Another Monday, another morning where the alarm blasts you out of your blissful slumber, and signals that it’s time to suffer your way down to the kitchen to ingest a pot of coffee, and head off on the long and dreary commute to an office that makes you shudder to even think about.

Sound familiar?

By all accounts, many people absolutely love their jobs, and wouldn’t trade up their time spent in the office for anything. And yet, many other people do indeed feel trapped by the everyday grind, feel that the work they do is ultimately meaningless and unfulfilling, and spend an inordinate amount of their time dreaming about making a change.

For many people, the ultimate dream is to work from home full time – whether as a freelancer, or as an entrepreneur running a start-up.

Of course, running a business from home implies all kinds of great things. You can set your own hours. You don’t have to wear any uniform, or placate any supervisors. You can have a nap in the middle of the day if you feel like it. You can work in your pyjamas – or naked, if you like.

The thing is, running a successful home business also takes quite a lot of work, and you need to take whatever steps you can to help smooth out the process and arrange your life so as to benefit your business.

Decluttering may not immediately strike you as the kind of thing that can significantly improve your professional prospects. When it comes to your ability to successfully run a business from home, however, it is exactly the kind of thing.

So, here are some reasons why you should contact a rubbish removal company, audit your belongings, and do some decluttering for the sake of your home-based business dreams.

Your home is a microcosm of your life — messy home, messy life; organised home, organised life

Your home is almost like an externalisation of your personality, or your inner thought processes, or something like that. Our homes are filled with belongings we find meaningful. They are arranged in a way that we find appropriate, or that we have the patience to manage.

To the extent that our homes are messy, it’s likely that our lives are somewhat messy in general – and certainly, that our internal mental landscapes are a bit chaotic and disordered.

Running a business from your home requires you to be highly orderly – just like running any sort of business, from anywhere. You need to be able to work effectively, to a schedule. You absolutely must be able to identify the core actions that you should be taking at any given moment. And you need to be able to engage with respective clients and customers in a systematic and methodical manner.

So, if your home is a mess, it may well serve as reinforcement for your already chaotic tendencies.

On the other hand, by decluttering and organising your home, you are likely to find that it has the opposite effect, and actually causes you to feel – and actually become – more organised and structured in general.

For the sake of your business, this is a good thing.

In order to really make your home business work, you need to laser-focus your attention — which in turn means reducing distraction

A good deal of research has been done on the importance of focus and attention, when it comes to developing the ability to work effectively, to a high standard, and to hone and develop difficult skills.

The basic conclusion, across the board, is that the more distractions you have in your working environment – including things as apparently benign as checking your email throughout the day – the less able you are to perform effectively, and the more likely you are to stagnate or fall off the rails in your professional life.

In a conventional office environment, there are already certain mechanisms put in place to minimise the more gratuitous and flagrant distractions you might otherwise encounter. (Although, increasingly, companies add new distractions in the form of things such as messaging devices.)

When you’re working at home, however, everything is there. Your TV is there. Your games console is there. All your books are there. Your sound system is there.

These larger objects can be dealt with more mindfully than clutter, however.

When your home is completely inundated with clutter, your attention is constantly being dragged in one direction or another, and it may be that you find it impossible to properly relax into a task and give it your full attention.

Decluttering can help to simplify your working environment, which can, in turn, increase your ability to do deep and meaningful work.

You need to create a clearly delineated professional environment, and decluttering can help to achieve this

Work-life balance is a big deal in the life of a home-based worker, because when your home is also your office space, it is all too easy to find yourself either working around the clock, and neglecting your family and your own well-being, or else being continually distracted throughout the day, and giving in to perpetual procrastination.

If you want to run a successful home-based business, it’s imperative that you create a clearly delineated professional environment, where it is very clear where “home” ends and “work” begins, and vice versa.

Of course, this implies that you are able to effectively structure your home environment, so that such a divide is apparent, and so that it can be meaningfully maintained.

If your home is too cluttered, however, your “office space” (whether that is an actual room of its own, or a corner of another room), may well be filled with old games consoles, comic books, children’s toys, and all kinds of unrelated material.

Decluttering can help you to make clear the divides between your professional and personal space, in the home. This can then help you to focus more effectively, and to maintain that prized work-life balance.