The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [80]
For the longest time, I felt guilty about getting rid of any kind of gift. Surely it was a sharp slap to the cheek to dispose of something a friend had gone to the trouble of giving me (even though most gag gifts retail for under $25). With each move I managed to collect more and more boxes, like debris caught in a gravitational field of pointlessness . . . now all of this shite was starting to COST me money due to packing, move time, and storage. It was also costing me TIME. I was wasting gobs of it trying to find things or trying to reorganize my closets so that new piles of crap could Tetris into the old piles of crap. I felt strangely trapped . . . that is, until I discovered the organizational trick known as “trashing.” Trashing is a process by which you take things that are in your house and place them somewhere else, where you have no responsibility for them anymore. The cornerstone of the trashing technique is local government–sponsored bins that are somehow emptied of their contents on a weekly basis. No one knows for sure exactly how it works, they just knows it works.
After years of personal research on hoarding, it turns out that old magazines serve no observable purpose; the information retrieval process on a stack of magazines is sucktarded at best, and uneven weight distribution makes them less than ideal for in-home fort building. I could give them to my neighbor, but he’s a stuck-up jerk. You know who has no taste boundaries? The Department of Sanitation. They’ll take anything I can cram in their cans (that sounds weird, but go with it).
So the next time you think about putting those extra unusable dock adapters that came with your new cell phone into a drawer simply because “you never know,” you do know. You’ll never use them. And the novelty bobblehead leader of the Khmer Rouge that someone gave you for your birthday is only fun the first second you see it. After that, it’s another miniature roommate to deal with. Just because you have space doesn’t mean you have to fill it. You don’t jam old pennies and phone cords into your mouth and nose just because they’ll fit there, do you? Well, do you??? ANSWER ME.
THE PAPER CHASE
The slow, malevolent revenge that trees have set upon us for slaughtering them and then writing on their skin has manifested through indoor forests of paper stacks now that decoupage our homes and offices, trying desperately to crush and suffocate us. Some of this elimination is easy because a lot of it is trash. But what about the stuff I NEED?? Insurance documents? Proof I paid my property taxes? Punny birthday cards from my mom?? I have tried for years to organize papers in a filing cabinet. I have tried various systems, from making folders that are subject based (Home, Bank, Office) to folders that are company based (AmEx, BofA, Farmer’s Insurance), but the problem always lies in the fact that, at the end of the day, I’m just accumulating more paper. After five years, this shit gets annoying—bulging folders that tear at the hooks and fall in the drawer. I’d even clean them out every once in a while and put the oldest stuff in file boxes in storage, but then I’m just filling another space and having to pay money to do so. In my mind, there’s no way around it. You just have to get rid of as much of it as possible using the two S’s: SCAN and SHRED.
BYTES AND BITS
If I were the tech correspondent on a local morning news show talking to my audience of elderly ladies and Mr. Moms, I would advise them to “turn their paper