Frustration

Saturday was a bit of a wash.

We were going to try selling some clothes at a local exchange/secondhand shop, but the buyer wasn’t there and the kid behind the counter wasn’t sure when he would be. We went to get some lunch and figured we’d try back in an hour.

Unfortunately, when we tried to start the car after lunch, it was no go. A very nice couple helped us try to jump the battery, but that didn’t work either. My girlfriend ended up calling roadside assistance, who sent a very helpful tow truck driver and found a service center open Saturday afternoons. (Harder than you might think.)

Turned out the battery was just that dead, which was annoying and ate up more than twice what we made selling books the day before. (Our car has a weird battery. That was a question it never occurred to me to ask before buying a car.) On the other hand, it could have been much worse, so I’m not really complaining.

After that, it was getting late and starting to rain, so we just dropped the clothes off at Savers. Some things are just not worth the effort, and we figured that was one of them. (Besides, I got all my fabulous shoes at thrift stores, it felt like it might be bad thrift karma to sell them.)

Today, I’m at work. It’s not a particularly busy shift, and I’m taking some time to sort through papers and get rid of those I don’t need via the industrial shredding. Tonight I’m going to continue sorting through journals and sketch pads. A few of the books in my journal box were actually only written on a few pages, and I’m parting with those after taking out anything useful. Sketch pads in particular seem to have been a space hog; many have only a few images worth keeping, but I held onto them because they’re full. Time to rectify that!

Hardly a Holiday

Friday’s a day off on my current schedule, but I had to call in for a work meeting around three. That meant that going anywhere was pretty much a wash, and really, I was just looking for an excuse to stay home and do some more purging.

I went through my books again, and between that and adding the DVDs to the pile, I had enough to fill two of those giant blue Ikea bags. I’m planning to keep doing this repeatedly until we leave. Every time, it gets a little easier. Every time, something I wanted to keep before ends up on the “out” pile. It’s slow going, but we’ve got the time to go slow.

My other goal for today was to get the “fanciest” piece of furniture we’re selling ready for me to take pictures and post them on Craigslist. I want to post this one earliest so I can ask for a higher price and wait it out before I have to drop it. I didn’t actually get around to taking pictures because I needed batteries for my camera; I didn’t want to half-ass it with camera phone pictures. I think I’ll get around to it on Monday.

I also spent an hour or two going through my shoes. I mentioned it to my friend as I was doing it, and she was shocked; I’ve got a bit of a reputation as a shoe junkie. I’m parting with three out of four pairs of sneakers, keeping the ones that are the most versatile and a little classier than my other ones. I’m also parting with most of my dress shoes; I’m keeping my black creepers because they’d be expensive to replace and because they’re my favorites, and I’m thinking I should hold onto a pair of brown dress shoes too, though I might let go of that last pair.

I’m keeping both my black Doc Martens and my brown steel-toe boots, because they’d both be expensive to replace. I’m keeping my teal boaters, because they’re ridiculous and I love them. But my shoe collection is 1/3 to 1/4 of what it was, so I figure I’m doing alright.

After my girlfriend got home, we took the accumulated books, CDs and DVDs to Half Price Books. So many of them had Goodwill and Savers price stickers, or clearance tags, that I’m willing to guess that I didn’t lose too much money on them. That picture up there is the pile on the sale counter once we’d unloaded the giant Ikea bags.

Christmas In July

We succeeded in sorting the Christmas boxes tonight.

We had three boxes of Christmas stuff. Small boxes – each about the size of a banker’s box – but still, three. Included in those three boxes were three Christmas trees. And I’m not even that into Christmas.

My girlfriend had a series of ornaments from her childhood (some of which never made it out of her ex’s place, apparently) and I had my collection of angel figures. We both ended up letting go of some ornaments.

We also seem to have acquired a collection of wrapping paper and ribbon. All of that went.

And I got rid of all three trees. Portland has lots of trees. I don’t need to move mine.

The Perfect Storm

Wow, been a while, huh?

So the perfect storm seems to be blowing in, and I’m not talking about “Haboob 2011” or whatever the media’s calling this week’s dust storm. I mean that my girlfriend’s work contract is ending, our lease is going to be up, and her grad school aspirations lie elsewhere.

Yep, it’s time to move.

We’re just under two months out from zero hour; the lease is up the last day of August. I’m back here because I want to write about the purging process, both to keep my head on straight about the whole thing and hopefully to get some feedback.

So far we’ve finally taken the first pile of books (which we sorted out weeks ago) to Half Price Books, cleaned out stuff from the pantry we don’t expect to use in the next two months, and gone through our closets for an initial clothing purge.

Last night my girlfriend and I attacked the DVDs. Now, most of my DVD collection is a mess of things I got at secondhand stores, video stores that were going out of business, and cheap-o bins. (What can I say? I love terrible movies.) The first thing we did was go through them all and decide which ones we simply weren’t interested in owning at all. Those are going to Half Price Books with the next book purge.

Out of what remained, everything that wasn’t in a fancy case box set got moved to a sleeve and sorted. Now you’d never know I have a collection of terrible, badly-dubbed wuxia movies… which is probably for the best. You’re probably already judging me on my Bill & Ted’s Excellent Boxed Set.

But It Was Free!

I have a compulsion.

Maybe it’s always being around college campuses (my hometown has a college), or maybe it’s because I’m kind of a psychotic recycler, but anytime I see someone’s junk labeled “Free” lying around somewhere, I have to check it out. And a lot of times I’ll take something. Because it was free! But this is most certainly a bad habit.

Doesn’t mean I should forgo all freebies. I just need to narrow down what’s good.

Between Stages and the Mess That Brings

As my college graduation nears, the looming prospect of Really Being On My Own is both exciting and daunting. One of the biggest troubles stems from the stuff I have stored at my parents’ house. Since I’m staying there for the summer as a way to save money (and since my job is in town) I’ve been tackling that mess little by little.

Two things in particular have stood out since I vowed to do this: my eighteen year old self was a huge packrat, and my parents should have given away the books and toys from childhood YEARS ago.

Some of it has to do with parents and their dealing with kids being grown up (I’ve been in school for a few years, but my only sibling just started, so the “empty nest” finally hit). Some of it is shear volume; if you didn’t continuously give away kid clutter as your kids grew up, then likely you’ll end up with a lot. Either way, you suddenly have to deal with it.

Parents? If you want your kids to take care of all the junk they’ve left over the years? I suggest you put it all in their rooms. So that when they stay over for any amount of time, be it back for the summer or for a break. If that still doesn’t work, then simply drop it all off, bit by bit, AS IS until they either toss it themselves or go through it. Don’t go through it for them; some of it may be personal, or might have been at one point.

Now, for those of you sorting through what amounts to maybe a lifetime of junk? You have to make some Hard Decisions. Or maybe not so hard, in my case. But here’s some quick things to get you started:

• Memorabilia Should Only Be In One Box

It doesn’t matter if the box is huge or a shoebox. But one box. Because memorabilia is just physical reminders of memories. And there are ways to get rid of say, your prom corsage, but not lose the sentiment with it. You could take a picture of it and store that on your computer. You could scan your baseball cards. Momentos should only be kept if they are REALLY meaningful. Don’t try and justify them. At the very least, would you want to cart all that to wherever you end up living?

• Only Save The Best Things For Theoretical Kids

Unless you’re well on your way to having some, really. You’ll get a ton of stuff from relatives if you have any, and it’s not like there aren’t lots of other people with far too much babystuff if you need it secondhand. Give it to kids that need it, like the homeless. Yes, even books too. Keep only your ABSOLUTE FAVORITES from childhood.

• Keep It Simple

Utilitarian. Unless you’ve got a house right after graduation, do you really need a house worth of stuff yet? Think like packing for a dorm room. And stick to it. Find places for everything else that are not storage. Don’t take all your knick-knacks at first… leave them in a box and then come at them later if you can’t decide quite yet. Chances are you’ll feel differently after time.

Transitioning between of your life can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be messy.

Seasonal Purgery

I’ve always been a Spring Cleaner.

Partly due to the fact that winter is so much more pronounced where I live, but mostly due to the fact that I’ve never been good at cleaning regularly. This year I managed not to have the cluttered nesting problem so much, but then, I didn’t bring as much stuff to my dorm room as I had some years.

Doesn’t mean I don’t still have a lot of work to do.

My problem areas are my storage places. I come from a long line of severe hoarders, so it takes a lot of focus for me to throw things away. I’ve narrowed down specifically “nostalgia” items to a shoebox. Whoo!

I usually start with my clothes, because they have the biggest tendency to pile up. Relatives have a tendency of getting me things that are too huge (my mom especially) which I just shove in the back of my closet so as not to offend them. Then I get to the items I had hid away from Christmas that were, well, awful.

Honestly, who hasn’t gotten some horrible knick-knack given to them “out of love”?

I always leave papers and drawers for last, because a lot of that contains “useful” items. And I have the hardest time deciding whether or not to let something go. I’m big on recycling and reusing, so I rarely actually throw anything in the trash. In the recycle or donation bins? All the time. But I know I won’t reuse everything and have to at least get it out of my room.

But there’s another purpose to the Spring Cleaning other than controlling the amount of crap that builds up despite best intentions. And it’s for introspection. I read somewhere that you can tell more about a person by looking at their rooms than by asking their friends about them–and who better to know the significance of something than yourself? Likely you’re going to be the only one that will see why you kept that certain ticket stub or that cigar case.

Habits and hoarding and possessions are all a part of a person’s psychological makeup. But every now and then we could use a little dusting in our minds.

For instance, the first thing I did after a particularly traumatic year was purge. Got things associated with those memories out of my sight. Cleaned the smells out of the clothes, threw out the more potent reminders. Then I opened up a bunch of boxes I had put in storage from way before, got a glimpse at myself before I got all mixed up.

I guess what I’m advocating is keeping a box, at least. Something out of sight until you go and clean everything. You may find yourself throwing some things away, but at least they’re there for a little while. And others can get tucked back in until the next big purge.

It’s just a matter of keeping it from getting out of hand, is all. And actually throwing something away.

Feed Me, Seymour

Leo at Zen Habits has a post on dropping RSS feeds. He discusses how he cut his 100 or so RSS feeds (which he spent an hour a day reading) down to a more manageable sixteen. Quite a leap. In his article, he outlines a ruthless system for minimizing the time spent on feeds every day.

For him, that may have been a necessary leap. But the article suggested readers take a look at their own feeds, so I did just that. According to Google Reader, I followed 175 feeds when I finished reading this article. Of those, maybe fifty update daily or more than daily. Maybe another twenty update on a regular schedule, two or three times a week. The rest are weekly or even less frequent.

One of his suggestions is to cut infrequent blogs. This was a bit of advice that I personally am going to put aside. To me, infrequent blogs are content that I enjoy that don’t take much of my time precisely because they rarely make demands on it – and yet, unlike an infrequently updated website, I don’t have to remember to come back to them and look for new content.

In the comments of the post, Leo mentions that part of the value for him in reducing his feeds is the sheer joy he feels from looking at a list that he’s whittled down that much. I suppose I can see how someone might feel that kind of joy, but I think that’s the difference between me and someone who’s a genuine productivity porn enthusiast – I find the techniques interesting, but I derive no inherent joy from having less of something. Less work, less worry, those are benefits of organization for me. Just plain less, or fewer enjoyable things, doesn’t have the same appeal.

I think that sort of near-fetishization in organization or productivity is a distant cousin of the “attachment to non-attachment” that sometimes crops up in enthusiastic Buddhists (and the related truism that new converts to almost any religion are often among the loudest and most obnoxious adherents). There’s a Buddhist tale about a monk who came to a river and needed to cross it, but there was no crossing for many miles. He built a raft out of the materials around him, and made his way across the river. When he got to the other side he left the raft there. He didn’t forget that the raft was a tool to get him over a specific hurdle.

So I’m keeping my infrequent feeds, and my comic strips, and my friends, and basically all the feeds I enjoy reading. I did remove a handful that I realized I was mostly skipping over… ironically, mostly productivity blogs or blogs about blogging. If you find you have more feeds than you have time to read them, you might also find his article helpful.

Bookworms and Bookshelves

There’s nothing that starts a debate on an organization or simplification forum like the topic of books. Some people think books are stuff like any other stuff, and you have to view your books the same way you view your clothes and your knick knacks. Most people, however, seem to view books as somehow sacrosanct and exempt from our self-imposed challenges and our mental definition of clutter. While my books are some of my favorite possessions, they’re still just possessions. (And very heavy possessions, as anybody who’s moved two dozen boxes of books through their college years can tell you.)

I’m going to say something that many booklovers would view as heresy: Odds are, you don’t need all those books. You probably don’t even really want all those books. Far better, then to cull your collection. (And hey, if you use all that space as an excuse to buy more books, that’s your own business.)

First, ask yourself, why do you have these books? Are they books you’re going to read, someday, really? Do your bookshelves act as a chronicle of your reading habits since you learned to sound out letters?

There’s nothing wrong with keeping the old favorites that you reread once a year, or even a few books you’ve had since you were small and you have a sentimental attachment to, but even if you think you can’t bear to part with any of them, you can still think about it. Yes, I’m giving you official permission to think about which books you would be willing to part with and why. If it makes it easier for you, tell yourself that you’re not really getting rid of any of them. You’re just doing a thought exercise.

Another thing that makes it easier for me to part with books is to make sure they’re going to good homes. Like pets and children, the image of a book left alone and forlorn in the rain makes me rush out to dry it off and give it a good home. I twitch at the idea of throwing a book away. But taking it to a used bookstore with an upscale and offbeat clientele that I know will appreciate it, or even giving it to a friend who would enjoy it, makes it possible for me to part with the book with a minimum of guilt.

Further Reading

• Simplify Your Book Collection
• Taming Book Clutter
• 20 Ways To Get Free Books…
• Against Stuff (useful mostly for the notes in the comments)
• Get Rid of that Library of Clutter
• So Many Books, So Little Space!
• Simplifying my Book Collection
• How To Organize Books

Variations on the Four Box Method

One of the standard techniques for cleaning or decluttering in a problem room is the four box method. Used on scales as small as an overstuffed desk and as large as the homes that are featured on TLC’s Clean Sweep, the four box method is one of the most recommended ways to clean.

Some of that popularity can be ascribed to the simplicity of the technique. All you need to use the four box method is, as you may have guessed, four boxes. Each box gets a label: “put away,” “give away,” “throw away,” and “not sure.” Everything in the room then gets sorted into one of those four boxes. When you’re done, you put away the things in the put away box, toss the throw away box into the trash bin, drive the give away box to your local Goodwill, and put the not sure box somewhere out of the way. After a month or two, anything you haven’t found yourself needing from the not sure box goes to the Goodwill too.

The standard four box method works great in a variety of situations, but sometimes you’ll be in a situation where you need to add another box. For example, if there’s a good used bookstore in your area and you’re cleaning out a room with a lot of books, you may want a “sell” box next to the “give away” box. There are certain kinds of books no used bookstore will take off your hands, so there’s no point putting all the books in the “sell” box, but putting them in the give away box gets them out of sight and out of mind before you have a chance to feel guilty about parting with your beloved pages.

Similarly, someone cleaning out a particularly difficult closet might want to augment their “give away” box with a “sell” box for the sorts of gently-used designer clothes that you might want to trade in at your local Plato’s Closet or other upscale used clothes shop. The whole point of the four box method is to get everything sorted in one go, after all — using a sorting method that will require you to go through them again later defeats the purpose.

During my recent experience moving, my roommate and I hit on yet another variation on the four box method uniquely suited to moving. Replacing the “put away” box with a stack of boxes for packing helped us do double-duty, packing and decluttering at the same time.

It’s easy to look up an organizing system, try it, and realize it doesn’t suit your needs, but that doesn’t mean the system itself is useless. Most of these systems are popular because they’re universal enough to appeal to a lot of people. Take a second look and you may see that the system would be perfect for your job with just a little tweaking.