Browsing the archives for the decluttering tag.
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Organization: Where Do I Start?

Resources

Recently I pulled together some key ideas to use when getting organized into a post, “Organization: Useful Principles,” and I promised to follow up with links to organization posts on this site and with a book recommendation.

I’ll start with the book recommendation, which is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Allen offers an extremely well-designed approach to organizing task lists and taking care of items on that list: you can get more information on his book in my post “Useful Book: Getting Things Done.”

As to articles on this site, here are some that I hope you might find especially useful:

Task organization
Don’t Use Your Inbox as a To Do List
Weed Out Task Lists With the 2-Minute Rule
My Top 1 Task
Why Tasks Lists Sometimes Fail 

Attitude and emotions
Effective Organization and Filing Are … Fun???
Relieving Stress by Understanding Your Inputs
4 Ways to Make Sure You Get a Task Done 

Organizing papers
Why bother organizing papers?
The Eight Things You Can Do With a Piece of Paper 

Decluttering
Digging Out, Cleaning Up, Uncluttering, and Getting Organized: Let’s Start With a Link
What Our Garage Sale Taught Me About Decluttering My Mind
Some Tips for Getting Rid of Things

E-mail
How I’m Keeping My E-mail Inbox Empty
Free Online E-mail to Help You Keep a Clean Inbox
My Empty E-mail Inbox, 10 Weeks Later 

General principles
Organization: Useful Principles
How Exceptions Cripple Organization
Why Organization Improves Motivation, and Some Organization Tips
Little by Little or Big Push?

Photo once again by Rubbermaid Products

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Organization: Useful Principles

Strategies and goals

A reader got in touch with me the other day asking about where to start with task management. While I’ve written a number of articles about different kinds of organization, I don’t believe that I’ve ever tackled the question from the basic question of where to get started with organization as a whole … so here that article is.

Five kinds of organization
At least five kinds of organization can demand our attention, and it’s helpful to separate them in our minds, because each one requires a slightly different approach. Those kinds are:

  • tasks (anything that needs to be dealt with, from a quick decision to a massive project)
  • paper (including mail, reference materials, the kids’ schoolwork, bills, receipts …)
  • e-mail
  • physical clutter
  • information (I won’t go into this in any detail in this article, but see “Eight Ways to Organize Information and Ideas“)

Useful principles of organization
Some approaches to organization are much more successful and rewarding than others. The following ideas can help move things along:

  • Have a clear system for decisions – It’s much easier to get through a pile or list of items if you have a strict and clear way to deal with them. A detailed working example: if you’re dealing with a stack of papers (or even boxes upon boxes of papers), take a look at the system outlined in “The 8 Things You Can Do With a Piece of Paper.” Process one item, then go back to the top and repeat for the next one.
  • Don’t get bogged down when planning – One of the difficulties with, prioritizing a task list or clearing out an e-mail box, for instance, is that it’s easy to get bogged down trying to do one specific item instead of finishing the task of organizing all the items. Except for one situation I’m about to mention, it tends to work best to only organize when organizing–not getting sidetracked onto one specific item, no matter how appealing or pressing that item might be (short of an emergency).
  • Do very quick things right away – Whenever we’re organizing and we come across a form that can be filled out and readied for the mailbox in a few minutes, or a task that will take a very short time to complete, or an e-mail that can be put to rest with a two-sentence response, taking care of that task immediately shortens the to-do list or stack of papers or list of e-mails to handle, and it saves time having to organize and review the item. This is the exception to not doing tasks while planning, because these short tasks won’t bog things down.
  • Categorize & prioritize – It’s great to get down a list of everything that needs to be done, but if we don’t prioritize tasks then we’ll end up doing whatever seems most appealing, easiest, or most obvious instead of whatever will make the greatest positive impact. Categories make it easier to attend to one kind of thing at a time, and priorities are essential for repeatedly answering the question “What’s the best thing for me to be doing right now?”
  • Review regularly – When organizing tasks and e-mail,  regularly going over the lists is an important part of organization in order to remove things that have been completed, bump up the priority of items that have become more urgent, recategorize, and revisit pending items that have gotten stalled. Along with the obvious benefits of this practice, doing regular reviews also helps us have confidence in our own organizational systems. If we just sweep things into categories and never look at them again, then we’ll our system will start failing this, and knowing this, we’ll be reluctant to put important items into it. As soon as we start keeping things out of an organizational system, that system has failed: it then needs to be handled differently, re-energized, or revamped.
  • Organize items once – When an item comes into an organizational system, it’s important to make a decision where to put it then and there. If we set things aside to consider later, then later we’ll just be faced with the exact same choice. By making the choice with each item as it comes up, we can make clear forward progress.
  • All tasks should go to one place – It’s easy for tasks to start growing, like weeds, in many different places. Apart from very basic separations like “work tasks” and “home tasks,” though, that way lies confusion and failure. If I have a computerized task list, a handwritten list for some other tasks, a file on my computer for some other tasks, a few sticky notes, and some e-mails in my inbox that I want to use as reminders, then I have no way to look at all of my tasks together and prioritize them, which means that my system can’t tell me the one thing I need to do next–and a good organizational system can always answer the question “What should I do next?”

In a follow-up post, I’ll provide links to some of the most useful organizational articles on this site and talk about the one book I would recommend above all others for getting organized.

Photo by Rubbermaid Products

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Practical Takeaways from Running Our Garage Sale

Projects

Recently my family, through energetic effort, ran a garage sale from our home in a semi-rural part of Vermont. Running that sale taught me some useful lessons in best (and worst) garage sale practices, and especially seeing as I don’t expect to want or need to run another one any time soon, I’m passing this information on in hopes that it will be useful to you.

I’ve talked in the past about getting rid of things we don’t need and about the personal and emotional side of garage sales. This post, by contrast, is about simple, pragmatic stuff.

We aren’t exactly in a high-traffic area, and the sale was only modestly successful, but it was a useful and necessary step to clearing out a lot of things we’d identified we didn’t need. In the weeks since, we’ve been donating items to appropriate places, putting them up on eBay, and both selling and giving them away through Craigslist. We’re getting close to the end of the process, which is exciting: that will mean we’ll have our garage back, just in time for winter, and I’ll be more clutter-free than I’ve been in many a year.

Signage is essential
Signs were especially important for our sale because our house isn’t visible from the road, and because the road we’re on isn’t a busy one. Accordingly, I made the extra effort to make five sets of signs: one at the intersection with the nearest large road, two directing people down our road from the medium-sized roads that connect with it, one at the end of our driveway to direct people in, and one at the fork in our driveway so that people wouldn’t end up at our neighbor’s house instead (we share a driveway with our neighbors). All of that appears to have been good thinking: I think we needed those signs to guide people in.

Unfortunately, the signs I initially put up had not one, not two, but three significant problems:

  1. They were too small
  2. They had too much information on them, making for small print and too much to read while driving by
  3. The poles they were mounted on weren’t strong enough

I got some poles that looked much sturdier than they turned out to be, and it was a windy weekend, so my signs were sometimes getting blown over. I ended up going out and reinforcing several of the sign setups, but even then it turned out that a key sign was down for the entire sale, which probably lost us a number of customers.

The signs were small because I tried to get away with what I could easily make with a standard printer, and I used 8.5″x14″ paper. What I needed instead were big, bold signs that listed the days, the times, and had an arrow pointing in the right direction with the words “garage sale.” I added some bigger signs for the second day, which helped a little, but I believe that big, clear signs that wouldn’t have blown down would have paid for themselves many times over.

Vendors can’t be choosers
I figured that since we were running the garage sale, we could do it on our terms. Consequently, I set it to run only one day, insisted on no early birds, and declared all prices final. This simply didn’t work. Maybe it works if you have a ton of traffic and people are fighting each other to buy your used coasters, but it’s no good if you live in the woods. We added a second day, lifted the “no haggling” policy, and got more flexible. After all, our goal wasn’t to run a business, but to get rid of some stuff and get a small amount of money back for it.

Free advertising is good
One place I think we made good decisions was in advertising. We posted the sale on Craigslist with a list of many of the kinds of items we were selling (and later, some pictures); on Facebook; and on our local Front Porch Forum (frontporchforum.com). Ads in local papers would have been prohibitively expensive, and offhand I don’t know of any other sites that would have gotten the word out well–though if you know of any, please mention them in comments.

Bargaining rules
No one in my family is an enthusiastic haggler, so I set some bargaining rules to make bargaining more comfortable for me. People who were buying multiple things could get more slack than people buying a few things. Things that I was pretty sure I could sell for more on eBay if I were willing to take the trouble weren’t very negotiable. We had set prices pretty low from the beginning, so I didn’t take less than about 80% of the asking price most of the time, and I never lowered the price twice. I also didn’t take less money than the sale was worth. What I mean is, if someone had tried to talk me down on a 25 cent item, I would have waved them away: at that point, I’d rather donate the item than get into a detailed discussion over ten or fifteen cents.

Three cash boxes
We actually had three groups of people benefiting from sales: 1) the adults in the household; 2) my son; and 3) our two girls. In order to keep things non-confusing, we had three cash boxes, and we put the money in those as it came in. I wouldn’t have wanted to try reconstructing sales after the fact or otherwise figuring out how to divide the money.

All in all, the sale did its job. It did move a number of things we wanted to get rid of and got them to useful new lives in other people’s homes, which is great. It didn’t get rid of a lot of the items we had on offer, but we now have tried and failed to sell those items, and we can give them away knowing that we’re not tossing out easy money. (Besides, giving things away to good people or organizations has its own rewards.) To put it another way, having the garage sale gave us the green light to get rid of everything that was left at the end, and it’s hard to put a high enough value on decluttering your life.

Photo by sea turtle

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What Our Garage Sale Taught Me About Decluttering My Mind

States of mind

This past weekend, my family had our long-delayed garage sale. It’s been two and a half years since I went through practically everything I owned and sorted it all into “keep” and “don’t keep”: the trick in the time since has been finding and setting aside enough time to organize, price, advertise, set out, and sell those items. In that couple of years, too, I’ve found that there are a number of additional objects I had that I could do without, and so along with everything else there needed to be another round of decluttering.

However, we did it all, and we survived. While I hope to not have to do another sale for a number of years, I feel like I’ve learned some useful lessons about running one successfully, and I’ll be putting that information in a separate post. This post, however, is about the emotional side of garage sales, because for many of us, getting rid of our old stuff is even a bigger emotional task than it is a physical and organizational one.

In the course of this sale, I’ve had to face a few truths about myself, my stuff, and my relationships, and it all continues to be challenging and sometimes even painful. Here’s what I think I’ve learned:

1. I’m not going to get what I paid for it: that money is gone
It’s nice to imagine when I buy something useful and well-made that I’m not really saying goodbye to my money: I’m just letting it go away for a little while. Eventually, when I no longer need the thing, I can just sell it and recoup much of my expense, right?

You probably aren’t falling for that and know as well as I do that the minute we take off the plastic wrap, whatever it is we bought no longer equals money: all it’s worth is its use to us plus sometimes a greatly-reduced resale value. Yet many of us find ourselves saying (or thinking) “But I paid ___ for that!” It’s hard to let go of the idea that things are worth what we paid for them, but at least in monetary terms, they hardly ever are. Maybe if you’ve recently bought a used Kindle Fire or something, you can get away with recouping what you paid for it, but that kind of thing is the exception, not the rule.

The hardest things for me to get used to losing value on, surprisingly, weren’t even mine: they were my son’s old toys. I would look at something and think “I remember when he was absolutely dying to own that,” and how we (or a relative at a birthday, say) had paid $50 or whatever it was for the item that was now sitting in our driveway on a sheet with a little sticker on it saying “$3.” It’s a hard lesson to learn, this evaporation of value, but it’s worth knowing–especially if it helps guide us into buying less stuff we don’t really need or won’t be able to use well.

2. The money I make won’t justify the time and effort, and that’s OK
One of the things I’ve been avoiding energetically is analyzing what my income per hour has been on this garage sale project. I’m not really making money in a meaningful way from doing this. What I’ve reminded myself, over and over (and it has helped), is that my payoff is in organization, space, peace of mind, and closure. All those objects in my life that have been hanging question marks (What do I do with this? Is it worth anything? How do I get rid of it? Do I really need it after all?) are being resolved into completed episodes of my life. Even if we hadn’t made a cent, all of the work was still necessary to get our lives back in order.

3. Bringing out old things brings out old thoughts
It was hard for me, during the sale, to relive some of my parenting from years gone by. I certainly don’t consider myself a world-class parent now, and currently I’m much, much better at parenting than I was years ago. Once again my son’s old toys gave me the most trouble: I remembered times when I’d been a just plain crummy dad. He used to have trouble sleeping starting when he was around 3, and I’d get angry when an hour after his bedtime he’d wander out into the living room. What I really wish I could do is go back in time and force some sense into my then-self, help myself realize that a kid who has trouble falling asleep probably needs some additional attention, affection, or comfort, and that a little patience would probably see the problem through much more handily and with much better impact for my kid than anger would. Other people might have to face reminding themselves of people they loved who had died, or relationships that went sour, or projects that disappointed. It’s hard stuff, sometimes, but it’s certainly a good thing to work through those old pains when we can and feel we’ve made our peace with them.

4. Giving things to people who can use them is kinda beautiful
One of my biggest challenges is my books: I have hundreds of books I no longer need that must have cost me at a thousand or two thousand dollars or more  over the years, and I have been really attached to the idea of getting some money for them. When I asked about selling or giving away used books on Facebook, though, a number of friends came back with a series of terrific ideas (which I’ll detail in a separate post): schools in my area that could use them, hospitals, homeless shelters, bookmobiles … I realize that far better than making a little bit of money from my unneeded things, I can actually get them to people who want or need them. The eight bags of clothes in the back of my car that are on their way to Goodwill or the boxes and boxes of books I can donate so that suddenly there will be all these great new things to read just where people need them … that’s almost magical, you know? I like the idea of charity, but don’t get to do nearly as much of it as I’d like. Here, suddenly, is a beautiful opportunity to give from a position of real (but non-monetary) wealth. What a huge improvement over boxes of books taking up space and never getting read!

I know that for many of you out there, garage sales aren’t this grueling. This is the first one I’ve had in years, and future sales probably won’t involve all the same memories and clutter. My point, though, isn’t that garage sales are always hard–it’s that decluttering our homes and lives goes with the difficult process of decluttering parts of our minds, and that if we’re having trouble with one of those things, it may help to turn our attention to the other.

It just takes a bit of courage. And time. And maybe a garage.

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Little by Little or Big Push?

Strategies and goals

Over the past few weeks I’ve been through a major effort to go through all of my earthly possessions and get rid of everything I really don’t want or need. I used the “In what kind of realistic situation would I actually want to pull this out and do something with it?” test to decide what needed to go, as mentioned in my recent article “Some Tips for Getting Rid of Things.”

The things I set aside to get rid of went to a variety of places, some like the ones I mention in my article  “Clearing Your Mind by Cashing In.” Many items went to ReSource, a terrific local non-profit that provides a household good reuse store, building materials reuse store, and other departments while creating jobs and teaching job skills. Other materials were sold through Craigslist, given away through Craigslist and Freecycle, and set aside to be sold on Amazon and eBay. Of course our trash cans and recycle bin were also given a thorough workout.

The process, which is still in progress for me (I still need to finish going through books, primarily), took much longer than I would have imagined–but it also yielded a lot more things to sell or give away and freed up a lot more space than I would have imagined. Best of all, it has been taking innumerable little pressures and worries away: things I’ve held onto to fix or reuse somehow that I finally realized were trash, projects of going through things that are now done, and so on. Physical clutter can create mental clutter.

Coming to the end of this big push, I now have to ask myself: would it have been a lot easier on me to do this little by little over time? Or did I need to do it in one big push to do it at all?

The big push approach
The big push has some significant up sides. One of the biggest is that I didn’t have to reorient and remind myself of what I was doing every time I restart, which meant I could work efficiently. Another is that I could attack one part of the house, pull out everything in it, and take over as much space as I needed until I had sorted through all of that material. I also was able to easily keep focus on the job once I had started.

Yet another thing I like about the big push is the sense of accomplishment and catharsis. The change in my house was drastic, fast, and visible.

When doing a big push, it’s generally necessary to plan in advance and carve out time during which not only do you not have your usual responsibilities to attend to, but you won’t be badly distracted by other things you could do with the time, like socializing or relaxing. Big pushes generally require clearing the schedule, locking the door, and unplugging the phone.

The little by little approach
As great as the big push is, little by little has one killer advantage, which is that big pushes have a bad habit of never happening. For instance, if I were to wait until I actually had time to go through every piece of paper I own to get my papers organized, there’s a good chance that would literally never happen. Going through my things has taken about five full days so far–and I do mean full!–and that’s not counting the time I still need to put in selling off some of the things I’ve identified to get rid of. Being able to take that amount of time for organization alone was a rare opportunity, one that I jumped at, and for me, such opportunities come along often.

Another advantage of the little by little approach–and this too is a major plus–is that doing something consistently makes it into a habit. This is very useful for things that we’ll need to keep up once we get to our goal state. For example, if I were to do a major landscaping effort on my yard, doing it little by little would get me in the habit of working on the yard, which would be important to keeping up everything I had done in the initial effort.

Deciding on which approach to use
So if you’re facing a monumental project and are trying to decide whether to crank it out all at once or to do it little by little, here are some questions to ask yourself and some ideas to guide you based on those answers.

  • Does it need to be done at all? Even though the project may be a worthy one, are you willing and able to devote the time it will require? For instance, it might be nice to send Christmas cards to 200 people this year, but is that project high enough in your priorities to be worth the time it will take?
  • Does it need to be done very soon? If so, you may have no choice other than a big push.
  • Is efficiency of the essence? Big pushes tend to be more efficient than going little by little because of not having to stop and restart.
  • Are you going to learn as you go? When doing something little by little, you have a chance to reflect on and refine your methods. This can lead to great improvements in how you handle your project.
  • Can you free up the amount of time a big push will need? If not, little by little is your only option.
  • Will this be something you’ll need to maintain once the initial work is done? If so, little by little can do a better job of helping you develop the habits you’ll need.
  • What if the project goes over? For most large projects, estimates are more guesswork than reliable prediction. If you were to set aside an amount of time for a big push and at the end find you needed twice as much time, what would you do? On the other hand, if you were going little by little and found out the project would take twice as long as you thought, would that push completion too far away into the future?
  • Will you be getting help? Some help is better suited to big pushes, as with decluttering or physical labor. Other help is better suited to a little by little approach, as with processing documents that arrive through e-mail or working with people who don’t have large chunks of time available.

Whatever your approach, connecting with why you want to do the project will help you remain motivated.

Photo by druid labs

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Some Tips for Getting Rid of Things

Strategies and goals

I’m currently in the midst of a two-day “decluttering vacation,” taking time off from my regular work to go through my house, get rid of things I don’t need, and organize the things I have left. I used to live in a larger house with a fair amount of storage, and I also used to have a less realistic idea of what I might really, actually use some day, so even though I’ve been getting rid of some stuff in recent years, my current, smaller house, which doesn’t have much storage space, has some packed closets and corners that I’d really like to clear out. (See my article “Clearing Your Mind by Cashing In.”)

It seems to me that the hardest part of decluttering doesn’t have anything to do with time, space, or materials: it’s the decisions. You find a book you read and liked ten years ago, or a tool that you’d lost for two years, or a stack of letters from a friend, and you think “Should I get rid of this? Will somebody be insulted if I get rid of it? Where would it even go if I did get rid of it? What if I get rid of it and I need it? I paid a lot of money for this!” and so on.

Many of these questions are misleading, because they get us involved in a lot of drama over the objects that doesn’t help us figure out whether or not the object belongs in our lives.

Let’s first say that if we don’t have any use for something, it’s best to get rid of it, even if that takes time and effort. I had a large laptop battery that was tapped out, no longer usable–but I didn’t want to throw it away, because I knew some of its materials might be toxic and that it could be recycled. I walked all over downtown Montpelier, Vermont trying to find a suitable battery drop-off, then did some searching online, then finally took it to a recycling bin for batteries at a local Best Buy store (though I also could have taken it to the dump and put it in the right place there, it turns out). This was a pain in the neck, but it was less of a pain in the neck than holding onto that useless object for the rest of my life! And the feeling of accomplishment and relief, although small, made a truly positive impact on my day.

So for the moment disregarding the question of what is to be done with an object once we decide it needs to go, here’s a proposal for a question that can help decide whether or not it should go in the first place: “In what kind of realistic situation would I actually want to pull this out and do something with it?”

Keep in mind that we’re trying to picture a situation that would actually happen, in which we would know where this item was, be willing and able to find it and get it out, and experience happiness or relief at having it available. There has to be a plausible payoff to keeping the thing. If there is no payoff, no value to keeping it, then it’s probably worth letting go.

It can take some time to get past our gut-level panic reactions at tossing something we may have had for years or paid a bundle for, but the effect of successfully ditching objects we really don’t need is often one of relief and pride, not to mention better organization and increased closet space. While getting rid of stuff isn’t always the most useful thing to do with our time, when it does come time to face that task, it’s an opportunity for becoming happier and more free.

It also can be done–and often will be more rewarding when done–in small amounts every day or several times a week rather than in one big push. (See “How to Reduce Stress and Get More Done by Turning a Project into a Habit.”)

One last note: decluttering doesn’t apply to data in the same way it does to physical objects. Electronic information can be searched automatically and takes virtually no physical space, and the amount of storage we have for that information grows exponentially over time as technology improves. So spending a full day going through all the files on your computer and deleting the ones you don’t need is probably not a great use of time. This is not to say it’s never worth deleting or offloading things from your computer, only that organizing data doesn’t pay off in the same way organizing objects does.

Photo by sindesign

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Is Willpower Just a Matter of Caring Enough?

States of mind

Some people give the following advice about willpower:

“You have to care about what you want to achieve, a lot. If you care a lot, it’s in the bag. If you don’t, you might as well give up.”

Since I think this is lousy advice, I’m not going to mention where it came from, but I do want to say why it’s lousy advice.

Why caring alone isn’t enough
First of all, a person can care desperately about something and still not be able to make it happen. For example, Melissa might feel completely oppressed by her messy and cluttered house every day and want nothing more than to clean it up. However, she won’t be able to do that if she doesn’t believe she’s capable of making the change, if she doesn’t know how to start, if she can’t organize her efforts, if she strongly wants something else that’s in conflict with the clean-up effort, or if every time she thinks about cleaning up she gets distracted, blocked, or hung up on emotional issues.

Why not caring doesn’t necessarily prevent self-motivation
Similarly, if she has systematically forced herself to ignore her house for years and doesn’t really care very much, but she still knows on some level how good for her it would be to have a clean, happy home–for instance, if she’s in love with someone who wouldn’t be able to overlook the mess–then she can still create the self-motivation to clean up, and even to come up with organizational ideas, deflect distractions, overcome obstacles, and get past emotional issues.

Caring as a source of motivation
Of course, caring deeply about something is nonetheless a powerful source of motivation, and if there aren’t other things in your way, it can sometimes be plenty by itself. For example, one summer when I was in college, I met a French exchange student who spoke hardly any English. She was very pretty, and I immediately decided I wanted to be able to speak to her in French. I probably learned more French in those two weeks than I have in all the rest of my life put together. I knew I could do it, having already become conversant in Spanish; I didn’t feel any emotional conflicts with learning French; I knew how to go about studying the language; I had the books … in other words, caring pushed me forward, and there didn’t happen to be anything major in the way. Under these kinds of circumstances, caring makes a real difference.

How to become motivated even when you have mixed feelings
Let’s say I’m in a situation where I recognize that something is very important–starting an exercise regime, for instance, or completing some difficult repairs on my house–but I don’t really care about it on a gut level. How can I motivate myself?

First of all, it helps for me to connect to the benefits. If possible, I’ll want to visualize and spend time thinking about the results I’m seeking–the increased value of my house when I sell it and what I could do with that money or the boost in energy I would get from exercising, for instance. These kinds of exercises help me care more, which as we’ve established isn’t strictly necessary, but which will help make things easier.

Second, I have to be willing to prioritize the thing I’m trying to achieve above every other kind of self-motivation. We are really only capable of working on one major life change at a time: this is one of the reasons people so often fail at changing their habits, because they try to fix everything at once, which means changing many kinds of habits. But changing habits requires a lot of focus and attention–too much to allow attention to be divided among a lot of different goals. So while changing in more than one major way at once is possible, it’s extremely difficult and usually fails. So if Melissa wants to declutter her house, she’s better off not trying to start a weight loss regime or a novel at the same time.

Motivation creating caring
The flip side of this is that our attention, our consciousness and awareness and focus, is so useful and valuable that if we direct it energetically at any one thing, we have a very good chance of achieving that thing if it can be achieved at all. If Melissa spends a lot of time thinking about how she’ll clean up her house, and reads books on decluttering, and talks with friends about the problem, and learns some of the strategies on this site to deal with the difficult emotions that can come up in that kind of process, then even if cleaning up her house starts out as something that doesn’t really mean much to her, it becomes something that she gets better and better at and cares more and more about.

Because it’s really the other way around: caring doesn’t cause us to make changes in our lives as reliably as making changes in our lives causes us to care. The more thought and effort I put into accomplishing a goal, the more I begin to identify with that goal, most of the time. As much as what we care about makes us who we are, in fact who we are changes throughout our lives, and caring about different things, shifting our own priorities, is a lot of what makes that change happen.

Photo by Storm Crypt

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Seeking Regular Contributors for The Willpower Engine

About the site

Lately I’ve been thinking how much fun it would be to enrich this site with material from one or two like-minded people who have useful information to share. If you’re interested in expanding your audience and especially in connecting with people who share your passion for improving their lives and mental resources, or if you know someone like that, please get in touch through the contact form to the right or through e-mail.

I’m mainly interested in potential contributors who have a specific focus that has to do with willpower, motivation, self-organization, or related self-improvement. That focus could any of a number of things, such as fitness, organization, writing, happiness, communication, relationships, decluttering, family dynamics, psychology, neurology, and so on. I’d love to have someone who would do a regular feature interviewing people (regular people or high-profile people) on subjects related to willpower.

To be a good fit, a contributor should be writing based on good scientific research, established practice, personal experience, interviews, or some other solid source of information; philosophical reflections (other than from professional philosophers) or off-the-cuff opinion pieces aren’t a good fit for the site.

There’s no pay (sorry!), but you can console yourself that I don’t make a cent from this site either. At the moment The Willpower Engine gets more than 800 views a week, so I can promise that you’d get good exposure to a new audience. Cross-posting to The Willpower Engine and your own site is fine. Posting would need to be on a regular schedule, but it could be anything from every other week to twice a week, depending on your preferences. Your bio and other information (bibliography, Web site links, etc.) would be on a new Contributors page.

By the way, I’m also open to writing posts for other sites in a similar arrangement or as a guest.

Any takers? Any suggestions for people who might be interested? Or are there just subjects you would love to see covered regularly? Get in touch, or add a comment. Thanks for your help!

Photo by Pete Lambert

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Clearing your mind by cashing in

States of mind

Our states of mind are often influenced–sometimes heavily–by the space immediately around us: our offices, workplaces, homes, cars, yards, towns, and so on. I talk about this a bit in my article How Tools and Environment Make Work into Play, Part II: Letting Your Environment Help You, and it certainly bears out in my own life: the massive peace lily in my office below the photograph my brother made when he was shooting in the subways of New York City; the additional focus I have now that there aren’t random papers scattered around my writing area any more; even the smile that comes to my face when I walk into my kitchen and everything is cleaned up and in its place. The effects will vary, but for most of us, physical clutter means distraction and annoyance.

Yet it’s often hard to get motivated to clear things out of our lives, especially if they seem to have some value–the old turntable that’s never used but that cost hundreds of dollars in its day, the suits in the closet that no longer fit, the old computer that still works but that has been shut down ever since the new one was set up …

Fortunately, there’s an easy and motivating solution to these problems: sell stuff, or give it away to someone who needs it. We live in a golden age of ways to get rid of stuff, which is lucky, since we also live in a golden age of being buried in our own junk. Here are some of the places I’ve been using lately to lighten up my life a little, after observing the more minimalist home of a friend I admire:

  • eBay: A great option if you can ship it affordably and it’s worth more than a few dollars. Not only does eBay provide good ways to sell your stuff, but you can also find out how much similar stuff has sold for lately and choose a sane price. Remember, the price is a matter of what someone else will pay for it now, not a matter of how much money you had to put into the thing. I’d suggest searching “completed” listings for real comparison prices, since current listings are just asking prices and current bids.
  • Craigslist: Free and local, good if you have something a lot of people want or that’s too bulky to ship.
  • Consignment clothing stores: Ideal for clothing that’s really worth something but that you won’t wear again. Selling things by consignment is more work than giving them away, though, so factor that in. There are also consignment stores in some areas for things like bikes, sporting goods, and household goods.
  • Freecycle: Great for things you’d love to give away when you don’t have anyone to give them to. Offer the stuff, get a taker, leave it outside the door, and it magically disappears to brighten someone else’s life.
  • Goodwill: This organization and ones like it (the Salvation Army, clothes donation bins in grocery store parking lots, etc.) are the perfect destination for things from your closet or dresser that you will never wear again, but that someone else would.
  • Recycle stores: Here in northwestern Vermont we have a wonderful, non-profit organization called ReSource that takes donations of everything from furniture to toys to appliances to building materials and makes it all available at low prices in their store. They also provide jobs and job training. Your area may have something similar. If not, I’ll try not to gloat about living in this part of Vermont (but sometimes it’s difficult).
  • Used bookstores: If you have material you’re not going to read again, go through your bookshelves and storage areas and box up some books to bring to a local used book store. You can also donate used books to library book sales and recycle stores.
  • Amazon and SecondSpin:  Second Spin buys used music and movies, and Amazon offers a marketplace for those things plus many other types of items. Second Spin will pay you up front, but often lower amounts, whereas Amazon is another consignment opportunity.
  • Garage sales: For anything of fairly general interest. Find a beautiful weekend day to spend outside chatting with your neighbors as you lighten your load of things you don’tneed. Also can be a good way to teach your kids about money. Anything that’s left, bring to recycle stores, Goodwill, etc. Try to store nothing that you have set out to sell: once you’ve decided it should go, it should go unless it’s going to be worth a lot more to you down the road.

Remember that there are virtues in getting rid of things other than the money. Garage sales, for instance, tend not to bring in a whole lot of cash, but they do pay off in getting things out of your way.

Photo by ma.co.

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Why bother organizing papers?

Strategies and goals

In my recent article The Eight Things You Can Do With a Piece of Paper, I talk about some principles for taking the stress and difficulty out of organizing the piles of paper that can sometimes grow unwanted around our homes and workspaces. But that article didn’t really address the question of why someone would want to put the time and effort into organizing papers in the first place. For instance, if a person has been used to living in the midst of stacks of paper for years, why shouldn’t that person just continue doing so?

Well, certainly not everyone needs to organize papers, and even people who can benefit from it might do better to avoid it if by doing so they can get some more pressing things done. For instance, if it’s between organizing papers and working on broken ideas to address a serious problem with anxiety, I say let the papers pile up.

Still, here are some benefits of organizing papers for those of us not in that kind of position:

  • It helps you capture tasks, responsibilities, ideas, and resources that otherwise might be hidden or forgotten
  • You will probably find you can get rid of a lot of papers you don’t need, freeing up space and simplifying your environment
  • Organized papers look better and are more motivating for most people than piles, drawers, or boxes of papers
  • Things you didn’t know you had or forgot about can often surface during the organization process, not uncommonly including money
  • The wonderful feeling of “THERE that thing is!”
  • When you actually need some of the material you’ve organized, it will be easy to find it
  • You can make much better use of information you have on paper when it’s collected by subject and easy to find
  • Even a small amount of organizing work can help create a sense of satisfaction, order, and empowerment

Keep in mind that just organizing papers once in a major effort isn’t success: success is building a habit of keeping papers organized as they come in so that they are immediately available when they’re needed. Conveniently, this habit can be built up by regularly–ideally, every day–grabbing a few papers and taking care of them. You don’t have to make a massive initial effort to get things organized; it can just become a regular part of your day.

Photo by jasra

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