Clutter

I want to make a more concerted effort to eliminate clutter.

For me, the following amount of clutter on my desk is fine.

However, it’s not unusual for my desk to look like this.

Or worse!

One strategy to eliminate clutter is to throw it all into a box or a bag. Then, you can just hide the box or bag in a closet. This approach is okay as far as it goes. The problem is that you probably need to go through the stuff fairly frequently.

Another solution is to file any paperwork away in a nice filing cabinet. I’ve tried this approach too. Unfortunately, it takes time. And I hardly ever look at most of the paperwork in the files.

For a while, I took every bill and piece of paper I used to file and placed it all in one bin. At the end of the year, I would have a pile of stuff roughly in chronological order.

The problem with the one-bin approach is that it takes time to find anything important in the bin.

What if I only ever put important stuff in the bin?

There’s no need to save bills I’ve paid, bank statements, and tons of other paperwork. It all exists online! Why save this stuff at all?

A paranoid person might worry that the online systems could fail. While this is possible, it would cause bigger problems than whatever ones this paranoid person hopes to prevent by saving proof of bills paid!

Times change. At this point in my life, I think the best strategy is to eliminate as much clutter as possible in real-time.

I can still keep a bin for the most important paperwork. I can still use files for anything I know I need to look at later.

But most snail mail is junk mail. Most of the paperwork I tend to accumulate can be thrown out before it piles up.

I can take pictures of mementos, and I can store the most important things on my computer, instead of keeping a copy in the physical world.

That’s my new strategy to deal with clutter!