Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [10]
Always identify a success point for a lap when working on projects that are unlikely to be fully completed during a single lap. For longer laps or daily goals, consider multiple victory conditions, such as, “finished cleaning the garage or did three laps on it and answered that letter from Aunt Betty.” Discardian mom Erin Hare suggests a special measurement unit for parents of small children: “what can be done during one episode of Sesame Street.”
Here’s a truly magical lap. Five minutes isn't very much time out of your day, even out of the last hour before bed. You can knock something off the needs-doing list without even really noticing the impact, and it's almost as if someone else flew in and made it happen. Don't plan it. Don't think about it hard. Just suddenly turn into the five-minute fairy every now and then and whisk away some annoyance from tomorrow.
Symptom #3: It’s All Too Much
Solution #3: One Bag at a Time
There are a lot of problems here. Pick a problem you think you can solve, and solve it.
—Dr. Dave Warner, humanitarian and neuroscientist
Just one bag
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the amount of stuff you want to clear out of your home, sometimes you’ll find that it’s better to do your laps by volume rather than duration. Instead of setting a timer, grab a paper grocery bag or comparably sized box and go after one category until you fill it.
Crafty crud. Many people engage in some kind of projects that involve supplies. Knitting, carpentry, building Linux servers, whatever. When one has a hobby, somehow, through a magical process, the supplies for that hobby proliferate beyond reasonable bounds. Perhaps they breed in the closets; in any case, one day (today, for instance) you realize that you have far more supplies than you've ever used since taking up the hobby. Fill up a bag with your excess craft crud. Depending on the hobby and the stuff, give it to a school or charity or throw it in a dumpster, which may be where you rescued it from in the first place.
Paper purge. Grab a paper sack and see how fast you can fill it up with recycling. Old newspapers, magazines, junk mail that didn't get properly processed when you carried it in, out-of-date coupons—the obvious stuff that you can knock out. You can also quickly fill your bag and effect some real change in your file drawers by purging user manuals for devices you no longer own, utility bills from over a year ago, and similar dead documents. (Don't forget to shred papers containing personal information.)
Evil shoes. Get a paper sack and put in all the pairs of shoes you haven't worn in the last year or that you did wear but made your feet hurt like hell every time. Maybe sell them if they’re current, fashionable and in great shape or donate them. Whatever you do, get them out!
Blah books. You’ll want to double-bag this paper sack; it’ll be heavy. Here are some suggestions for books of which you can let go:
Out-of-date reference, technical and travel guidebooks (if no computer in your house is running that version of that software, you do not need a book about it);
Books you haven't opened in five years and that you don't feel like reading within the next month;
Books you bought and intended to read, but still haven't read several years later and don't want to start this month;
Books you didn't like;
Books someone gave you that you don't want to read;
Books for a hobby you no longer have; and
Cookbooks for foods you don't eat anymore.
Check for inscriptions or papers tucked into the items you’re parting with. Remember that you