directly into your calendar. Choose the period when your mind feels its freshest—when your creative brain lights up. For me, that’s as soon as I arrive at the office. My team knows that unless it’s an emergency, I’m in heads-down mode. For others, it might be the end of the day. Figure out when you’re most energized and protect that time like your career depends on it.

Declutter Your Mind From Worries

If you’ve ever stared at the ceiling at night and wondered whether your company’s marketing campaign will launch on time or if that security check was properly executed, then you know how anxieties can take your brain hostage.

One thing I’ve learned in twenty years of running my company is that, unfortunately, those worries never go away. As you grow, they tend to multiply. Anxiety doesn’t just steal your focus; it’s the bane of creativity. When people are anxious or fearful —aka in survival mode—they’re less flexible and more risk-averse, not ideal conditions for experimentation and innovation.

Finding automated solutions to do essential but anxiety-inducing tasks not only saves you time, but it also gives you the greatest gift for entrepreneurs—peace of mind.

For example, automatic checks and verifications with tools like ZeroBounce can ensure your bulk emails reach their recipients and also improve email open rates, click rates, and sales conversions. You can automate GDPR privacy and other regulatory compliance tasks with tools like Webhooks, which enable you to set up custom automations to delete user data from multiple systems.

You might be surprised at how each minor burden you eliminate compounds to ease your stress.

If you’ve ever worked as a freelancer, you probably had this epiphany: many meetings in the average corporate organization don’t need to happen at all. Unnecessary meetings and communications are all too common in today’s corporate world. They clutter your calendar and drain your energy. They keep you from doing your most important work.

In managing my schedule, I aggressively assess which tasks deserve my attention, which can be delayed or delegated, and which should be eliminated altogether—and I encourage our employees to do the same. If anyone realizes that a meeting or process is redundant or obsolete, we encourage them to speak up.

The Eisenhower matrix provides a useful rule of thumb for decluttering your calendar. It divides your commitments into four categories—what’s urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important—so you can prioritize what truly deserves your time, delegate what doesn’t require you, schedule things that support long-term goals, and eliminate what adds little value.

When it comes to your work calendar, more isn’t more. Each week, you should be able to look at your calendar and feel confident that every item truly needs to be there.

Declutter Your Physical Space

It may seem like an aesthetic concern, secondary to more concrete daily obligations, but keeping your workspace organized and uncluttered can directly impact your output. Studies show that clutter can spike cortisol levels and create cognitive overload, leaving little mental space for meaningful, creative work.

At the end of each day, I take five minutes to organize my space. I toss the unnecessary, file away the important but not urgent items, and leave a neat pile of priority tasks for the following day. This quick ritual also provides an off-ramp to transition to my life outside of work. It clears my desk and my mind. The benefits continue when I arrive home, ready to focus on my family—the things that matter most to me.