Tag Archives: decluttering

18.

The Clutter Cure (©2007) by Judi Culbertson is a sort of hybrid between the “psychological approach” and the “practical approach” to decluttering. The book includes a few worksheets, but not so many as to serve as a distraction as with other books. The approach Culbertson suggests is to go through each room and make lists based on various criteria before starting the actual cleaning out and discarding. She’s realistic enough, and approaches the subject with enough humor, to admit that sometimes she simply wants to tell her clients (particularly when it comes to paper hoarding), “get rid of all of it!”

11.

I quickly began to wonder if Clutter Busting by Brooks Palmer (©2009) was some kind of joke. The book reads as though it were written by Stuart Smalley, a character from the old Saturday Night Live program. “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, you don’t need this stuff to feel special!” That line pretty well sums up the two-hundred pages of this tepid book. In fact, this book was so anti-inspirational it almost made me want to go out and buy something in order to feel better.

At work today I helped toss out a lot of stuff from the counseling office, including three old electric typewriters — not “cool” old typewriters, but hideous beige plastic typewriters from the late-1980s or early 1990s that were broken and missing their power cords and ribbon cartridges. We also tossed out three computer towers that had stopped working years ago, and multiple dust-covered boxes of miscellaneous outdated forms, policy manuals, and worn-out office supplies.

Still no action on the house listing, even though the listing has been picked up by most of the local real estate web sites.

7.

Monday. A holiday from work. Yay for that, anyway.

Spent, or wasted, the entire day going through stuff. Hauled another load to the storage unit. Tossed a number of things into the trash. The house and The Room of Doom are still full of crap.

And I still weigh a shade over 200 pounds.

Finished reading Clutter Free: Finally and Forever (1995) by Don Aslett. This book offers a collection of excerpts from comments Mr. Aslett has received over the years from people dealing with clutter. Occasionally amusing and perhaps somewhat helpful, I did not find this book quite as inspiring as the Lose 200 Pounds book I read last week. Still, I keep plugging along. Yet as I said, despite both tossing things and “temporarily” placing too many bins, boxes, and tubs to count into storage, I can barely walk into the now completely disorganized Room of Doom.

DAY XCIX

“You might say clutter is a way of avoiding life.” – Don Aslett in How To Lose 200 Pounds This Weekend (©2000), another decluttering book, and definitely one of the best there is! Every so many pages I found myself getting up off the sofa to work through another box of stuff. I tossed out things I’ve been lugging around for years… decades… even that I’ve had since I was a little kid! The Korn’s Bakery wrapping paper roll is gone. A dozen pieces of rusty O-gage toy train track are gone. Two bags of clothes, mostly t-shirts, are gone. My collection of seven Elvira, Mistress of the Dark / Coors Beer standup displays, dating back to 1987, are gone, folded up in the cardboard recycling bin. Those were tough to part with, but how likely is it that I’m going to ever set up an Elvira beer display in any room of my house? I checked prices on eBay before ditching stuff. The Elvira displays might have been worth thirty bucks apiece,  but shipping costs from where I currently live made selling them untenable. I threw out an old Marx toy metal barn. That was really hard. My brothers and I got that set from our grandparents when we were very young. Sadly, in addition to being ungainly to store, the barn had rusted quite badly. I did, however, keep the farm animals and accessories. I also tossed a plastic model kit of a London bus I purchased only a couple of years ago. I was swayed by a “fun” looking photo group on Flickr combined with a visit to the annual Honolulu NNL model car show to spend eighty dollars – eighty dollars – buying a plastic model kit. I had started on it, didn’t get very far, and it’s been taking up a lot of space ever since. The likelihood that I will spend my free time building a huge plastic model of a double-decker bus is pretty slim right now. I have too much other stuff to do, both things I need to do and things I “should” be doing. The bus model was so far on the back burner that it was never gonna happen. Tossing that felt like tearing up dollar bills – more like, tearing up a handful of twenty dollar bills – but it’s done, it’s gone, time to keep moving.

Last week we rented a storage unit to help with the decluttering. After reading How To Lose 200 Pounds This Weekend, I realize there are probably at least two large tubs of stuff I’ve already hauled to storage that I’m ready to part with. Next trip, I’m bringing those two tubs home and purging them.

Even though they’re beginning to sound a bit dated in some respects (the technology world, in particular, has changed a lot in the past fifteen years), Don Aslett’s decluttering books are definitely still the best on the market.

DAY XCIII

Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life (©2009) by Gail Blanke is written in a breezy, informal, almost stream-of-consciousness style that ultimately begins to feel rather forced and disingenuous. She totally lost me on page 171 with, “I hadn’t heard back form a financial institution about whether or not they were sending me to Dubai to give an important speech to some of their most valued people in the Asia Pacific Rim.” Nevertheless, I slogged through the book to the end, wading knee-deep through the author’s gloating anecdotes about winning a regional swimming competition at age 12, ibeing the manager of special promotions for the New York Yankees at the age of twenty-four (“Yup. The only woman in Major League Baseball with what they called a front-office job”) and appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, of course she got the Dubai gig. The brief sections on “re-inventing yourself” were nominally interesting, but beyond that, I found the book lacking in helpful advice and I found little in the examples and anecdotes to which I could relate.

DAY XCII

Finished reading Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding (2nd edition, ©2014) by Tolin, Frost, and Steketee. A statement on page 45 made me laugh out loud because it so accurately describes my response to little bits of string, cardboard, or plastic packaging materials:

People with hoarding often run into trouble because of their intelligence and creativity. One way this occurs is when the person engages in over-creativity – the tendency to think of more and more uses for an object.

The passage goes on to describe a hypothetical situation with cardboard toilet tissue tubes! Yes, I periodically begin to compulsively save cardboard tubes because of their potential uses in diorama projects. Sometimes, when the clutter is particularly bad and I can’t find the box in which I’m collecting tubes, I simply pitch them into the room, intending to put them in the appropriate place when I get around to clearing the room.

Eventually I go on a cleaning binge and discard all the tubes. They burn really well in the fireplace… altho’ that is another potential reason to hoard them. Currently, however, I do not have any cardboard tubes stashed anywhere… altho’ yesterday I was tempted by an even more desirable paper towel roll tube!

Other than the quote above, I did not find Buried in Treasures to be particularly helpful or enlightening. Of course, being the third book I’ve read in the past few days on the same topic, it was unlikely that I would discover anything particularly new. Buried in Treasures takes a “workbook” approach to the process. To me, it seems like the book itself could be distracting, as it is filled with forms to fill out, surveys to take, and “experiments” to complete. The process as outlined in this book calls for quite a bit of writing. It’s an excellent book for people who like to procrastinate. There was a time when I would have happily immersed myself in the surveys and introspective writing exercises. At this point, I’m looking for insight into the psychological aspects of being attached to “sentimental” items, for practical tips on cutting ties with things and getting rid of stuff, and for motivation and “pep talks” to keep me rolling.

I have taken at least three filled trash cans out to the big trash can since starting to read these decluttering books, and I’m putting items to try to sell on eBay into a couple of clearly marked tubs. I am going through my boxes and tubs again, sorting things a bit better, and trying to thin things out. It’s slow going, and I still hang on to too much stuff. I also cleared away more outdoor clutter, like piles of yard debris and some broken tools and containers. I have some areas in mind on which I’d like to focus my attention next.

Additionally, having completely read three two-hundred page books, I think I have read more books in the past week than I read in all of last year! And I didn’t buy any of them!

We took some containers to a rental storage facility today. This will be a temporary situation, for no more than three or four months, in an effort to get the house cleaned up and listed for sale. Of my containers, I only took boxes of books today. I had thinned my book stash pretty thoroughly last summer, or so I thought. I still had seven tubs of books. I’m sure I could thin them out a bit more. I will do so before we actually move, if, indeed, we are able to sell the house.

I did not run today, but I got plenty of exercise moving boxes and tubs, plus cutting up a considerable pile of yard debris.

DAY XCI

Jogged 12.7 km today at a 7:18 /km average pace.

Finished reading the second of my library requests last night, The Secret Lives of Hoarders (©2011) by Matt Paxton. This book was skewed slightly toward providing the friends and families of hoarders insights and suggestions on how to deal with people who have a hoarding problem. The tone was lighter but more practical than the previous book, The Hoarder in You, that I recently read, with less psychological examination and more direct ways to work with a person who has hoarding or clutter issues.

The two most interesting points for me:

1. The author, who is a professional house cleaner, rates hoarders or clutterers on a five level scale he has developed over the years. He explained that in the early days of his business, “the scale that my company used was a pretty subjective one and based roughly on the number of dead cats we found in a house.” He then continues, “after years of working with clients we’ve refined our language.” I found this highly amusing, because according to his description of his current scale, I would rate myself a solid “2” on his 5-point scale (with 5 being the highest level of squalor). If someone were to carefully sort through my belongings, they would find precisely two dead cats – one a completely mummified cat carcass I discovered under a house many years ago, with the second being only a skull.

2. The author, Matt Paxton, states that in his experience as a professional cleaner, 99% of the “collections” he sees are worthless.

This last statement leaves me thinking about the things I intend to get rid of by selling on eBay. My spouse occasionally helps out one of our neighbors with filing and organizing. The neighbor pays her twenty dollars an hour for her work. When I list items to sell on eBay, at best I can process two or three items per hour, and that doesn’t necessarily include the time required to photograph the items and crop and tweak the photos, and it certainly doesn’t include the time (or space) spent storing the items or shuffling them around while I’m looking for something else. With occasional exceptions, the final “take” after paying eBay and PayPal commissions and shipping costs on any single item is often less than twenty dollars. And of course there’s always a significant portion of listed items that do not sell. Is it worthwhile, then, to keep boxes full of items that I intend to sell on eBay? I’m getting better about this in that I no longer keep items that will likely bring less than ten dollars. This is a result of rising shipping costs making the sale of inexpensive items impractical for the casual “garage sale” level seller like me. Now I’m starting to think about the rest of the items I retain for future sale.

DAY XC

Last night I finished reading The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life (©2011) by Dr. Robin Zasio, the first of the “decluttering” books I requested from the library a few days ago. I found it an interesting and helpful book – I have already donated a box of magazines to the library book sale that I’ve been lugging around for fifteen years!

The main idea I gleaned from this book is the concept of “cognitive distortion,” of seeing or thinking about things differently than they actually are. In fact, I strongly, strongly recognize about eight and a half of the nine listed cognitive distortions detailed in Chapter 5, including:

  • All or none thinking, or dichotomous thinking: you see all things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you believe yourself to have failed.
  • Over-generalization: a single negative event seems to you a never-ending pattern of defeat.
  • Discounting the positive: you reject positive experiences by insisting that they don’t count and ignore successes.
  • Mind reading: you negatively interpret the thoughts or feelings of others even though there are no solid facts that support your conclusion.
  • Fortune-telling: anticipating that things will turn out badly and treating the prediction as an established fact.
  • Catastrophizing: expecting the worst possible outcome and responding as though your prediction will come true. This tends to lean toward highly exaggerated conclusions.
  • Emotional reasoning: Assuming that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are.
  • Should statements: you try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts. The emotional consequence is guilt and a perpetual feeling of failure.
  • Labeling: an extreme form of over-generalization in which, instead of identifying an error in your thinking, you attach a negative label to yourself, such as, “I’m a loser.”

I found the book easy to read, straightforward, and helpful in understanding the psychological side of not just cluttering/hoarding, but of low self-confidence in general.

DAY LXXXV

Walked, did not run, a very, very slow 4 kilometers. I was going to run again in the afternoon, but decided to work on organizing and decluttering instead.

I ended up wasting a lot of time, as is usual for me. The decluttering project turned into “reading about decluttering” online and looking at decluttering books on Amazon.com. Of course I ended up purchasing one, but it was only a Kindle eBook and it cost only two dollars. I did, however, manage to request fifteen books from the public library, including several by Don Aslett, whose Clutter’s Last Stand (which is among those I requested) is the most direct and useful book I’ve read on the subject.

The time is now 2:30 p.m., and I intend to spend the next three hours or so working on organizing and, I hope, discarding some unneeded items. I should make it a point to update this post with a note about my progress. So…

NOTE REGARDING PROGRESS: (To Be Continued)

DAY LXXXIV – Stuffocation

On a work trip to New York or London, your boss announces that you are not needed today and can have the day off. Which would you do?

The above question appears on the Stuffocation.org web site as part of an online quiz. I ran across an article by James Wallman online today about his book and concept of “stuffocation,” of feeling suffocated by our stuff. Regular readers of Chamber of Chaos know that feeling suffocated by stuff, or “stuffocation,” is one of the ongoing issues around here. Wallman suggests that perhaps those of us who are overwhelmed by “stuff” should look at replacing owing things with having experiences, or to use his term, becoming an experientalist. Wallman is getting a fair amount of press for his observations.

To me, however, Wallman seems to dwell in the rarified atmosphere of those who have plenty of money and plenty of time. When was the last time my boss sent me on a business trip to New York or London? Let me think for a moment… oh, of course; that would be… NEVER!

You see, it’s not the well-heeled or the more-than-adequately compensated people who drown their sorrows in stuff. It’s the poor people. It’s the working class who actually have to work for a living. In an interview in Forbes, Wallman suggests that sharing current experiences via Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have become the new status symbols:

“But with all your friends, fans, and followers on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, many more will know that you’re at TEDxHOP, on a chairlift in Chamonix, or you’ve just got round a Tough Mudder course.”

On a chairlift in Chamonix. Yeah, right. I was in a big city WalMart once that had a wheelchair lift up to the second floor. That was pretty cool. But I don’t think tweeting about it would have helped my social status.

When it comes to books about hoarding and decluttering, and I’ve read quite a few, my number one recommendation is Clutter’s Last Stand by Don Aslett. Originally published in 1984 and updated in 2005, Aslett’s book addresses both the causes and the cures for clutter, for hoarding, and for finding yourself unable to let go of the stuff with which you’ve surrounded yourself. Thirty years before Wallman and his “experientalist” philosophy, Don Aslett was making the same suggestions to replace things with experiences; as an added bonus, Aslett’s writing style is hilarious and engaging as well as being inspiring.

The upside of reading about Stuffocation, and mentally comparing it to Clutter’s Last Stand (great pun, that title; I don’t know how many “of these kids today” would even get the reference), is that I’m finding myself re-inspired to continue my own assault on clutter… and I hope make a few bucks via eBay while I’m at it!

Back to jogging today: jogged 14k without walking, average pace 7:05/km. Weight is around 202.