30 Days to a More Organized Life, Day 27: Purge Your Possessions
You know who’s really organized? Monks. Why? Because they have nothing to organize.
The fastest way to a perfectly organized life is to have nothing at all. You don’t need to be that extreme, but you can learn from the idea: the less stuff you have, the less difficulty you’ll have keeping it organized.
Stuff, by it’s very existence, causes you work. You have to buy it, store it, organize it, clean it, move it, update it and worry about it. The less things you have, the less off all that you need to do.
Today’s task is to pick a room in your home and purge, purge, purge!
Here are some suggestions to get you started:
The Kitchen
It’s too easy to accumulate many, many things in the kitchen that you don’t use. Think back over the last year of your cooking life. How many of those pots and pans have you never used?
Yes, you like to think that you might use them one day, but if you haven’t used them during the preceding year’s Holidays you probably won’t use them next year.
The Closet
Clothes are terrifying in their ability to accumulate. I’m a pretty spartan guy and I didn’t think I had many clothes, but when I did my most recent big purge I discovered I had thirty one pairs of trousers and jeans. Thirty one! If I regularly wore more than seven of them, I’d be surprised.
Bring out your ‘donate box’ from yesterday (you may need several) and go through everything in your closet to get rid of as much as you can.
The Attic or Garage
What lies in wait here? In American houses, usually lots of big, brown boxes that haven’t been opened in years. Guess what? If you haven’t opened that box in years, you don’t need whatever is inside.
If you find something that is sentimental to you, what you really want to keep is the memory, not the item itself. Photographing the object keeps the memory without the thing.
The Bathroom
Do you have lots of stacks of old reading materials? Ditch them. What about half-empty bottles of soap and shampoo? Look in your medicine cabinet and under the sink. How much of that stuff do you need or even want? Purge, purge, purge.
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Header photograph by stewart
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i can’t tell you what perfect timing this post has come at. i just recently moved from a small room to a house with several bedrooms. however, i am in a sort of roommate situation and so have things scattered all over the home. i just started putting many things away but i am actually going to sit down over the next month and work on purging! i can’t wait to purge, purge, purge all these things i have been randomly holding on to. thank you for sending out this post. the less material in life, the healthier for me.
‘Purge, purge, purge.’
You are starting to frighten me now, It must be the lack of proper beer since you left Blighty.