Grant's Space

How

1. write a list of stuff you use
2. tag it (use post-its, sticky dots, whatever). This makes it easy for you to identify what you need without taxing your brain, and lets you tell friends, 1-800-get-junk, etc, “don’t touch anything with a dot”.
3. get rid of everything else
   • categorize into sell, give away, trash, and keepsake
     • sell stuff worth more than $10-$20
     • set your own threshold here – what’s your time worth to sort, list, ship (or meet someone who is picking it up)?
     • give away anything that’s decent or useful to anyone else
     • anything you don’t use but can’t bear to get rid of is a “keepsake”. Arrange to store it somewhere (in a storage area, not in bookshelves, the floor, etc – get it out of your way). After your first few purges, you’ll want to revisit your keepsakes, because lots of it is probably really stuff you need to purge but have an emotional attachment to.
     • “throw away” anything that’s left. 1-800-got-junk is good if you have a lot of stuff, as it’s fast and they’ll try to recycle or donate anything they can (so you don’t have to feel bad about getting rid of things that could be useful to someone). Or, toss it yourself.

Why

You don’t realize how much that clutter is distracting you. Every item you have is a weight of some sort: mental, emotional, physical, etc.

For example:

• A friend gave you that planting pot. You haven’t put a plant in it in years, and you don’t do well with plants anyway. It takes up space on the coffee table, so it uses attention, because you see it and it takes up space (mental weight). You can’t just throw it out because you’d feel bad, both because it was a gift and because someone might be able to use it (emotional weight).
• your couch is in daily use, but if you wanted to, say, move downtown, you’d have to move it (physical weight).

Multiply that by all the items in your house (every book, every piece of paper, every plate, every towel, every piece of furniture, etc) and you have a lot of weight that you feel, but are so used to that you don’t even realize you’re carrying it.

Consider:
What if you wanted to travel through Europe and Asia for 2 months. You’d have to pay your rent at home, adding say $3000 to your costs (assuming $1500/month rent). You say “of course, I need a place to live”. But you’re not living there, your stuff is. You’re paying $3000 so you don’t have to move your stuff. You’re used to that limitation, because you’re used to carrying the weight.

Once you start getting of stuff you really don’t need, several things happen:

1. You feel “lighter”. You’ll see the open space in your house. Clear surfaces, room to move across the floor, etc. You’ll notice the decrease in mental distractions.
2. You want stuff less. Once you realize that the smallest item requires maintenance, a place to be, a purpose, and to be disposed of at some point, you won’t want to even take the free pen some comapny offers as swag.
3. You become free. You’ll want to purge everything you can, because without the stuff to maintain, you’re free to do what you want, where you want.

If you’re like me, your “to-do” list is more like your “to-don’t” list. There are certain things I just hate doing, like paying bills, sorting snail-mail (ever wish there were spam filters and mail rules for snail mail?), and doing certain little random tasks (like getting the debris from the remodel two years ago out of my garage).

On “accounting day” (when I paid bills, etc), I would be in a reeeeally bad mood, to the point that I had to learn to not answer the phone or I’d be mean to the caller, no matter how close a friend. I realized something had to change.

So, I implemented a new system: I figured that I could handle 15 minutes of bill paying a day. I was right. It’s amazing what you can do in 15 minutes a day. I just stack the incoming mail on my desk and have a special email folder for incoming bills (“your online statement is ready”, etc). I wrote up 2 lists that are taped to the wall in front of my desk: One shows the “process flow” (order in which I do things), the next shows a list of bills, how they come in (mail versus email), and what needs to be done with each (needs to be paid online, send an online payment through my bank, auto-paid, etc). (I printed the lists not because I like paper, but because it makes getting into and out of the 15 minutes very easy – nothing to find or open, just sit and start).

Process flow looks like this:

1. Paper Inbox (stack on desk)
2. Incoming Bills email box
3. Download Bank Statement into Quicken
4. etc…

So, at the start of my day I just sit down, note the starting time, and start with the first thing on the top of the stack. When 15 minutes is up, I stop and get to more important things. (Maybe you want to pick a time after work instead .

The system’s worked so well that I added a second 15-minute chunk to my day (mine goes right after the “accounting” chunk): The to-do list. This is very different from the to-don’t list. Items on this list get “processed” in order during that 15-minute chunk of time. I’ve made a covenant with myself: During that 15 minutes, I’m in what I call “execution mode” (’cause I’m a nerd) – I do not think about the list, I just start at item#1 and start processing. Doesn’t matter if that processing is just taking inventory of the crap in the garage – it’s the first step in the task, and after 15 minutes I stop. Next day if the task is still there, I continue it. Of course the other side of this self-covenant is that I carefully think about what goes on the To-Do list. It’s actually a separate list in my calendar named “To-Do”. There are other “to-do” lists on my calendar too – things that are good ideas, might be good to do, etc go there. But when something gets to the To-Do list, it’s special. It will get done. And it does!