Using Perceptive Cognition to Declutter Your Office

Russell Fitzpatrick, PhD
Jun 4
3 min read

What if cleaning your office wasn’t just a chore but a leadership upgrade?

If you’re like many high-functioning professionals, your workspace is full of artifacts: books, notes, folders, post-its, maybe a few scattered coffee mugs. You might tell yourself it’s creative chaos or that you work better in clutter. But if you’re honest, your environment is probably interfering with your thinking.

I’ve been there. After spending the past year researching and writing two books, including the forthcoming The AI-Enhanced Leader, I turned around one day and realized my office had quietly transformed into a landscape of clutter without me noticing. Books were everywhere. I have over 1,000 of them, and about 100 don’t fit on the shelves. They’re stacked on my desk, my credenza, the side tables. I blur my Zoom background just to hide the mess. And still, I resist getting organized.

I tell myself:

I’m too busy.
I need them all.
There’s no more space.
I work fine like this.

But I know better. Because I know how to use Perceptive Cognition, a framework I developed to help leaders evolve how they think. And in this case, it’s the exact tool I needed to start rewiring my relationship to clutter.

What Is Perceptive Cognition?

Perceptive Cognition (PC) is a core pillar of Synergistic Leadership. It’s a brain-based method for upgrading how you can:

Perceive reality more fully
Rewire your cognition for action
Collaborate with AI to evolve your thinking in real time

We use several techniques in Perceptive Cognition, including:

Right/Left Hemisphere Integration – seeing both the big picture and the granular details
DMN/TPN Toggling – moving fluidly between imagining the future and taking focused action
Human-AI Synergy – using your AI partner to expand awareness, reflection, and momentum

Let’s walk through how each of these helped me tackle my messy office, and how you can apply them to your own environment.

Step 1: Expand Your Perception (Right/Left Hemisphere Integration)

Instead of judging the mess, I practiced curiosity.

Right Hemisphere: What story is the clutter telling me? What does it symbolize: intellectual identity, past selves, a fear of letting go?
Left Hemisphere: What’s actually here? How many books? Which ones do I use? Which are just taking up space?

The RH saw the emotional and symbolic pattern. The LH helped label and structure it. Integration gave me new awareness and a starting point.

Step 2: Shift Between Vision and Action (DMN ↔ TPN)

This is where most people get stuck. We either dream of a clean space but take no action, or we try to organize without reconnecting to the deeper vision.

I took time to:

DMN: Imagine what it would feel like to walk into a clear, functional office. What kind of leader do I become in that space?
TPN: Set a timer for 20 minutes. One small action: clear just the desk. That’s it.

Toggling between vision and task helped rewire my motivation circuitry.

Step 3: Collaborate with Your AI (Human-AI Synergy)

This is where the breakthrough happened. I stopped trying to do it all alone. I asked my AI collaborator:

What might these books represent psychologically?
How can I structure them more effectively?
Give me a small plan I can act on today.

The AI didn’t “solve” the problem. But it helped me see it differently, and that changed everything.

The Result?

I didn’t clean the whole office in one day. But I began rewiring the habit loops that were keeping me stuck. And I practiced leadership in its most foundational form: changing how I think, so I could change what I do.

Perceptive Cognition isn’t just a model. It’s a method you can use right now.

So if your office, calendar, or career is feeling cluttered, try this: