Category archive: declutter

Have you been wondering if life could be easier, and if you could get rid of bad habits and develop new ones? Would you like to enhance your productivity at work? Do you want to feel better about yourself and be more present to your family and friends?

Do you want your life to be rich rather than full? I do.

For several months now I have been trying to figure out how to live with less (less possessions, less commitments, less worry), and one voice stood out from all the material I was reading about it: Leo Babauta's Zen Habits.

I could not describe this website better than the way the author himself does on the Zen Habits 'about' page:

'Zen Habits is one of the top blogs on the Internet, and covers: achieving goals, productivity, being organized, GTD, motivation, eliminating debt, saving, getting a flat stomach, eating healthy, simplifying, living frugal, parenting, happiness, and successfully implementing good habits.'

I have been finding Zen Habits inspiring on several occasions recently, and full of tips for so many of the areas in my life demanding my attention. If you find yourself on a similar quest, I encourage you to head over to Zen Habits and start by sampling the most popular content listed at the bottom of the homepage.

Leo Babauta has recently written a book entitled 'The Power of Less', which tagline embodies exactly the kind of skill I want to develop:

'the fine art of limiting yourself to the essential… in business and in life'

The Power of Less by Leo Babauta is out now on Amazon.com, and is available to pre-order on Amazon.co.uk (publication date in the UK is 12 February 2009).

And if you order the book before the end of January 1 2009 you also get to choose a free ebook or audio podcast.

The publication of the book has also been marked by a the Power of Less New Year Challenge that you can join to commit publicly to develop a new habit next month. I have chosen to focus ten minutes a day on establishing and maintaining a badly needed bedtime routine, so that instead of falling asleep more often than not while reading or watching TV I will focus every night for ten minutes on:

• taking out my contact lenses
• brushing my teeth
• flossing
• laying out my clothes for the next day
• …and going to bed!

I will report my progress daily here and on the Power of Less Challenge forum. I tried to pick up this habit last September but it did not last. I am now confident that committing and reporting publicly will help me succeed.

I have just read a brilliant post on Unclutterer that offers suggestions on Sharing space and dealing with moments of chaos.

To my horror, I realised that I am guilty of every single attitude that can only make things worse when someone obsessed with putting things away (me) lives with someone with a, how shall I phrase it, 'more relaxed' attitude towards tidiness (Dr B.):

• I nag;
• I get judgemental;
• If I reorder myself, I either do it with a 'How great am I?' or with a martyr attitude.

Major fail.

The post offers some useful tips and also lists some ways to make joint tidying up sessions fun, but I just cannot see myself wearing the suggested maid outfit.

I have lately adopted a very responsible attitude towards backing up the files on my main computer at home.

Every Saturday an automatic backup kicks in. I configured it to be an incremental backup of all my image files (I would be devastated if I lost any of the pictures I have been taking during the last ten years or so).

The automatic backup asks me to label and insert a disc (I use 4.7GB DVDs). And then another. And another yet. Over the weeks I have collected a fair amount of discs that need to be labelled and stored if you ever need to restore any of the files.

Trouble is, 1. it's a pain, and 2. if the flat was to be damaged (fire, flood, magnetic wipeout) so do the backup discs.

I looked around for online backup systems and I chose to use Amazon's impressive S3 system together with JungleDisk (a simple interface that lets you both see your storage as a network drive for ad-hoc manual backups, and set up regular automatic backups if you wish to do so). You only pay Amazon for the storage and data transfer you use every month, and JungleDisk is a one-off 20USD to install on how many machine you need, and comes with unlimited upgrades.

I have started backing up all my pictures – around 15GB, it is going to take some time to upload them all. Once that is done, I will probably stop backing up on DVD but am thinking of setting up a just-in-case additional backup on a local network drive.

Knock on wood, I have so far never had to face the nightmare of losing data because of failing supports. Better not to push my luck too far though.

During the last six months I have developed an interest in social network aggregators (solutions to bring together all activity performed on several sites online, in one single location that people can subscribe to).

While performing my investigations I signed up for nearly every single available service, until I lost track of what I was feeding into what else, and created quite a fair amount of duplication along the way.

Then a few weeks ago I started using FriendFeed, thinking it was going to be yet another lifestream/aggregating service. I fed it all my other services' feeds and left it alone for a bit.

After a couple of weeks I noticed that there was something unique about it, namely the possibility to merge together your friends' feeds in a river of posts, then comment on their activities or simply give them a thumbs up (a 'like') on what they have written.

It would be fantastic if these comments were saved alongside the original posts (in Twitter, Google Reader shared items, or blog posts, for instance, instead of within FriendFeed as it happens now). Apparently, you can do so with Socialthing (I have not yet checked out Socialthing myself).

So now I feel that my research is going somewhere, I can forget about certain aggregators I have used but that I do not need to track any more – and I definitely do not need to include in FriendFeed, unless I want to create a self-referential infinite loop. The casualties are:

• Tumbler
• iStalkr, which seems to be down at the time of writing
• intuuch, which now shows a message in German saying that the project is closed
• Suprglu
• profilactic
• tumblr
• Jaiku

Today I decided to stop logging my food intake. I have done so on and off all my life, and without interruptions since August 2005.

This is a very big step for me, and there are three reasons behind it:

1. it is taking up far too much precious time to maintain it,
2. logging what I eat does not stop me from overeating occasionally, especially under stress, and
3. I have come back from two and a half weeks in Australia with a list of everything I have consumed in local weights and measures, and I do not think I have the animus to sit down and figure out what schooners and kilojoules are.

I will from now on only record my weight once a week. I will probably miss looking at all my complex charts illustrating weight fluctuations over the years. I will also probably gain some time to do something a little more useful.

Over the last six months a reminder has been going off every Saturday to prompt me to go over my del.icio.us account and rename similar tags to avoid duplication.

Another reminder has been prompting me every month to delete tags that I only used once, and therefore considered to be too detailed and of little use.

I do use del.icio.us extensively to keep my bookmarks organised and synced across machines with the del.icio.us Firefox extension. It is therefore natural that I like my tags to be organised.

This is however taking away precious minutes from my life every week, and when my life flashes in front of me on my death bed I don't want it to be dotted by Saturday mornings spent renaming all the instances of 'weblog', 'blog' and 'blogs' to 'weblogs', just so that my world could be a tidier place.

I have therefore deleted the recurrent Outlook task and related reminders. What I thought was tag decluttering ended up cluttering my life with unnecessary obligations, and that is plain ghastly.

I trust the technology to become more and more intelligent and one day, hopefully soon, to be able perform these tasks for me. In the meantime, I accept to live in a little bit of a disorganised sea of data. It is not the end of the world. I can already set del.icio.us up to only show tags that have been used a minimum of 3 or 5 times anyway.

You know, the kind of stuff that you keep just in case, or that you got for free:

The stuff in the left half of the picture can go.

Stuff in the middle can go in my opinion, but it's not mine and I need to ask Dr B. permission to throw away (I so want to hear why a household where hair clippers are used once a week on a number two still needs to have a comb and a brush).

I intend to keep only the stuff on the right:

• 4 mini plastic ducks from Virgin Atlantic (hanging inside the bathroom cabinet);
• travel sewing kit;
• travel ear cleaning buds, wrapped;
• small metal box (now used to keep paper clips), branded with the company Dr B. used to work for;
• small plastic box (now used to keep earplugs);
• old Pit Rock deodorant, perfect travelling size.

At the top in the photo below, the four mobile phones I have donated to Oxfam today. Dr B. wanted me to sell them on eBay, but I did not think it was worth the hassle. Besides, they can help Oxfam raise some money.

At the bottom in the photo, the three phones I am keeping. The one on the far right is my current one, the one in the middle is my first smartphone with GPS, the one on the left is a back-up handset.

A bit of a long story, and one where I don't come appear to be particularly bright. Bear with me.

During the Christmas break 2002, the friend I shared a flat went to see his family in Ireland and came back a captured leprechaun in a can for me:

I only had a vague idea of what a leprechaun was, so I thanked him politely and read the instructions on the tin that said:

DIRECTIONS:

1. Close all windows in room and pull across curtain
2. Open can carefully keeping your eyes fixed firmly on his face (blink and he's gone)
3. Make him promise to behave (leprechauns must keep their word)
4. Extract secret location of crock of gold

GOOD LUCK!

I shook the can, it made no sound, it felt empty. I asked my friend if there really was a leprechaun inside, he replied 'Of course there is'. I was none the wiser, his answer may very well have been ironic. I decided that one day I was going to open the can in the dark and make a wish.

Five years later, the can was still unopened, and kept in a box out of sight! So the other day I took it to our windowless bathroom, closed the door, switched off the light, removed the plastic top from the can, unsealed it by pulling on the ring… and I felt something fluffy and fuzzy brushing at my hand:

I switched on the light. There actually was a leprechaun in the can:

And damn, I was so startled I forgot to make a wish. If it works retroactively, how about 'I wish I was not such a gullible git?'

Not so easy, this one, because of the memories involved:

In September 2002, when I moved into the flat I shared with a friend in Tooting Bec, a friend from NYC came to see us. He is an artist, and after an afternoon spent sightseeing he came back and gave me three postcards that I put into standard Ikea frames and placed just above my bedroom door.

Since then I have moved twice, and never found a place to display them. I cannot believe they I have kept them in a box for four years and never once did I think that perhaps I did not need them. So bye.

The fourth frame is from a charity shop and I like the fact that it is made out of a carpentry ruler (I am sure there is a more accurate technical name for it, but you know what I mean I hope).

I am hesitating a lot about it because I still like it, even if it goes with absolutely nothing we have at home. However, not only has it been kept in a box for four years, but the back stand is broken and useless.

I am going to keep the postcard (a reproduction of the old Vauxhall Gardens refreshments price list, with a theatre invitation from a friend on the back), then bye to this frame too.

This was an easy one.

On the left in the photo below:

• Contact lens solution travel size bottle that has been opened since September 2007? Gone.
• Several spare contact lens cases that come with every new bottle of solution? Gone.

On the right:

• Solution and case that are currently being used, and a spare case? Kept.

I just keep a black pen, some sticky notes and a ream of printer paper next to my desk, and that's all I need for day-to-day needs.

However, we have a briefcase full of paper, envelopes, staplers, glue… and a few unidentified objects of the stationery kind:

I have simply removed everything that was double (or sextuple), or broken, or kept 'just in case' (Christmas-green cardboard, I am looking at you). It will be brought in to work, or thrown away, once Dr B. gives his approval.

The rest fit back into the briefcase – only this time we can actually see what we have got:

The Royal Vauxhall Tavern will always a special place in my heart.

It is probably the single venue I have visited most often since I moved to London in 2002, a place where I made new friends and met Dr B. too.

I started keeping the wristbands issued by the RVT (it's the kind of place where you can spend a lot of time outside sitting on wooden benches and tables, or on the grassy knoll behind it) and between my flatmate at the time and myself the collection grew very quickly.

When I moved in with Dr B. we put to use a neglected banana stand (on the left in the photo above).

When the RVT switched from the glossy plastic wristbands to a paper version, we kept those too (in the middle).

And when they changed again to machine-issued plastified paper, we started another collection (on the right).

But really, only the original vintage ones look good and remind us of the good times. So we are throwing the others away – and reclaiming a jar and a vase in the process.

Last September I got rid of half of my clothes. So howcome today I managed to select another third of what was left, to be given away too?

I did the same with footwear yesterday: I thought that last September I had only kept a few pairs, but I ended up counting 21, of which I am keeping 12.

I was aware that I had kept some stuff because of sentimental value, clothes that reminded me of a particular circumstance or a person. Guess what? it's in the pile that is going to go. They are just clothes. I hesitated a little bit, put stuff on one pile and then another, until I knew that I was determined enough to part with some of the stuff. The memories are still there, stronger than ever.

All the clothes I had, minus shirts and coats

All the coats and shirts I had

The clothes that I am giving away

The clothes that I am keeping

This was an easy one. I'm keeping more recent, less tatty shoes (that fit) and getting rid of older stuff. Fron 21 pairs to 12. And they all fit in my three shoes drawers.

All the footwear I own

Click on the photo above to see an annotated version with date and place of purchase, and price.

The shoes I'm giving away

The shoes I'm keeping

The shoes I'm keeping, stored

This was a tough one, because I had very recently taken a lot of books to charity shops, so those that were left were probably there for a reason.

The reason was that they were gifts, and even if I had read them and was unlikely to read them again in the next ten years, I could not give them away.

So I entered all of them into my LibraryThing account, and tagged them with 'read', 'gifts' and 'donated'. Because I'd read them, they were gifts, and tomorrow they are going to the Oxfam Books and Records that is very conveniently located just opposite the Central London location where I am working today and tomorrow.

Dr B. joined me and got rid of all his outdated IT reference manuals. We only kept unread books, some reference material, recipe books and recent travel guides.

I have taken a few pictures of the volume of books 'before' and 'after':

• all our books (unsorted) before decluttering;
• all our books (sorted by type) before decluttering;
• all the books after decluttering.

And yes I know, books are not clutter per se, but when you are fighting for space and space does not come cheap, I am sorry but they have to go.

I was thinking of giving up something for Lent but nothing came to mind.

Then suddenly I saw the clutter that I let into my life and that I am not happy with. Clutter that I cannot get down to reducing because it is too daunting a task. Clutter that is completely useless and bothers me.

I have decided that this Lent I am going to take something away every day. It can be something very little (like tidying up the outside pocket of my backpack – one does not need to carry sugar-free chewing-gum in four different flavours at all times!) or something big (like finally putting those two drawer units on craiglist and reclaim one cubic metre of spare room – after two years!).

To begin with, yesterday I said goodbye to three old email accounts I have not used in six years. I had a three-monthly recurrent reminders in Outlook to log on to them, check for messages (only one of them allowed redirection) and send a message out from each account to keep them active and open.

There was no option to actively close the accounts, so I simply said goodbye, removed the Outlook reminder and smiled at a simpler life.