Good Questions: What to Ask Yourself as You Evaluate Your Stuff

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.

Playing Devil’s Advocate

This week’s assignment is to do a little play-acting—to interrogate yourself about an item from an outside perspective:

• Identify an item or collection of items that you’re contemplating letting go.
• Imagine yourself in the role of a challenging and skeptical critic of your stuff—for example, your mother-in-law, a minimalist friend, a favorite decluttering authority, or an imaginary character of your own creation.
• Write a list of three to five probing questions about the object or collection under consideration.
• Write down your answer to each of the questions you wrote.
• Now reflect on whether your skeptical critic would find your answers satisfying. Would he or she give you permission to keep the item or collection in question?

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