A Decluttering Christmas

If ever there were two words that didn't go together, they are "decluttering" and "Christmas".  However, this year I decided to stay true to my belief that a decluttered life is a good one and thought of ways to avoid adding to the clutter of loved ones.

To this end, I employed two strategies:

1. Asking people what they want - in the past I have always tried to surprise people with the "perfect" gift, but this only works if you are a mind reader.  For my nephews and niece, I asked my sister what they want (the answer - vouchers because they like to put them together with money saved to buy things).  For my husband, I told him what I want ("Earth" by John Stewart) and asked him what he wanted (lessons of some sort, eg cooking, singing or guitar lessons).
   
   If you want to add the element of surprise, you could ask people to give you a wish list, so while they know they are getting something from the list, they don't know which one.
   
   
   
2. Buying non-decluttering presents - when we think "gifts" we usually think "things", eg CDs, DVDs, jewellery, books.  But when you ask yourself the question "how do I have a non-clutter Christmas?", you realise there is a whole host of gifts out there that do not take up space, eg tickets to a play or movie, voucher for a massage (Colleen over at 365lessthings has put together a fantastic list).  I decided to put together hampers of yummy stuff.  While there seem to be a lot of shops selling hampers this year and for quite reasonable prices, the thing that put me off them was the basket.  It seems no matter how exotic the contents, suppliers can't get away from sticking everything in a wicker basket and when all the chocolates have been eaten and the wine drunk, you're still left with a wicker basket, aka instant clutter.
   
   I bought Christmas present boxes from The Reject Shop ($3 each - how do they do it?) because I thought, if you want to store things in them they stack neatly in the cupboard, they are hardy enough to recycle next year to "wrap" presents for someone else, or, if all else fails, they can be put out in the paper recycling. 
   
   Making your own hampers also means you can tailor the contents for the person you like.  With the pre-packaged ones there is always going to be something in them that gets thrown away (for me, its the fruit mince tarts - seriously, I just do not understand the purpose of those things).  All the contents I bought at Target, in their Christmas section - fudge, chocolates, shortbread biscuits.  Then in the queue at the registers I grabbed a few "stocking stuffers" for the nephews and niece so they had a little something to play with along with their vouchers.

These strategies worked very nicely, if I do say so myself.  Having left my Christmas shopping to the last weekend before Christmas, I was dreading hitting the shops.  But as it turns out, the interval between heading out the door to heading back in it was less than three hours - and that included one hour of travel.  I think the true beauty of hampers is that, as adults you go out and buy what you want, but you will hold off buying little treats for yourself because they put on weight.  Hence, its far easier to find a bunch of little treats for a few dollars each that people will like and be a novelty for them, than it is to try and guess what one big thing they would really enjoy.


I will see what reaction I get to the hampers, but I think I'll be sticking with these two strategies for years to come.

Quick update

A quick update to check in and compare where things are now to where I started.

Here's what my daughter's room looks like today:

Here's what it looked like when I started decluttering:

I think there's been some improvement there.  Here's another set of "after and before's" from a different angle:

When I took the photos earlier today, I was feeling quite annoyed about how much work was still to be done.  But what I notice now, is that while the room today requires a bit of a tidy up, there is not a lot of decluttering work left to do, and what is left to do (eg remove the bookcase on the right, clear the shelves of the remaining bookcase for toys) is straight forward and does not require a lot of "what am I going to do with this?" type thinking.

A moment to spare

Just in case you were under the impression that I had cluttered up only one room of my apartment (perhaps in some sort of Picture of Dorian Gray fashion), let me disabuse you of the notion by showing you a picture of the area beside my bed.

This has been how my beside has look for ... oh ... lets just say 30 years.  Being in decluttering mode, I stopped and looked at this one day (and took this picture) and pondered for a moment what this was telling me about myself.  I noted that half of the books there were ones I had borrowed from the library just because they had caught my eye and when I got them home, I read about ten pages and decided they weren't worth reading.  [Note to self - read those ten pages in the library and you won't have to carry the books home and back to the library again.]  I also noted that the one book I was really interested in (The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron) had been neglected in favour of the books I should have left in the library. It made me realise that not only do I indiscriminately fill my space with things that I don't really want and that I certainly don't need, I do the same thing to my mind.

This realisation was further reinforced when I tried to re-borrow The Places That Scare You to have time to finish reading it, only to have my request rejected because somebody else had reserved it.  I decided then to stop acting like a kid in a lolly shop at the library and to try to read only a couple of books, and preferably one, at a time. (Much to the joy of my husband who has been telling me to do this for years.) 

Today I was reminded of a guy I read about early on in my decluttering travels.  He was the ultimate couch potato, but decided to declutter his house.  After starting small, he eventually got the whole place sorted with the final item to go being his TV, because he didn't watch it anymore.  

At the time I read this I just couldn't imagine life without television.  I was spending three to four hours a day watching TV and couldn't see how I could reduce that down.  In our home, we have a PS3 with PlayTV and are in the habit of "taping" whatever catches our fancy in the TV guide.  As a result, the PS3 regularly fills up and we try to watch the shows to empty space so we can tape more shows.

But something strange has happened in the last couple of weeks.  First, the PS3 filled up again. At first I thought nothing of it, but by this Friday just past, we had recovered half the disk space (has never happened before) and I found myself clicking through the remaining shows and thinking "no, don't think I'll bother" for each and every one.  I actually found myself staring at the TV with nothing to watch.  I can't remember this happening since we got our first hard-disk recorder about four years ago.

Then today, my husband asked me about three times what I wanted to watch on TV and each time I said something along the lines of - "I want to get X done first".  As a result, I realised that there has been a shift.  I no longer tape things just for the sake of it, I usually only tape things I know I want to watch and if, occasionally I tape something just because, say, the title caught my attention, rather than watch the whole thing, I will watch if for a few minutes and delete it if it doesn't really interesting me.  Hence, for the first time in years, I found myself with nothing to watch (if only for a few hours).
 
So what has caused this shift?  My theory is that decluttering gets you into the habit of evaluating.  Evaluating what? Evaluating everything!

Decluttering is almost pure evaluation (and a little bit of moving things around).  You evaluate every item you come across to determine whether to keep it, give it to someone you know, give it to charity, try to sell it on eBay or to simply toss it in the trash/recycling (note, as time goes by the validity of that last option becomes increasingly apparent).

Decluttering gives you a true appreciation on how much you have and the realisation that its far too much. You realise that the easiest way to deal with things is to not buy them in the first place, so you stop shopping.  But the evaluation habit spreads, to books, to TV, to all the other things you are in the habit of doing, until one day, you find yourself for the first time in a long time, with a spare moment, an actual real spare moment in which you don't feel any pressure to do anything - and its wonderful!

Progress Report

Just a quick update on where I am with the decluttering.

Pretty much the wardrobe is done.  I'm quite happy with the 30L white boxes, which are now all full and labelled.  The ramshackle looking pile in the corner (see below) is actually board games except for the white box on top, which is a present for my brand new nephew - born last Thursday.  As he lives 200 kilometres away, it may be a few weeks before I get to meet him.

I have cleared out all the stuff on top of the bookcases (see below) and all the extra books that I won't read again (Paulo Coelho recommends you give books you are unlikely to read again to a library. I, instead, give them to the Salvation Army or friends).  As soon as the body corporate manager gives me permission to add a new TV attenna point to my apartment, I will be able to rearrange the dining/lounge room and move these book cases out.  

You will note that the desk top remains rather messy.   There is also a white box to the left of the blue chair.  All these things belong to my husband, who assures me he is getting around to them.

At least this side of the room (below) looks like a baby girl's bedroom thanks to the wall stickers my sister-in-law gave me and the teddy bears. 

Things Take Time

One of the things that decluttering makes you realise, is how much time you spend on things. Time that you would prefer to be spending on something else. 

This was particularly highlighted for me when I decided to tackle a pile of magazines that I pulled out of my coffee table. I have long had an addiction to magazines.  This is inspite of the fact that I am well aware that they promise so much and deliver so little. Well, actually, I used to read Smash Hits as a teenager and loved it.  In my 20's I moved onto The Face and loved it too. (Wikipedia tells me that these magazines were both created by the same person.)  These magazines were relevant to me at the time and let me know about the music and fashion that could actually become a part of my life, that is, I liked them and could afford them. For some reason, now magazines are full of $2,000 handbags and $500 t-shirts, all of which look like crap; who buys these things?

But I digress - back to the pile of magazines.  My intial strategy for dealing with it was just to flick through them  (about 20) and see if there were any pictures suitable for my vision board.  I thought that they were all magazines that I had read and decided to keep (new rule - never keep a magazine unless you own a library), but a number of them I had only half read.  So of course, that meant I had to read all the unfinished magazines as well as look for pictures before I threw them away. 

I started reading a copy of Vanity Fare, but after a time period that seem FOREVER, I had only read a couple of articles and there were lots left.  It was then I realised that I have no interest in learning about some rich woman who can no longer afford the upkeep on her mansion in the Hamptons, nor do I care about some Wall Street bloke who has become the go-to guy for the USA government since the global financial crisis because he doesn't work for any of the banks, etc.  So I tossed it.

I then picked up a copy of Shop Till You Drop.  I bought the first issue of this magazine and found a great pair of shoes in it, which I bought and to this day they remain my favourites.  As a result, I keep coming back to this magazine to hopefully have similar experiences but every time I am disappointed.  This magazine has become one of the worse offenders for advertising luxury brands (seriously, who spends $5,000 on one outfit?) and its full of demands - buy these jeans! read this website! decorate your home all in white!  If one of your friends spoke to you like this you would tell them to piss off, yet so many woman's magazines are the same.


In the end, I invoked the economics rule of sunk costs.  A sunk cost is a cost paid in the past that you cannot recover.  The idea is, that you should not think about sunk costs but only the benefit you can derive in future. This is at odds with how people actually behave. People buy things and then try to get their money's worth. So the more you pay for something, the longer you hold onto it and use it, trying to justify the cost. For example, you don't throw away magazines you haven't read.

The more you think about this however, you realise this traditional approach only makes sense if you don't place any value on your time. If you look at things from the sunk cost perspective, you say - I bought these magazines over a year ago, I'm never going to get the money back that I paid for them,  reading them is going to take up time that I could better spend on other things, hence I have got all the value out of them I am going to get and so should throw them away.  So I did, and it felt great.

Well and truly in the thick of it

Now I have everything off the floor (more or less), the plan is to move the four bookcases out into the living area and set up the cot in the left corner of the room as seen in (or rather, cut off of) this photo below. The black plastic that you can see behind the red ladder is covering the dismantled cot.

I was also rather pleased to realise the other day that I have the whole of the top of the wardrobe cleared out and have started putting the things to go into it in 30 litre boxes with lables. They are a good size but not too large and heavy, so you can pull them out without having to be an olympic weight lifter. I was thinking, that the right side of the wardrobe is also finished, but then I realised that the red ladder in the photo above is supposed to be going in there so I will need to do a bit more rejigging.

Today, being a Saturday, I had planned to get stuck into things.  Unfortunately, I got the results of a blood test yesterday, which showed that my thyroid gland is overactive.  In the past, it has been just slightly out of whack, but now its gone the full monty. My doctor has told me to do nothing for a week to try to calm it down (and she means nothing, to the point where she has given me a certificate so my husband can have a week off work to look after me and our baby). I hope it works because pretty much the only cure if it doesn't get better is to cut out the nodules causing the problems and then take tablets for the rest of my life.  

I really don't want to be on medication for the rest of my life, so I have spent much of the day in bed and the rest on the couch. Yesterday, I was thinking that an overactive thyroid is not so bad - I have almost got down to a weight I am happy with, I can eat as much as I want and I never get cold anymore.  However, doing nothing all day has made me realise I really don't feel well.  I have the jitters like I have drunk 10 cups of expresso, but I'm still tired and wish I could just fall asleep. 

The decluttering continues, however, with my wonderful husband in the process of moving the two bookcases into the dining area and setting up the cot. 

Spot the difference

No really, I have been working on this ...

Anyone who has questioned the buddhist maxim "everything is connected", clearly has never tried to declutter their house. I know a comparison of the photos requires a magnifying glass to see the changes, but most of the things crowding the room are required for regular use, while the wardrobe has been packed (with extraordinary and disheartening efficiency) with all the things we never use. 

So over the past fortnight I have been concentrating on moving things out of the wardrobe to a storage locker.  There are now 12 things in it, including golf clubs (used once over the past 11 years), a box of video tapes (last watched over 6 years ago), a christmas tree and decorations (at least they get used once a year).  This will allow me to create a home for the things we do use in the wardrobe and get them off the floor.

Another tricky aspect about decluttering is that it opens your eyes to how much clutter surrounds you.  So I have also been working on other areas of the apartment:

• the two guitars and two violins we own are now safely housed in my parents' back room,
• my Thomas Gannon coffee table is now a giant toy box, while the 3 year old magazines and newspapers that were in its draws are now cleared out,
• a collection of stray homeless items are now in a "find a home" box for dealing with as I progress.

The silver box I discussed in my last post appears to be working.  In these types of things you can never sit back and wait for the universe to come to you, so I called my boss so he could give me the phone number for HR and wrote it down on a catalogue while talking to him. Of course I ended up throwing out the catalogue before I called HR, but then I thought, "OK silver box, lets test you out".  I decided I would look under the silver box to see if I could find the piece of paper with the phone number for HR (and my employee number, which I would also need).  The silver box was sitting on the desk with nothing underneath (you can see it in the second picture above, on the left hand corner with a CD-ROM box sitting on top of it).  So I opened the draw below it and pulled out a bunch of papers.  The last piece of paper was the one I was looking for.  I called HR and 10 minutes later they had emailed me my pay slips.  I now just need one of my husband's payslips, and I have all I need to apply for the baby bonus.

New Project: Decluttering

My husband and I have lived in our apartment for nearly six years, I have never been happy with the amount of stuff we have in it.  We now have a baby who needs her own room - here is what her room looks like at present:

I once read that the best advertising works by making you envy your amazing future self which possesses the item being advertised (Ways of Seeing by John Berger).  This is what makes decluttering difficult - you pick up something you haven't used for years and you imaging yourself using it so you want to keep it.  Decluttering means you have to admit that you are old and boring and never do the fun stuff you used to do.  It means facing up to the fact that you have wasted thousands of dollars on things you have only used a couple of times. It means accepting that the "future" you with the advertised item is no more amazing than the past you without it.

Being me, I, of course, own a book on decluttering called Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston.  It claims that clutter clearing "is one of the most powerful, transformative aspects of Feng Shui" and mentions that decluttering gives you energy.  I have found this to be true.  In the few days before I started decluttering I was getting out of bed at 11am and spent a lot of time on the couch.  Yesterday, the day after I started decluttering, I was up at 8am and spent the whole day being active.  Today, I was up at 8:30am.


Clear Your Clutter also explains how the bagua relates to your home.  The bagua is a 3x3 grid which links different areas of your home with different aspects of your life.  The room above affects two areas:

• Career / Life Path / Journey - which is definitely the area in which I feel my life is most blocked at the moment; and
• Helpful friends / Compassion / Travel

 The website Feng Shui Palace explains this second area in more detail.  Amongst other things, it says:

"This part of the home (the front right gua) is associated with getting you into the synchronicity of life. When you are in-sync, you don't have to expend any energy getting help with anything. It is also usually easier to make money when you are in-sync with life."

I find this interesting, not just because it mentions money, but because I have been trying for months to get my application for the $5000 baby bonus sorted out and each time its a case of one step forward, ten steps back.  The problem is that I need to send in pay slips to prove I don't have an income while on maternity leave.  To get the payslips I need to log onto the HR system at work.  I was going to do this from home, but I couldn't find my token, so I went into work one evening, but I had been locked out of the HR system because I had not logged into it for over one month.  I called the IT Help Desk, they said because it was after business hours all they could do was arrange to email me a new password the next day.  I couldn't make it back the next day, so I left it.  About two months later I found my token, so I thought "great, I can get IT to send me a new password, log in and get my pay slips".  But when I tried to log into work from home I was locked out completely from the whole system.  I called IT, they said that because it had been too long since I last logged in my access had been cancelled. Yesterday, I thought I would just telephone HR and ask them to post me my payslips but I couldn't find the telephone number even though I was certain I have placed it in a particular draw.

Feng Shui Palace suggests getting a silver box, placing a written prayer of thanks for what you want in the box and putting it in the Helpful Friends etc area of your house.  I went into the room to see if I could find something appropriate to use for the box, thinking I didn't have anything.  First I saw my husband's glasses case, which is silver, so I was going to use that.  Then I saw the rewards pack that Ford gave us when we bought a car from there a couple of years ago.  It comes in a silver box (and is more clutter I intended to get rid of).  I took out the rewards paraphernalia, which is now out of date, and put in a green (the colour for money in Feng Shui) card saying "Thank you for sending me the baby bonus."  Clear Your Clutter says that these "cures" don't work as well when a room is cluttered, but we will see what happens.