Betsey Langan @ #207 regarding how long to keep various records: There's a summary at Get Rich Slowly which also links to a more in-depth answer from bankrate.com.
Also of interest in terms of decluttering paper: ma.gov's guide to stopping junk mail. Stopping the pre-screened credit card offers was hugely helpful for me -- I still get a few, but it's not the massive deluge of airline mileage cards that used to come in.
Lee @ #217: Yeah, that's something I've thought of. Thus far I've managed to keep a net outflow of stuff headed out the door, and I've still got the ability to step back and recognize when my reactions are irrational. If I start losing that ability, I'll get worried.
It doesn't help that the tendency to clutter runs strong in my family. My father also has the "But that could be useful!" reaction to throwing things out, which might explain how I come by it.
I should add that I don't think "This would be useful in case of zombie attack" for everything -- that was just the most extreme example. Other can't-throw-it-away excuses range from "I'll need that horrible fabric if I decide to make a Christmas cushion for my parent's cat to sit on" to "I can't throw that tatty old blanket away, the North Atlantic Deep Water might shut down." If I could wave a magic wand and destroy the possibility of zombies, I would find another reason.
I'm getting somewhat better at catching myself doing this. Once I access the (il)logic behind my desire to keep whatever-it-is, I can usually short-circuit it and get rid of the item. It just gets exhausting to do.
Since starting the project in December, I've gotten rid of four trash bags of Goodwill-ables, five bags of books, several stacks of magazines, and at least ten trash bags of shredder confetti and assorted trash, so I am getting somewhere. It's just slow going.
I'm by no means pathological about clutter -- my apartment is bad enough to bug me, but not really that bad on an absolute scale -- but I wouldn't be at all surprised if a more extreme version of this thought process were motivating some of the people who are.
Re: #177: The logic (what little there is of it) is based on the assumption that a zombie apocalypse would knock out the pharmaceutical industry and leave me unable to get basic drugs. If I were to get an infected cut while fleeing from the undead hordes, those out-of-date antibiotics that made me puke would be better than nothing.
It's completely idiotic. I know it's completely idiotic. And yet I find myself coming up with crap arguments like this for why I might someday need every item I try to throw out. I can get over it the first hundred times or so, but cumulatively it becomes overwhelming.
I've been trying to declutter since the beginning of December. I've taken out bags and bags of the stuff, shredded multiple trash containers full of old papers, brought a big load over to Goodwill, and somehow my apartment looks exactly the same.
Re: #82: In your own estimation, are you better than average at spotting the object or objects in your environment that can be used to address some emergency or sudden need? Do other people say you're good at that?
Yes. This is my major problem when decluttering: I can always come up with a situation in which a given object would be useful. Or potentially life-saving.
Actual example: While cleaning out one of the unopened containers from my move (three years earlier), I came across some meds I had hanging around from a surgery (four years earlier). Please note that I couldn't take these pills, even if they hadn't already expired -- they made me throw up. By all rational standards, these pills are completely useless to me.
My first thought, when I picked them up to toss? "I can't toss these. If there were ever a zombie apocalypse, I'd regret it."
I wish I were joking, but that's actually what went through my mind. It's completely irrational, and I know it's completely irrational -- and yet. Every damn thing I throw out puts me through a gauntlet of potential uses. It's exhausting work.
I'm trying to convince myself that if the zombie apocalypse did come, I'd be better off being in a nice clean apartment where I could find my baseball bat quickly than in a messy apartment full of potentially useful items I couldn't put my hands on.
When I was in college, I worked at one of the campus lost-and-found offices. The campus police used to give *us* lost items that were turned in to them -- our offices were right next door, and we had the time to track down the owners.
I don't think there are many circumstances when I'd assume that the policeman was the logical person to give a lost item to. The station manager, the store manager -- if I handed it in to an authority figure, I'd go with them. And that's assuming the lost item didn't include a handy cell phone with a "Home" entry to try calling.
(Tangent: it's a really good idea to make sure your cell has some entry like "My work number" or "Home" or "If found please call" on it. It makes it a lot easier to track you down than a cell phone full of entries like "John" and "BootyDawg" and "K. Chuzzlewit".)
Yeah, Boston's a bit... well, it's totally barking mad, actually. I've learned to drive there by teaching myself a set number of routes through the city and then slowly expanding them by trying new things when traffic's slow, and by studying aerial images of my route before I leave. It's a process.
I'm in eastern PA for work right now. Eastern PA and Jersey confuse me, so I got a GPS unit with my rental car. So far it's told me to go through a washed out bridge, to make a left turn through a concrete Jersey barrier, and to drive several miles over a dirt road. (I'd do the dirt road in my Jetta just fine, but the rental car -- not so much. Low clearance.)
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| 2007 | 2 |
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