Ever since I read Marie Kondo’s book – Book Review #1/50 – The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying we have been on the de-cluttering journey. Her method does work ! We haven’t had cluttering as far as our clothes are concerned. Krishnan and I follow the simple philosophy of giving away more than or equal to what we add. So we indulge in buying clothes that we like but also give away, so the numbers remain in check always.
We did De-cluttering Continued – Clothes & Books which was essentially round 2. In July this year we finally got into round 3 …. our beloved collection of Harvard Business Review or HBR as the magazine is known. Krishnan has been collecting these since late 1980’s. They were prohibitively expensive in India till the digital revolution came about. We would go to the used book market in Daryaganj to buy HBRs there in the first few years of our moving to Delhi.
Now that we have access to the online copy, we didn’t have to store the print versions.
A 25 year collection of HBR was given away in a few minutes !! But yes it did empty out a whole underbed drawer. Not just HBR, we gave away a collection of several other magazine collections.
As we redesigned our home with Jyoti Verma’s help, we did a lot more de-cluttering and actually it has an emotional effect too – we feel unburdened. The problem with clutter is you need time to take care of soooooooo many things, that its exhausting. Clutter takes away time meant for more meaningful work.
You also realise that you need far fewer things to live a good life…. so learn to not clutter from the word go :). If you have already accumulated a lot of things, then de-clutter.
De-cluttering is my life. Moving forces you to set priorities, but I have inherited lots of clutter from various family members. I’ve also accumulatedy own clutter that has nowhere to go, except the dump.
Broken, un-repairable things, or remnants from past hobbies, or things that have out-survived their usefulness . . . these require decisions about how to dispose of them, who might want them, or whether I might find another use for them, some day.
Does the book say anything about the decision-making component of de-cluttering? Or about how to dispose of the excess? Heavy, broken equipment, or furniture, requires transportation for it, and strong people to lift, carry around tight spaces, up or down stairs, and negitiate the many obstacles involved in freeing oneself from excess.