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Clutter
By Brick | January 13, 2008
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The 4-Hour Workweek credo describes the concept of elimination - eliminating or otherwise offloading the tasks that take up 80% of our time and yet add no, or only incremental value. It is not a matter of better organizing the time you spend on tasks (i.e. classic time management) but doing only the tasks that really matter. You could say that one is eliminating task clutter - all those activities that literally clutter your time. And Let’s face it, when you have to remember when and what to do all the time, task clutter inevitably leads to mental clutter (New Theory: mental clutter is directly proportional to stress). Elimination frees your time and your mind!
There is another dimension to elimination, and that is reducing real, physical clutter. This is all the stuff in our homes and workplaces that we don’t really use, at best taking up space, at worse requiring maintenance and attention (leading to more task and mental clutter). A number of years ago, my wife and I moved into a new, larger house. For some reason, as a society, it seems our houses get bigger and bigger, but I digress… The interesting thing about larger spaces: you find a way to fill them up, and that’s exactly what we proceeded to do: our new house just gave us an excuse to buy, collect and store more stuff.
Last summer we realized that our house was actually filling up with junk. What we were accumulating was often not being used at all. In a stroke of brilliance, we decided we needed to have a garage sale and clear it out. We started going through our house, first in our “storage” areas and then our closets. At first when you are going through your stuff you usually come up with some reason to hold onto it. To get by this roadblock we developed a one year rule: if we have not used something in over one year it was a candidate for our garage sale. As we identified stuff that met this criteria, we staged it inside our garage where we would perform a final decision on whether something stayed or went. The funny thing was just getting things into this staging area ended up being 90% of the battle. Nothing we staged came back inside, and in fact inspired us to identify more items we did not need.
At the end of the day, I spent perhaps a full day of effort between setting up and holding the actual garage sale. I made about $200. It was a great way to meet people in the area and also nice to know that some of our stuff might find use with someone else. Beyond this, there were so many benefits to this exercise:
- There was a lot of stuff that did not even make it into our garage sale and went directly in the trash. The whole thing doubled as a spring cleaning exercise!
- Seeing the sheer volume of stuff that we were willing to part with, all in one spot, made us realize that a lot of things we had bought over the years were really quite unnecessary. We now have a garage sale rule when we are shopping: if there is a chance that at item we are considering might end up in a garage sale, we put it down.
- Freeing up space was actually mentally liberating. We have found that less clutter in our space eliminates a lot of mental distraction.
In the end, the garage sale itself was probably not worth my effort, but the exercise of preparing for it was priceless. In the future I would either simply donate any items of value to charity, or put it on the curb with a big “Free” sign (a friend tells me he had a big piece of plywood with “Free” spray painted on it that he would regularly use for just such a purpose - ironically the sign itself was also taken by someone!).
This is just a story about a single battle, but the war against clutter still rages with me and others. Resources and tactics:
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Topics: Elimination, Organization |
January 25th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Hiya! I just found your blog and I’m impressed by it! I wanted to comment on this post in particular because of the “garage sale rule.” That is a great idea!
We started decluttering our home last year after reading 4HWW. We haven’t had a garage sale, suspecting that it wouldn’t be worth the trouble, so thanks for telling us your conclusions!
We have so far gotten rid of (donated or trashed) 38 grocery bags of stuff plus 12 large items. That has amounted to a “dent” at least, but it’s sorta scary how much we’d accumulated in 4 years of owning a home.
So now I think we’ll adopt the “getting rid of it” rule… As we look at buying something, “Will we just end up getting rid of this when we start vagabonding? And/or is it really essential to our quality of life in the meantime?”
Thanks for the blog & I’ll be back!
~hilarycat
January 28th, 2008 at 4:12 am
hilarycat: Thanks for the kind comments and I am glad that you found this post useful! I find that while you are busy eliminating stuff from your environment, you also need to ensure you do not thoughtlessly add more! BTW, I checked out your blog - welcome to the FHWW community!