One of the most common questions I’m asked is how to downsize all the things we’ve spent our lives accumulating. There’s no easy answer nor a single answer. However, I have a few techniques that might help you pare down that I’ll share over the next few weeks.
Remember it’s unrealistic to expect to clear out in a short period of time what it has taken years and years to gather. We tend to make it a big project that becomes over-whelming. And what do we do with over-whelming big projects? Procrastinate…
A couple of years ago I decided to get serious about paring down. I broke my suffocatingly huge project into a manageable daily micro-project/game. Each day, before I can go to bed, I have to find something I don’t need or want anymore and decide what to do with it. That means: give it away, sell it, or throw it away.
Not a box of things to go through, not a closet, not a basement. I just have to find ONE thing… I can do that! Some days, I hit the mother load and find a whole box of stuff I can dispose of. So that may give me several weeks’ worth of things to dispose of. Yes, I could just do the whole box at once, but some days I’m really busy or tired and it’s nice to have an easy cache sometimes.
More next time! Get to digging…