No, my house and car isn’t stuff full of junk.  I don’t have multiple cars on blocks in my driveway or backyard.  But I am a mild packrat…

I need to get rid of the following things or at least manage them better:

• Stacks of unread magazines in my office.  I know that I won’t read 80% of them, and yet there they sit on my table taking up space.
• Another one of my weaknesses is saving mail that isn’t critical, especially credit card mail.
• My garage isn’t optimized either.  While this isn’t a big deal, it’s something that has annoyed me for way to long.  While there is a semblance of order, there’s a table way back in the corner of my garage that shouldn’t be there.  It has stuff stacked on it that I no longer remember what they are.  In my garage, I do have shelves with things organized on them, so my garage is somewhat organized, but it’s not the best it could be.
• A Snowball of collected things during my life is clustered in a small portion of the basement.  I’ll never looks at some of this stuff again, if I don’t clear it out.  I can probably sell some of the stuff on ebay.
• Saved emails. This is truly one of my worst areas.  I save my emails thinking that I’ll need them someday at work (and occassionally I do need them).  What I need to do is purge the junk and keep the potential important emails.
• Old clothes that are in bad shape or slightly ripped. The logic here is I can use the ripped clothes for rags or work clothes.  And I do use my old clothes that way, but I don’t think I need such a stock pile.  This might be me being frugal though.  I’m on the fence about this one.

While this isn’t a huge problem for me, it would still be a nice area for me to conquer.

How am I going to accomplish this goal?

• Each day I’m going to allocate 15 minutes a day to throw away the junk in my packrat areas.
• Once I get through my packrat areas, I’m going to throw away useless items when I first receive them.  Ex.) Free Magazine subscription and credit card offers that I don’t read.
• I’ll deciding what I keep or throw away by asking “Will I use this (whatever… mail, magazine, etc) in the next week, month, year.  If “No” to all 3, then pitch it.

As long as I do the three steps identified above, this should be the easiest goal to accomplish.

Are you a packrat in some way or another?

If not, then what techniques do you use to avoid the packrat life?