Clutter. Learning to love or loathe your inner packrat.

Clutter. We've all seen it. We've all had to deal with it. But some people handle it a lot better than others. I was driving my car around yesterday, and I can't remember the point at which the back seat of my car went from "cherished object that I shall never sprinkle litter into" to "catch all junk drawer that holds everything". Seriously, I have everything back there from a rubber Spaldeen ball to a bag full of dice to an extremely overdue Blockbuster DVD.

And it doesn't stop with my car, that's pretty much the last domain to get junk-ified. No, I have closets, cupboards, and trunks full of junk. For some reason I thought it would be smart to save all of my college notebooks, thinking that one day I might need to refer back to something. Why on earth I thought I'd need to look up something from Algebra II, I have no idea. But, they sit there, just in case I need to make some advanced calculations. I opened up one of those notebooks since college, the only tme I've peeped into any of them. And that was just to check out what kinds of doodles I used to put in the margins.

I'm not sure if it's a gene or a trait that gets inherited. My dad has extremely few belongings, and almost lives like a Spartan, but my mom and my aunt (on my dad's side) both rathole things away like I do, "Just in case." At this point, I've just about had it... but I can't just toss the stuff out, and I don't have the time needed to eBay all the stuff. What's a guy to do? This is when I wish I had some sort of futuristic space time little box with infinite storage capability. Is that coming anytime soon?

Comments

[Julia]

Two ideas:

1.) Buy a proper scanner, such as the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 (or S510 for the Mac)
http://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-S510-Sheet-fed-Scanner/dp/B000RUOW66

You can effortlessly convert stacks of paper into PDFs that can be organized, *backed up*, OCRed & indexed, etc. I've used it to scan greeting cards and postcards, too! Legal-size documents are no sweat.

2.) For items that are more complex than two dimensional scannable docs, I suggest taking some good photos of them, and then sending them off to be reused, recycled, or trashed.

External hard drives such as the WD My Book are downright cheap these days!! Get a 1TB drive and just pack it up (and back it up) til the packrat in you is content.

[Lizzie O.]

a more dramatic, less tedious approach:

allow an organizational consultant/planner to visit your space and design a storage plan for you. sometimes holding-on to old notebooks, letters and various printed materials is worthwhile, even if only for their nostalgic and tactile qualities. there's nothing wrong with collecting as long as there's a place for everything (and everything in its place).

when you're ready, i'm available to help...
(it's what i do!)

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I've always found minimalism the best... clutter depresses me!

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