recent items gone

[fred_mouse]

I'm being a bit haphazard in decluttering at the moment - when it occurs to me, I look around where I am, and try and find something. This is unfortunately not a good choice for me, because all I see is a sea of Stuff, none of which is identifiable as clutter, and so I keep ending up in denial about being able to do anything.

What I have managed to deal with

• broken popcorn popper (electrical) - I now have a working microwave method, no need for fixing the unfixable.
• one set of small-child appropriate bedding (not quite gone - have put it on a mailing list looking for a home)
• one random baby blanket of unknown provenance (ones where we know which kid it was for, and who made it, fine, but this one???)
• jumper from the 'returns' shelf that none of our friends would claim has now gone to op-shop. 

Areas that could do with more attention - the linen cupboard (do we really need four hot water bottles?), the music room (is there still a desk under that pile? Can I rehome that unloved computer than I assembled myself in 1999?), and the garage. 

Comments

[peaceful_sands]

Well done on getting a few things out. Speaking personally, I find having a focus helps me to 'see' the clutter for what it is - whether the focus is an area or a type of clutter (as in last month I decided to try and get rid of a DVD or CD for every day of the month - I could probably safely do that again, but I think I'll leave it until later in the year and instead focus on an area for this month - maybe I'll section the bedroom and tackle an area a week with a view to getting rid of 10 things from each area).

[fred_mouse]

thank you. And yes, having a focus does help, but at the moment the goals I'm holding front and centre are related to other areas that I want to improve (amount of time spent on music, the mess that is my email inboxes), and I don't have spare energy to work out what I want. I've been sticking to the 'at least spend five minutes on this a week', and trying to find something, because sometimes that is enough to trigger a set of things - not so much this week and last.

[tanaqui]

Well done on still making progress while feeling haphazard.

Maybe for the music room or garage, you could draw up a list of categories of the kind of things that are in there and then each day choose a category and find 5 or 10 things that you can get rid of? (Even if that's 10 sheets of paper....) But it might help to do the thinking "in advance", as it were, so you don't have the issue of walking in and not knowing where to start/what to do?

Anyway, good luck with making progress in May!

[fred_mouse]

thank you!

I could certainly do categories, but at the moment I'm so much in the 'cannot deal' that I'm getting analysis paralysis, and having to stop. The plan is to go in to the garage each day, and see what I find. I've learnt from past attempts that the first few times I won't see anything, and then I'll find one thing, and then suddenly there will be a jump in what I'm looking at, and clarity will set in, at which point it becomes easier to work out What Next.

[nanila]

Congratulations!

I always find sub-dividing the big jobs is the most difficult part of uncluttering. One shelf at a time in the linen cupboard, perhaps? I apply that approach - one pile at a time - to my desk when the piles of paper get unmanageable. The goal, eventually, is to get good enough at organising it that the piles don't form in the first place. But that's been the goal for over a decade so I'm not sure it's ever going to happen...

[fred_mouse]

I'm not yet at the sub-dividing point - the garage is full of a mix of things we have already agreed to get rid of, and working out what to do with them is the problem, and things that we use rarely, or which were put in boxes during sections of renovations, so need opening up and working on. Basically, tasks that take much more oomph than I have available at the moment - so 'go in the garage' is my current decluttering goal, because then things might bubble to the top of the list as do-able chunks, at which point I can sub-divide to 'that pile' or 'that box'.

So, for example, today I identified a cd of exam music from two years ago, and that has gone. And now I know that there is a box with a handful of cds, and thus can go an look in it each day, if only I have the oomph to go out there. But other than that box, I can't work out where to start!