March 18, 2008
reducing clutter, Office Supply Fetish, tools
2 Comments
The last time I was in San Francisco I stumbled across a utopia of organization: The Container Store.
Leave it to San Francisco — a mixture of the free spirited and intensely productive — to have such a place. Outside the entrance to The Container Store, dirty hippies mumbled psudo-zen nonsense through the fog of drug smoke that surrounded them.
“Woah,” said one to the other. “They only sell containers? Like, with nothing in them?”
“Yeah man, emptiness is the product.”
“That’s deep. Like really deep.”
Having no patience for such things, I knocked down the hippies, rushing past them to satisfy my office-supply-fetish glee.
Inside, The Container Store was everything I hoped for: shelves filled with empty containers of all shapes and sizes. Each box whispered seductive promises of a life more organized if only I would take it home. Had I not just been passing through San Francisco on a road trip. I would have emptied my wallet and taken all I could carry.
It’s worth a pilgrimage to San Francisco for the organizational faithful.
[Click here to visit The Container Store]
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Header photograph by photohome_uk
January 22, 2008
reducing clutter, os x
2 Comments
GrandPerspective is an OS X application that lets you visualize how much space files take up on your hard drive. This lets you quickly find what’s been hogging the most room and causing those scary ‘you are about to run out of space’ warning messages.
GrandPerspective is also helpful for teaching those less familiar with computers about the relative sizes of different kind of files. People like my mother, who will leave a 3Gb movie laying around, but spend hours deleting text files to try and free up space.
(The above photograph is from my own attempts to declutter my current laptop and see if I can squeeze down into 64Gb for the SSD on the new Macbook Air. Sadly, it looks like that won’t be an option.)
[Click here to download GrandPerspective]
January 15, 2008
reducing clutter
1 Comment
Unclutterer has a brilliant idea for reducing knickknack and keepsake clutter. Take your mementos and photograph them.
From the article:
Finally, he [my husband] screamed, “wouldn’t pictures of all of this stuff serve the same purpose as storing it?”
He was right. It wasn’t the physical objects that mattered to me, it was the memories represented by the objects that mattered.
Over the next few weeks, I went through the contents of the bin and took digital photos of the items with my camera. I organized the photos in an iPhoto album and filled in the photo’s Notes field with information about the object’s associated memory. Then, I threw away the object without any guilt or sense of loss.
[Click here for ‘Photographing your mementos’ at unclutterer]
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Header photograph by aussiegall