Our one year old boy keeps my wife busy, engaged, and on-the-go all day, and I’m always inspired by how much she’s able to get done in addition to keeping him entertained and taken care of. Even so, people always compliment her on how the household always seems so organized. The other night, she was telling me about one of the techniques she uses to help keep it that way. I liked it so much I thought I’d share it here. She didn’t have a special name for the idea, but I thought it deserved one, so I’ve dubbed it “The Constant Purge.”
Every time my wife opens a drawer or closet to retrieve something, she’ll take an extra moment to see if there’s anything she can get rid of. The things she’ll find vary: a pen we haven’t used in months, an expired coupon, an old throw pillow, and she’ll either throw it out or toss it into the donation bin we keep in the garage. This kind of mindset, she explained, keeps things from piling up. And if you’re paranoid about throwing something out that you might need, you can create a “staging area” in an out of the way place. Let things live there for a few weeks before you officially toss them.
It might take you an extra moment or two throughout the day, but if you keep up with the practice, you can eliminate the need for bigger, more time consuming purges like Spring cleanings. The stuff you don’t use will already be gone.
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Jonathan Snook
31 March 2009 at 7:45 am
I dream of being able to do something like that. We have boxes of stuff, mostly of my wife’s stuff when she was in high school and university. Example: her psychology text books. Can I convince her to get rid of them? No. We have a box under the bathroom sink that hasn’t been opened since we moved into the house. I told her I’d just get rid of the box without even opening it (since we obviously don’t use it) but she insists it get reviewed before going out the door. We have so much ‘stuff’, it’s completely unnecessary. (Mind you, it doesn’t all fall unto her. I still have a box or two of computer cables. I mean, I may need that parallel cable for that dot matrix printer one day (you know, the one with the butterfly clips).)
Kane Gruber
31 March 2009 at 8:32 am
I tend to distrust any system that regards the accumulation of stuff as a bad thing, since, hey, I like my stuff. But this idea is great because it doesn’t see stuff as a burden necessarily. But it minimizes the effort. Tell your wife she’s brilliant.
Zachery Bir
31 March 2009 at 10:28 am
Sounds like a simpler version of Fly Lady’s 27-fling-boogie: http://www.flylady.net/pages/FLYingLessons_Decluttertips.asp
“Your house didn’t get messy in a day. It’s not going to get clean in a day.”
Tom Carmony
31 March 2009 at 9:04 pm
I’d absolutely love to make this a habit around our house.
Julian Schrader
01 April 2009 at 2:36 am
Great technique, thanks for sharing.
For work I need to have my desk empty—but there’s still so much “stuff” piling up in the shelves of my room… I need to get rid of a lot :-)
Mathias
15 April 2009 at 1:31 pm
I wish every developer would do that with his code regularly. Every time you skim through a piece of code in your application, look for code that’s not needed anymore, or could be turned into something more readable and useful.
Hugh
01 June 2009 at 7:40 pm
There is a lady out there who is an expert at helping the hopeless get keep their house and lives under control. It is the “flylady”. My wife subscribes to the yahoo group (however I am the messy one, not her). Perhaps others would also benefit. Start here: http://www.flylady.net/