Survey #258—Full Response from Barbara
| Pronouns | She/her |
|---|---|
| What useful decluttering or organizing strategies or methods did you take away from the book? | Container concept and don’t make a bigger mess—although I still may dump out a drawer, I wouldn’t empty a whole closet because I’d never finish it in one session. |
| What parts or aspects of the book did you find difficult to grasp or challenging to apply to your home or situation? | When I first started decluttering, I struggled to sell or find the perfect recipient for my stuff. St. Vinnies, not Goodwill for clothes & household items. Foster care for old suitcases. Siblings for family “treasures”. It made things more complicated. I also see that my daughter’s progress is so much slower as she deals with her aunt’s estate plus her own basement full of “stuff”. She spends so much time finding the best place for things. I read the book when it first came out and it took me a long time to realize that donating was usually the answer |
| Please share your favorite quotations or key ideas and concepts from this book. | Container concept. |
| White suggests a decluttering process that requires making a final decision about each item (keep, trash, or donate) and placing the item in its appropriate home right away rather than into a “keep pile” or “keep box” for later organizing. If you’ve used her method, how has the “take it there right now” approach worked for you? What are the pros and cons of her suggested strategy? | I use this at night when I’m doing a 5 minute pick-up. I think it is really useful for a young family so that you can stop at any point without another step necessary. |
| A big part of White’s decluttering philosophy is the “container concept”—the idea of setting firm limits on the containers you use to hold your stuff, where “containers” are understood to mean the boxes, bins, racks, baskets, drawers, cabinets, shelves, etc., that you use to hold stuff, as well as the rooms that must contain the containers—and then decluttering to fit those limits. If you’ve used her method, how has the “container concept” helped or hindered your decluttering? What are the pros and cons of her methodology? Are there areas or categories of stuff for which it works better than others? | I think the container concept is brilliant. That doesn’t mean I’ve totally adopted it. For me, it works well for clothes, cleaning supplies, rags, tableclothes, linens. I no longer have a basement to store extras of anything so it has to fit in the apartment. But I have a very tiny desk and my extra office supplies live in a plastic container under my bed. (Although, now that I think about it, I realize that I did give away a lot of extra folders, pads of writing papers, pencils, post-its during the early stages of the downsizing process. I kept some extras but gave away more than I kept.) |
| White suggests following the “visibility rule”: Start every session of decluttering in the most visible places in your home. If you’ve used her method, how has the “visibility rule” helped or hindered your decluttering? What are the pros and cons of her suggested approach? | The visibility rule works really well if you have a lot of visible clutter like Dana did when she started her decluttering journey. It’s less useful to me at my stage of life. I am a very messy person. But I have learned to clean up my messes. I might leave the bathroom counter cluttered with my toiletries and toothpaste. But later in the morning, I see the mess and put everything away. I pile things on the kitchen counter but put it away before I go to bed. Decluttering never ends so I might as well have a pleasant place to live while I clear out my extra kitchen utensils. |
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