Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [6]
Remember: The goal is to clear your chosen space of anything that is not part of your vision for it. If you can't decide about something, put it in the Keep? box.
Move the Better Place and Keep? boxes to somewhere else in your house or stash them out of the way in your office. Unpacking them will be your next project after you have created your lovely chosen space.
Now look at your new territory again. Better, yes? Does it have the wrong furniture in it? This is the time when you could start rearranging your furniture but not before getting rid of the clutter. You see, if you get bogged down now, at least you got that junk out of the way and you've made some progress. Also, if you're moving furniture out—whether to another room or to storage or out to the curb—before you bring the proper furniture in, clean up your chosen space. Dust, sweep, wipe down. Make it uncluttered and fresh. If you don't have exactly the right piece of furniture yet, see if you have something close to serve as a placeholder for what you really want. Partway to your dream is still a good direction to be heading.
Say now, look at that—your space!
Enjoy it. Defend it against encroachment. Start your cleaning here so it's always the nicest spot. From this new castle you will plan your next campaign, or maybe just have the peace of mind to ignore the rest of the mess for a while.
Winning out against entropy
Now that you’ve got somewhere good to be, it’s time to think about the best tricks for winning out against entropy (that is, the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system). The first trick is that easy is easy; in other words, go for the low-hanging fruit, by all means! Two great examples of this are big objects, which have a more significant effect on you when they are very wrong or very right, and categories of things, which can be tackled en masse for a bigger impact. When faced with a huge number of things you could work on, try starting with one of these.
Categories are easier to handle than intermixed piles; you can set yourself up for easier starts in the future by chunking instead of randomly stacking. What's the difference between “stacks” and “chunks”? The items in a chunk represent the same kind of action. You’ll get a very different feeling from four chunks that correspond to “phone calls to make,” “vacation planning ideas,” “clothes to exchange for correct size,” and “scheduled events to add to the household calendar” than you do from one intermixed “stack of stuff I gotta do something about.” Piles of the unknown create the most tension. Tackling a chunk is a lot easier because you know exactly how to start and understand the context of the work you'll be doing. Know what you have, then choose when to deal with the chunks according to your higher-level priorities.
Looking for the low-hanging fruit? Here are two examples to get you started:
1. Hall closet overstuffed and driving you crazy every time you try to hang up a coat? Pull out the one biggest thing in there that doesn’t belong anymore and put it where it goes, whether that’s somewhere else in the house or out of your life. Repeat this every time you notice the problem and before long the problem will go away.
2. Catalogs piling up on every flat surface? Throw them all in the recycling bin. Seriously. All of them. Worried there might be something you want in there and how will you ever know if you don't read it? Forget about it. If you need it, you'll seek it out. If you don't seek it out, you don't need it right now. It’s easy to tell catalogs apart from other things; single-mindedly whipping through the house with the recycling bin, separating them from other papers, and purging all of them is a piece of cake. You’ll be done in a few minutes! This kind of selective whirlwind works on other things, too, like dirty dishes and stale, old magazines.
Act on decisions as you make them
Another great trick for fighting the buildup of random junk is to act on decisions as you make them. One of the purest examples of this is