• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Choose a spot where your purse, briefcase, laptop bag, or backpack will go when you get home. Under or beside your desk is usually ideal. When you decide that you need to take something to work or school, put it there right away so it will go along for the ride.

Decide where your keys live. Always put them there right away when you get home. Some people like a hook or a bowl by the door; others prefer a key clip in their purse or other constantly carried bag.

Find a visually pleasing container to live on your dresser and throw your change in it at night when you empty your pockets while undressing. (Yes, I say always empty your pockets when undressing. Better to have clutter on your dresser top than wash that important business card or have to rummage through a pile of dirty clothes looking for your phone.)

Use the front of your refrigerator (or a bulletin board beside it) for important household knowledge. Keep the tickets to the next event you’re attending clipped there. If you share a house with a group, put up a rotating chore wheel to indicate who is doing what this week. This is probably also the best place for the shopping list and any menu plans for the week.

Create a finite place for saving just enough and not too many bags for re-use. We have a Bag of Bags hanging in a closet (sung as though part of Handel’s Messiah, of course) and if it’s full, incoming bags are recycled.

Figure out what you need and where you’ll use it, and then set things up to make it all flow smoothly.

Allow for just a little indecision

When you are uncluttering or sorting through old things, the key to a great session is to decide on sorting buckets before you start. In addition to having the usual outbound trains handy, allow some items to go into a Not Sure container. In a perfect world, every single thing is clear and unladen with emotional baggage, but I don't live there and I bet you don’t either. Don’t try to force an airtight system onto a far more complicated reality. Leave yourself a little slack. Keep moving on the easier choices to get your 90% progress while letting the 10% weird ones bide a little time to get less weird.

Combine trips

Here’s a great lazy person’s trick that is frequently mistaken for wild productivity. Don’t make extra trips. When you’re leaving the house, take a quick look for any outbound traffic that can come with you. Pop that stack of stamped mail in a postbox as you stroll. Swing by on your way to somewhere else and quickly dump your charity box in with the other donations or your library things down the book drop. Feeling especially sly? Train yourself that the way one does errands is to dump the trash and recycling, and then load the car and head out. You’ll love the satisfaction of coming home from a run to the grocery store or an afternoon at the movies and finding your home pleasantly freed from that unwanted stuff.

Whatever else you do to make it easier for unwanted items to depart, find one thing in your home that makes you feel cruddy and get rid of it right now. One thing, today.

Symptom #2: It’s Hard to Start

Solution #2: The Lap

We do not need the courage to write a whole novel. We need the courage only to write on the novel today.

—Julia Cameron, writer and artist

Even a little is better than none at all

It can be difficult to get yourself in motion any day of the year, no matter who you are. When you first begin with Discardia, there sometimes comes a day when ya just don’t wanna. So how do you fight this resistance to your life becoming more awesome? Well, it helps to remember that it’s really what you’re working on, but, even when we know we’ll be happy about the outcome, it can be hard to start. The solution to this is to run The Lap. It takes many forms but, at its heart, The Lap is a deal with yourself to do a little bit now, instead of saying, “I’ll do it later.”

Any progress is better than no progress.

Jane Anne’s one-room sweep

One very enthusiastic Discardian, Jane Anne Sorenson, takes a spatial