A Strategy for Minimizing Your Stuff
Posted April 13th, 2010 by Chris Gurney
OK, so you’ve decided to clean out your basement, closet, spare bedroom, car, or some other space where stuff has collected.
Where do you begin? And how do you get yourself to actually go through with it?
Here are some things that worked for me:
Don’t panic!
At first, the sheer volume and variety of stuff you have to go through may seem overwhelming. Getting mentally prepared, and getting rid of things intelligently, is going to take some time. So, give yourself the time! In other words, don’t decide to clean out your things right before you move, and don’t expect it to happen overnight.
Make a list, and sleep on it.
What helped me to grasp the quantity of stuff that I had to deal with was to start to create a list of things in my storage locker.
Now, you don’t have to list absolutely everything: Bite it off, one manageable piece at a time, by listing the first chunk of things that you can get to. Just write down what you see. It doesn’t have to be in any particular order, at first.
Now, take the items on your list and break them up as follows: Give/Donate, Sell, Recycle/Trash, and Keep.
Now, sleep on it. Pausing here may do away with some of the first instincts you may have had about keeping certain things. This was the case for me, anyway!
Establish clear next actions for each thing.
Now, to decide what to do about each item on that list.
Give/Donate
If your intention is to give something away, your first challenge is figuring out who to give that something away to. And then you actually have to follow through with it.
First, share your list with friends and family. Some may just jump all over some of the items you now have up for grabs!
Otherwise, depending on what it is, here are some ideas on what you can do with it:
- For books and movies, consider donating them to the library, if they accept donations. Donating to the library had two benefits, for me. The first was that more than one person would be able to make use of it; if I gave it to a single person, on the other hand, they would read/watch it, and then it would sit on their shelf… becoming “stuff”. My thinking also went that if that item was in the library, and if I really wanted to see it again, I could always sign it out. Whether or not that was true, it didn’t really matter!
- For clothing, search for clothing donation boxes. You can usually find these in certain plaza parking lots, though you may have overlooked them in the past.
Take it to an agency such as Goodwill (goodwill.org, goodwill.on.ca). The City of Toronto’s web site has a list of not-for-profit agencies that accept furniture, appliances, computers, clothing, books, and other things; your city’s waste management department may maintain a similar list.
Keep in mind that these places are not dumps — you can’t just drop off anything there. Ask ahead of time if there is something in particular that you think might make for a questionable donation.
Join Freecycle, a mailing list of people posting ads for free stuff. In my experience, it seems to be a gentler alternative to craigslist’s free section.
Sell
My preference was to give away things, versus dealing with the masses on craigslist, Kijiji, or eBay. The selling process slows things down, and kills the momentum. Your preferences may vary.
If your intent is to sell, search first to see what others are selling it for, and how they’re describing it. Now take a photo of the object, write your own sales pitch for it… and post it.
Recycle/Trash
When you put something in the trash, you’re just relocating your “stuff”… to a very permanent place. So if you finally decide that you intend to trash something, please consider the environment before you just throw it out:
- For appliances, search for recycling depots.
- For computers and electronics, I found a particular company in my city that accepts donations of used computers, that they dismantle, and transform into working computers. (For other electronics recyclers in Ontario, check out dowhatyoucan.ca.)
Some people’s first inclination might be to back a truck up to the door, pitch everything in it, and take it to the dump. While, yes, this is the fastest way to get rid of things, this just isn’t smart. So, please, try not to default to the Trash list.
Keep
The things you want to keep need to be set aside, from the rest of your things. I encourage you to continually reevaluate what you’re choosing to keep, lest it become “stuff” again.
Talk about it with others.
I found that sharing this endeavor, and the progress I’ve been making with it, to be rather motivating.
On top of that, other people may see treasure in your trash. It’s how I ended up finding people I could donate or sell a lot of the stuff that I had. As a result, things that I thought would take a while to get rid of — such as my dated TV — turned out to be rather easy!
Try to establish new habits for cutting back on new acquisitions.
Once you’ve minimized a lot of the things that you own, the trick is to put some thought into the new things that you acquire, from here on in.
What methods have worked for you for getting rid of things? Leave a comment below. Photo by rmahle.
Thank you for reading! Please sign-up for email updates, or subscribe via RSS, or follow me on Twitter.
See more posts tagged with: Minimizing
