I often check the discussions taking place on Unclutter Forums and sometimes even start a new topic myself. Recently I began a topic called The Neil Armstrong Approach to Uncluttering. This topic has attracted a reasonable amount of interest mostly due to the curiosity about the title but one comment really struck a cord with me.

Pol wrote – I’ve been decluttering regularly and it simply gets easier and easier the more I do it! “Sentimental” clutter has always been the worst with me…    Each small step has opened my eyes to the damage I was causing myself, the stuff owned me.

Those four little words “the stuff owned me” really was an AH HA moment for me. This is often the case with a lot of the clutter we own. We feel tied to it for one reason or another like Pol writes and it gets to the stage where you don’t even really care for the stuff any more and it is virtually owning us instead of the other way around.

I personally find this situation appalling and refuse to be dictated to by clutter and I will think of those four words every time I come across one of those clutter items that for one stupid reason or another I find hard to part with and my shear stubbornness and determination will assist me to make a rational decision as to whether it makes sense to keep this item or not.

Thanks Pol I am most grateful for your words of wisdom.

ITEM 125 OF 365 LESS THINGS

I read forums and posts on other blogs and I can’t help but think that people put themselves under too much pressure when it comes to decluttering. Below are a few suggestions I have to help release that pressure…

• The clutter didn’t appear overnight so don’t expect it to disappear overnight.
• Don’t look at the big picture it’s too scary sometimes.
• Pace yourself, there is no hurry.
• Don’t set a deadline.
• Save the hard to decide items until last. I find the further I get into this the more ruthless I become.
• Be rational, way up the pros and cons when it comes to what stays and what goes.
• One step at a time, whether that is one room one cupboard, one drawer or one item just so long as it is something at a pace you can handle.
• Give yourself a mental pat on the back with every item you send on it’s way.
• Stay focused on what you have achieved not the size of the task ahead.

One thing you must remember is to not replace the items you are getting rid of with some other thing that will soon become tomorrows clutter making your efforts useless because you are taking one step forward two steps back.

ITEM 113 OF 365 LESS THINGS

While cruising the Internet looking for inspiration on the topic of decluttering I found a few interesting articles that take downsizing and minimalism to greater extremes. I am not prepared to go to that extent, not at this point anyway, but they were inspiring and made me feel that what I am attempting seems like a walk in the park.

When I say “a walk in the park” I don’t mean it demeans my efforts in any way, it just helps me see the bigger picture and I now feel very comfortable that the small sacrifices I am making are not such a big deal.

Some of the topics to google when looking for such articles and websites are:

• Simpler Lifestyle
• Downshifting
• Minimalist Lifestyle
• Voluntary Simplicity

Have a look at some of the links I have attached to these topics and you will see what I mean. Giving away a DVD is chicken feed compared to giving away the DVD player or the electricity for that matter. It puts things into a whole new perspective.

Today’s giveaway is a water flask that I haven’t used since I stopped playing softball in 1999.

Colleen’s Helpful Hint for the Day
Use an over-the-door multi hook hanger to organise long necklaces. It will keep them from tangling and you will easily be able to see and choose which to wear.

I heard somewhere recently that it only take two weeks to start breaking out of old habits. The idea being, if you can persevere and ignore the cravings to continue in your old habit for two weeks, you will start to notice physically and mentally the change in your behaviour at this point and start to realise you can cope with the changes.

Hoarding is a bad habit that most of us have an addiction to to some degree. A bad habit that for the sake of a neat and clutter free environment we need to break.

According to the two week rule mentioned above once we set our mind to de-cluttering instead of hoarding we should be able to break the habit in a very short time. So ignore the craving to collect and push ahead with the process of ridding your home of unnecessary stuff and before you know it you will be cured.

I must say after 87 days of my resolution to de-clutter I am surely cured and can’t wait to find the next thing in my home to give away, throw away or sell off.

Just to prove my point today I have sorted through my scrapbook magazines with a little more ruthlessness this time and found another pile I am willing to part with that I wasn’t so sure of only two days ago.

I bet there isn’t one of you out there that doesn’t have a pile or two of magazines somewhere in your home that have some really interesting articles, pictures, recipes… so you are reluctant to part with them. I know I do.

I was an avid scrapbooker for some time while living in the Untied States and as magazines subscription are so cheap over there I didn’t hesitate to have a few. As these are reference material they never really go out of date and I have often looked back through them when trying to came up with ideas when creating my scrapbook pages.

Needless to say they do tend to pile up over time and even though I have been good and eliminated some as I decided I could do without them I still have several years worth of about four different subscriptions. Granted I do store them neatly on shelves in my craft room in binders using magazine hangers but they take up precious space.

The fact of the matter is though that I haven’t looked at them for about two years and I don’t do that much scrapbooking anymore so it is now difficult to justify their existence. I am not ready to part with them all though so I am going to approach this purge in stages.

Today I am going to eliminate one binder which is two years of one subscription that I didn’t enjoy as much as others. I am not going to waste time and risk giving myself second thoughts about this by looking through these magazines to make sure there aren’t any lame reasons why I should keep them I am just taking them out of the binders and putting them in the donation box.

For some people you may want to tear out articles and store them in a binders or boxes so you can refer back to them. Others may utilise your computer to scan items before throwing away your magazines. There are so many great graphics programs out there so you can arrange the articles you want with great creativity using tags to make it easy to find what you are looking for when you do need to reference this information.

Use the 365lessthings approach and just eliminate one today if that is all you are willing to part with and then perhaps another next week. You might find you start to become more ruthless at culling once you set yourself on that path. Give it a shot!

This in my pile I am discarding today. I may revisit my binders again very soon and find some more I really can live without.

At some point early in this exercise, my husband suggested that I photo document the items we rid ourselves of with the intention that I should get this blog up and running. I have since discovered two other good reasons for this archive of visual reminders of what was. The first being that we can look back on our achievement as we go along and remind ourselves how much clutter we expelled from the ever expanding space we live in. It inspires us everyday to come up with an idea for tomorrows contribution. The second reason is that, if there is the odd thing that we had a hard time parting with, we still have a place where we can go to reflect on those good times without it taking up valuable space except for a few megapixels on our hard drive.

Today’s item is a batch of old motorcycle magazines that my husband kept for nearly 20 years. The photos only shows a small sample of them.

Today, three pair of holey Nike Skate shoes that languished in the shoe cupboard for nearly three years head to the garbage bin. We can sometimes make personal attachments to the strangest things. I suppose this is so because they remind us of a happier time in a place we would much rather still be, a common mistake we fall into that causes a lot of clutter in our lives. Purging ourselves of these useless items will not make us forget the good times, the places we’ve been or the people we’ve met along the way so don’t be afraid to let go. It is just “stuff” after all, the memories remain. The beauty of this plan is that if you don’t feel you can let something go today maybe you will feel better about it on day 100 or day 213-so what-after all there are 365 days in this resolution, just pick something else for today.