I embrace it!

I have journals and stuff on a bookshelf. Then, in my closet, I keep a box going where I toss in ephemera - letters, post cards, ticket stubs, stickers, notes, special things. When a box gets filled up I label it with the years it covers and start a new box. I only have 3 of those for my whole lifetime, so it's really not a severe issue.

Scanning stuff sounds unimaginably time-consuming and bothersome, and then you'd have to keep updating backups and such. Pain in the tuchas.

I like paper. Don't mind saving it. The only things I throw out these days are things I know I can find on the web that have no other significance - recipes, craft instructions, how-tos, etc.

I don't want crap in my house; I am not a packrat, and I'm not particularly sentimental about things, either. So once a year or so, whenever I feel like I got too much junk, I do a massive cleanout. Did one a few months ago, and it felt great- not just to throw out all the stuff I didn't need, but to review the small amount of stuff that I am glad I kept.

In some parallel world, I might be a person with a lovely old rambling family home that has room for a library, and an office, and a laundry room, and a linen closet, and a couple of walk-in closets, and a pantry, and a root cellar - and in that world I have all sorts of albums and scrapbooks and flat files neatly organized.

In this world, I'm a person who lives in small places and moves a lot. In both worlds, I'm a person who can't face clutter, and if the clutter takes over the house, I retreat to a small corner of it that I can keep tidy. So, I'm as ruthless as I can get by with. V. has different ideas, so I have to compromise somewhat, and so does he; we throw away more than he is strictly happy with, and less than I would prefer, but I have no compunction at all about throwing away things I haven't touched/used/worn/looked at in two years. Except books.

Actually, of necessity, even the books get thinned out. But I'm not happy about it.

I throw things away. Sometimes I throw too many things away, like a card my sister gave me a month before she died (tossed just days before she died), but most of the time I'm happier with less crap.

My boyfriend piles things, and I've had to promise cross-my-heart that I would never throw anything of his away. And oh, it's hard. Especially when I want my home looking and feeling a certain way and his stacks of papers make it look and feel cluttered and disorganized. But as long as he keeps them in his office, then I'm happy.

You folks wouldn't believe the state I'm in.

I'll describe it, just for your amusement.

I have shelves and boxes and piles of papers full of everything you can imagine in my current little "apartment", including worthless CDs mixed with great CDs that are nearly impossible to replace, lousy magazines and comic books mixed in with classic '70s and '80s comic books that are priceless to me and irreplaceable, books that range from worthless to sentimental and irreplaceable, software CDs, boxes of notes I've written of dialogue and plot ideas for fiction writing, magazines and letters and junk mail and bills and...

GHAAAAH!

Shit. Imagine me lost amongst all this garbage currently looking for ONE SINGLE SOFTWARE CD (Microsoft Office 2000 that I desperately need for myself and my aunt now that we're both on new PCs that no longer come standard with Office) like a needle in a haystack...

I need professional help. And I'm going out of my head.
:-)

I have a walk-in closet six feet deep that you can't take a step into... boxes and papers are piled 3' or 4' high all the way back...

My closet clothes rack finally collapsed under the weight of clothes I should've given to the homeless shelter ages ago...

I might be moving soon, but not soon enough for me to organize while moving JUST the things I want to keep to a new place (where I'd build a wall of shelves big enough for ALL of the books and comics and CDs I want to keep.)

So I guess I have to organize now.

LOL!

I help people like you, Shane.

I do live in a giant house and yet most of the time I sort, file, toss out, and stack. I save things from humans, but maybe not the store-bought card from the person I barely know. I keep the postcards I get in the mail on a big plate cupboard because it's good to have reminders of bunches of people from all over when it's late at night and there's no one awake for mines. I file paid bills and receipts and manuals until I no longer have the thing. A lot of this requires a sort of re-acquaintance with the files every so often. I recycle mercilessly and pretty much get rid of almost all paper stuff after I've read it if it's not in one of the above categories.

I'm doomed if I ever get audited. I'm really fidgety if there's crap cluttering up the place that I usually use that nervous energy to put it someplace. The biggest trick to cleaning/organizing (when you're not washing things) is "Like with Like" get the paper together, the CDs together, the books together, the clothes together and then once it's all in one place you can decide what to do with it all.

I've had a lifelong obsession with all things paper and apparently kept everything that ever crossed my path. I had several file cabinets (2 in the office, 2 in the garage, and another in my closet) and boxes stacked anywhere that I could without totally taking over the house.

About three years ago I finally realized that my obsessive hoarding was just plain irrational and a pain in the ass - so I started getting rid of stuff.

I condensed my music magazines from over a dozen boxes to a file drawer of articles I wanted to keep. I also got rid of 5 or 6 boxes of other magazines and condensed it down to about a single box, mostly of graphic magazines that I really do return to regularly as reference material. The hardest thing to part with were four file drawers worth of articles and ephemera that I had accumulated (including literally thousands of pages of articles I had copied from journals and magazines the college library). I ended up getting that down to a small box, which is incredible, since for years that stuff meant the world to me. It was fun looking through it all again, but it felt really good to get rid of it.

Now I've begun getting rid of the stuff that I deemed "important documents", which filled a few boxes and four file drawers. That includes stuff like bank statements from twenty years ago and just about every bill I've ever gotten. Although it was interesting to see how much I spent at Wax Trax Records in 1988, I just don't need to go that far back. So now I've got a heavy duty office shredder and and am having at it.

I've still got a few boxes of personal things like cartoons and drawings I've done since I was a kid, song lyrics, and bits of nostalgic ephemera from my life. That's the stuff I hope I never get so detached that I get rid of, but the other crap has got to go.

I used to spend a LOT of time thinking about file cabinets and was always on the quest for "the perfect box" to hold everything.

It actually feels really good to be cleaning out this stuff. I'm starting to enjoy empty spaces, which is weird, because my whole life has revolved around stacking stuff to find ways to cram more stuff into every available space. I'm sure when I'm finally done I'll still have more paper accumulated than most people do, but I won't be at the over-the-top accumulation level I've lived most of my life with. Plus the next move is going to be a LOT easier.

I feel for you Shane. It's tough to break that habit/cycle of hoarding. But it's so easy to let it get out of hand. One of my friends and fellow hoarder told me "you spend half of your life trying to get everything you want and then you spend the other half getting rid of it all".

Shane. Flylady.

I save things I consider of importance. I have all my journals from age 11. I have all the letters my late grandmother sent me (we corresponded for years). I have some birthday cards from special people over the years. I love to read, and it's very rarely that I get rid of books, and then I donate them. I'm also a magazine addict, but I give them to my neighbor when I'm done with them. I've also taken them to the emergency room and waiting rooms of my local hospital for people to read.
I do admit having too much garbage paper, too. Old bank check registers, old recipes I've clipped, old articles I've cut or ripped out. Those I get rid of when I come across them.
And I do have all the things my kids have made for me, baby footprints, macaroni pictures, etc. Those I'll never get rid of.

I go through my entire swath of papers about once every six months and purge, purge, purge. I've moved so many times that I'm fairly merciless about things with purported "sentimental value." I've accepted that the experiences themselves, not necessarily the mementoes thereof, are the most valuable. So I've become fairly zen about divesting myself of material reminders.

I am slightly more neurotic about things relating to my family, as my mother (and her now-deceased twin sister) were German orphans, so I rate their keepsakes much higher than mine.

Of course, I was recently helped in this endeavor by a flood in my basement which destroyed a great many things that I had no intention of throwing away.

How do you deal with accumulation...

I don't. To be specific, I grew up in the house of a borderline pathological hoarder, and was too embarrassed by the mess and clutter to ever have anyone over. It's likely this informs my draconian clutter-management strategies to this day.

I don't subscribe to any print editions of anything because you can find it all online. I don't keep CDs/cassettes/albums anymore because all my music is backed up on my .mac account and my external HD.

About every 3-6 months I go thru my my stuff. Anything that hasn't been used/worn/read in the past year gets tossed / shredded / recycled / freecycled / sold on craiglist.

life's too short and I've moved too often in the past seven years to live in a magpie's nest.

thank buddha the mister's on the same page as me about this sort of thing.

Anything I desperately need for bank and/or tax purposes can be easily recreated from my online accounting. In the near-decade I've operated this way, I have never, not even once, gone back and said 'oh gee I wish I hadn't gotten rid of x..."

Moving house every couple of years tends to help. The only thing that doesn't get tossed out (or given away) are books. That said, I have two rooms of books and a tiny wardrobe of clothing. Priorities are important.

:)

I was recently helped in this endeavor by a flood in my basement which destroyed a great many things

Me too! I was overjoyed at finally having to toss things because they smelled like, at best, mucky water, and at worst, shit. It was wonderful. I hadn't hardly seen the basement floor in years.

LOL, I filled this dumpster, that could've fit a Buick inside it, with trash from my flooded basement:

≡ Click to see image ≡

I don't keep CDs/cassettes/albums anymore because all my music is backed up on my .mac account and my external HD.

That's perfect, but I'm sentimental about CD booklets and even worse about old record albums, LOL. Maybe I could at least break myself of the CD booklets, although it would be tough for me to give up certain promo CDs and limited EPs from bands I love.

I've accepted that the experiences themselves, not necessarily the mementoes thereof, are the most valuable. So I've become fairly zen about divesting myself of material reminders.

THAT is a worthy goal!

The biggest trick to cleaning/organizing (when you're not washing things) is "Like with Like" get the paper together, the CDs together, the books together, the clothes together and then once it's all in one place you can decide what to do with it all.

Thanks. I think that's a big key. Tomorrow I'm going to get the shelf boards that will eventually make my wall of shelves when I move. For now I'll set them up on cinder blocks so they're easily moveable later. I'll have 40' of shelf space. Then I can sort books together, CDs together, comics together, and the whole time be deciding what to keep and what to sell.

Slack-a-gogo, you sound like me.

I really think I need mercilessly to weed out my material possessions.

I just keep remembering how good and free it felt when I was a kid and I just had some books, some toys, but not too much of anything. What was really important back then? Things that actually were used in life, like a bike or a ball. Now I feel like my mind is constantly, like, linked and pulled in different directions by all this clutter I have to keep track of. I just want to be a simple physical being again. You can lose yourself in all your junk, LOL.

Oh, Jan--I tried FlyLady. I'm beyond her help, LOL.

A lot of this requires a sort of re-acquaintance with the files every so often.

Absolutely, and over the years I've actually found this works into the rhythm of life beatifully. Normally, some time in the letdown slump after the New Year, I set aside a weekend day to pull out all the file drawers, throw out all the bills and EOBs and invoices that are 3 years old or older, make a judgement call on the softer stuff, and weed through my personal remembrance stuff. I don't keep everything, and after a few years, it's a lot easier to separate from old stuff. If I didn't go back through and revisit everything yearly, I'd have drowned in my own paper by now. As it is though, I've made it a nice self-renewal ritual, usually on a cold winter day with good music on and some good food simmering for dinner.

I recycle most paper into my own handbound blank books with handmade sheets of paper. Recycled pizza boxes and other corrugated papers make excellent coverboards.

If you are on my MeChat holiday list, you will probably get a small one. I only have the equipment to make 8 sheets at a time, and they take four days to a week to dry.

I really like Miko's maintenance strategy for making it a pleasant experience instead of an aaargh-chore. I think I'll adopt that.

I had a big clearout in May when I was getting rid of some furniture that had lots of paper files stuff with paper in them.

I ended up burning out the motor on my shredder. There was so little stuff left to keep that I put it in just three files, which are now in my filing cabinet.

I bought a new shredder - an essential in this day and age, I believe. I try every day to sort the mail, but I definitely do it at least once a week.

- Flyers from Domino's, the local Chinese & Indians restaurants, window companies, etc. go straight in the recycling bin.

- Anything that has my name on it that I don't need gets shredded.

- Anything important that I need to keep goes in a particular shallow drawer where I won't lose it. So I know that those concert tickets are in that drawer and I won't be hunting round for them the day before the show.

- Catalogues I look through (especially Lakeland, which is like reading pr0n for a foodie like me - my nearest Lakeland store is 30 miles away), but I always tear off the page that has my name/address on it, or shred the order sheet. Then I toss the catalogue, once I've looked through it (no, I can't explain the stack of Lakeland ones in the bathroom.)

- Bills - I pay all my bills online or by direct debit, so I keep the paper one until the next one comes in, then I shred the old one. I put them in a pigeonhole in the hutch on my desk.

- Important correspondence. Usually I'll put it right in front of the monitor, or I'll put it in my office bag and email myself a reminder to the office to deal with it next time I'm in.

- Anything important such as annual pension or mortgage statements, I just put in one of the folders in the filing cabinet. I need to organise the folders, but as there's only three of them, it's not going to be such a huge job as when there were 35 of them, all stuffed to the gills with random bits of paper.

I cleared out loads and loads of books last year too. I have two large boxes stored in the garage, one in the hallway here (with precious books that must never get damp, hence not in the garage).

I gave away tons of books to charity. I filled these boxes, and more. Mostly paperbacks, books I'll never read again. I kept the ones I want to keep - the Sue Grafton Alphabet series, some of my true crime books, my Jonathan Tropper books (great writer), the Barbara Vines, and just about all my hardbacks (apart from some that I'd never opened and knew I never would - gift books mostly from people who didn't know my tastes).

The difference it made, clearing out the clutter! It really is freeing.

I need to clear out my clothes, there's a lot of things I never wear, things I keep 'just in case'. I never, ever wear dresses, so why I keep those couple of smart shift dresses I'll never know. I certainly have no shoes I could wear them with. If I need to do dressy, I have black trousers I can dress up with a smart top.

I'm about to start on renovating my bedroom, so I need to clear out the extra clothes (and the hangers! How did I end up with so many hangers?)

I also need to sort out the kitchen. I have an old set of non-stick pans that I haven't used in years since buying a good set of stainless steel ones. I'll either take them down to the local waste tip, where they have a section you can put reusable stuff, or wait until I get one of those sacks through the door for charity where they collect bric-a-brac, clothes, etc. from the door, as long as you leave it all bagged up outside on a particular day. (Those things never seem to coincide with me having a clearout.)

A bit of a long ramble, but for me the key to not letting clutter accumulate is to deal with it NOW. Doing this for five or ten minutes a day is so much easier than having to spend several days just sorting through stuff, or, even worse, losing important things in a mess of papers.

I go through a cyclical process. I save tons of magazines, newspapers, articles, journals and put them in organized stacks in various corners of the garage, bedroom, and closet. Then the stacks begin to teeter and I come to the realization that I have not needed anything in the stacks for the last 6 months, so I throw it all out. And the process repeats.