"Throw out fifty things"
Informative and helpful book review at The Simple Dollar. Good decluttering advice. The review begins:
Whenever I see clutter, I see money lost. For one, the clutter itself is usually made up of unused items that have value. Books, decorations, games, DVDs, and so on – they all cost money to purchase and many have at least some degree of resale value. For another, clutter takes up time, and time is money. It takes longer to find things. It takes longer to clean. It takes longer to rearrange and to organize.
Thus, over time, I’ve begun to look at clutter as an enemy of sorts. Stuff that just takes up space, particularly stuff with very limited aesthetic appeal, is stuff that can easily be eliminated.
That’s not to say that I’m entirely successful in my war on clutter. There are many places in our home that are quite cluttered (starting with my office, for example), but I often have difficulty sifting through that clutter and determining what exactly I should keep – and what I should get rid of.
Throw Out Fifty Things by Gail Blanke offers an interesting solution in the title itself. Blanke’s premise is that by going through your cluttered spaces and choosing fifty things to get rid of, you push yourself through the psychological barriers that cause you to create clutter in the first place.
Blanke identifies four key rules of disengagement (how to decide what to get rid of): …
