Aiiiie.

[holyschist]

Hi, I'm a packrat with too many hobbies...and I might be moving temporarily for work soon and am hence trying to clean/organize/sort through/declutter ALL the things ASAP so a) I will be able to easily and efficiently pack for a year in another town, b) leave my partner in a tidy, organized apartment not covered with my stuff. It is sort of daunting, although I am making pretty good headway (I am afraid I may not be able to work fast enough, though).

My biggest long-term problems are books (which I am getting better about--I got rid of 20 or so books the other day for store credit which will only buy 2 books, and have generally become much pickier about buying books--there is empty space on some of our bookshelves now!) and craft supplies, so once I finish the marathon my goal for this year will be to destash--primarily by sewing a lot, because the fabric takes up more net space than anything but books.

I'm not really aiming for minimalism, but I would like to craft more with what I have, buy fewer supplies, and I would like to have only stuff I love and use regularly, and not too much stuff for our living space.

I'm pretty good at getting rid of stuff, except for all kinds of weird sticking points. I absolutely hate throwing things away--recycling or donating is fine--but then I run into stuff like the entire office box of half-used notebooks I accumulated through college and grad school. Should I just toss most of them and start over, now that I no longer buy four pristine notebooks a semester and can probably do fine with three total notebooks? What do y'all think?

ETA: I actually ripped out the used pages a while back, so what I have is a giant stack of blank half-notebooks, which could probably be more productively replaced by three new notebooks...I guess I'd better suck it up and recycle the collection. Erk. Thanks for the moral support!

Comments

[finch]

It depends on what info you have in the notebooks and whether you think you need any of it. Most of my college notebooks just went into the recycling bin at university, because after the final, I didn't need them. Some of them had useful information that I copied into other places or kept a few pages and scanned, then recycled the notebooks. If you have a notebook that's entirely composed of useful info that you'll refer to later, keep it.

[holyschist]

At some point I actually went through and ripped out all the used pages--so what I have are a bunch of blank half-notebooks. Which I could use...or I could rip the spiral rings out and recycle the pages and buy a smaller number of brand-new notebooks that I can ensure are entirely composed of useful information.

It's just...challenging...to get rid of perfectly usable paper, but it's a lot of half-notebooks.

[finch]

Have you actually used them up to this point? If you actually are pulling them out and using them, there's no problem in keeping them to use up. If you're choosing new notebooks in better shape - and I can't blame you if you are - it's time to recycle them.

[holyschist]

Hmmm. The answer to that is probably "sometimes". Part of the reason I have so many is...I lose notebooks in the chaos. On the other hand, most of them have been living in a relatively easy-to-access box, so....I'd better recycle them.