Decluttering

To reduce a clutter, we need to first understand what a clutter is. The most important fact about clutter is that it is mostly a perception, instead of pure physics. Let's compare the following two pictures. The overall impression is that a golf course picture is much cleaner than the bushes picture. The determining factor of this perception is the ground instead of trees. Looking independently, tree branches and leaves in bother pictures have various shapes and densities which hardly be characterized as clean. Thus, we have the most important observation about human perception of clutter:

Our perception of clutter is highly sensitive to the horizontally scattered objects on the reference surface. Our perception is insensitive to the objects vertically scattered above the reference surface.

The reference surface could be any large horizontal surface such as floor or desktop. This may be due to that scattered objects on the surface pose a threat to our feet. Most of us have childhood memory of sharp pains on our feet when we accidentally stepped on things like sharp objects, holes, and animals that bite, etc. Scattered objects on the ground make us mentally uncomfortable so that we have a tendency to avoid stepping on them.

This is a good observation with a high practical value. For example, it saves us a lot of yard work. We only need to mow the grass to make our yards look good and it relieve us of the labor of trimming trees. Another example is that mulching makes gardens look better.