Everything Depends on Execution: Decluttering Philosophy at Work

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Asking the Right Questions

This week’s assignment is to craft a set of algorithms or questions to apply to a decluttering project that’s been keeping you stuck:

• Select a decluttering project that’s clamoring for your attention.
• Reflecting on the elements of the personal philosophy of decluttering you’ve been contemplating recently, write down a few rules to apply or discriminating questions you’ll ask yourself.
• Schedule an appointment to work on your project.
• As you work on the project, apply the rules or questions.
• If you find that you’re not purging as much as you’d hoped, consider making your rules tougher or more restrictive.

This is a very challenging assignment, so here’s an example to help you get started. Suppose your project is to reduce the volume of office supplies you’re keeping. Your algorithms might go like this:

• If you haven’t used any of this type of item—for example, #10 envelopes—in six months, it goes away.
• If you have a greater supply than you could reasonably use in a year, the excess goes away.
• If any item was purchased for a project that’s finished or a process you no longer use, it goes away.
• If any item is bulky and you foresee little use for it—for example, a box of 12 vinyl binders—it goes away.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.