Are you constantly dealing with your stuff? Is it driving you nuts? Today a huge part of our time is spent dealing with researching, purchasing and tending to our physical things. We are becoming more and more victims of our personal items! It is a real burden on our daily lives as we grow into our things, and not into our lives.
I believe the key to happiness lies in finding joy in the simple and honest natural things in our world. Truly, we are very fortunate to have the ability to communicate and share our days easily with our technology. We are very lucky indeed! It is a fortune that we can share with everyone, and because of this communication, we will grow into better people.
But, when we save everything, and find value in every single physical item, we have lost the keys to the best parts of our lives. Newspapers, recipes, photos, receipts, bank statements, coupons, lists of things to do, can all be electronically digitized and removed from our physical presence.
The results can be very rewarding! If you are finding you have no where left to stack things, and you are ready to learn how to toss and save more effectively, give this process a try.
1. Take one stack and focus on it: The stack should fit in one box, and you should be able to make decisions on this stack within a day. It can be a size of around 100 pages or 100 papers. You will only look at this one stack. Nothing else.
2. Take a look at your kitchen table: if it is covered, you need to start here. Do not think, just put everything, and I mean everything in a box, and move it aside. Go ahead, you can do it! There…now you have a place to look at your stack.
3. Now that you are sitting in front of your stack, let’s look at the top page or paper. Only that page, nothing else. Is it something you need to save? or toss? Decide now, save or toss. Nothing else. Do not get up and put it somewhere, you need too stay sitting, and decide save or toss. Nothing else.
Keep going through the stack until you are done. Do not worry where you are saving, or how you are tossing, just save and toss. 2 Categories, save and toss. All done? Great Job!
Now let’s look at the toss pile. Are those pages full of personal information? if so, you need to shred them. If you have a lot personal pages, you might want to start a box and have a service pick it up. Or, if you don’t have the money to do that, just do this: put them in the sink and get them all wet. Then, once the ink is running, and you cannot see your name and address, you can wring them out and off to recycling they go! If they are not personal in nature, off to recycling!
Do not make this harder than it needs to be. You are doing great!
Ok, now let us look at the save pile. Top piece, is it a recipe? A receipt? An article? A Photo? Categorize this one piece.
If you cannot really categorize it, call it miscellaneous. Just that!
Now go through the entire save stack. Remember, if it something you have to do with it, take action on, set that aside. You are making some categories, and maybe you have 3 or 4 piles. If you have 100 piles, well, you need to get it into may be 4 or 5 categories. Here are some suggestions:
- House/Car
- Memories
- Action Items
- Miscellaneous
You’ll notice I did not get all detailed and go into recipes, bank accounts, thanksgiving turkey ideas, ribbon resources, paint color ideas etc… do not get too detailed. This is why you are here now, you are being too hard on yourself.
Chances are your stack can go into one of the four categories above. Make a note to yourself: Buy some great fun boxes at the home office store, and buy them to match your categories.
Now, you can look at what you have done. Exhausting isn’t it? But well worth the effort.
Now go to the home office store and buy:
4 boxes for your categories
And remember, this is just a start. Next time, we will go over how to continue this process and what to continue to do as new things come in.
Here’s to your organized world!