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?