Survey #258—Full Response from Ann
| Pronouns | She/her |
|---|---|
| What useful decluttering or organizing strategies or methods did you take away from the book? | She's clear she is about decluttering not organizing. That's helpful. I think I need both — but for me, if decluttering PRECEDES organizing, then I have a bunch less to organize, plus my brain can be stewing and scheming on the organizing system that is best / simplist / most natural and suited to the stuff at hand. I'm relieved to hear her pile-of-paper strategy. She says to go thru the big pile once fast. That way I weed out a bunch of obvious stuff, and I'm getting acquainted w the rest. My brain is working on where to put those ?? papers. The prevailing wisdom I've heard is to touch a piece of paper once. Sounds cute and ruthless. Doesn't work for me. If I have to figure out where to put something the first time I see it, I'm going to procrastinate a LONG time before I feel up to all that decisioning. Things from Speed of Life I want to try • Start w the visible. Especially the visible to a visiting guest. • Her 4-pass system per room: Trash, Easy, Clutter, Fit into Containers |
| What parts or aspects of the book did you find difficult to grasp or challenging to apply to your home or situation? | I don’t really get her 2 decluttering questions, about where would she look for something, and something else.… Not sure I grasp what she calls trash, and how that's different from duh cluttering. |
| Please share your favorite quotations or key ideas and concepts from this book. | p4 I define clutter as anything I can’t keep under control. If a space in my home consistently gets out of control, I have too much stuff in that space. p5 I accepted that people with homes that are consistently under control prefer living with regret over living with clutter. p7 [letting go of] totally-useful-in-the-future stuff p9 I did not understand that my overabundance of stuff was directly related to my inability to function well in my home. The more stuff I brought into my home, the more out of control it felt. The more out of control my home felt, the more I looked to the future as the time when I’d finally have things figured out. The more I focused on the future instead of the present, the more I justified collecting things I might need one day. |
| 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'm aiming for a compromise on the "no keep pile" approach. For me, I don't call this a KEEP box. I call it my I DON"T KNOW box — as in I DON'T KNOW WHERE TO PUT THIS ITEM. I find this super useful. Instead of a whole unsorted box full of scary stuff I don't know what it is, I sort that box into piles of 1 RECYCLING/TRASH, 2 DONATE, 3 I KNOW WHERE THIS GOES, including various categories like "concert programs," and 4 I DON'T KNOW. Most of that box I can put away in #1-#3. Only a much smaller pile goes in the I DON'T KNOW box, to be kicked down the road for future enlightenment. That I DON'T KNOW box really helps me breath easier and have the gumption to face de-cluttering without too much stress. So what’s my compromise? I keep my I DON’T KNOW boxes. But I aspire to getting my house de-cluttered to the point I diminish them, and/or put time limits on how long they get to stick around, remembering Dana’s NO KEEP BOXES reasoning. |
| 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 like the container concept and I want to try it out. Especially, the part where I work with the containers I have, and don’t constantly go get more. I have a lot. I will say I love containers. Always have. When I was three and asked what I wanted for Christmas, I said BAGS. The adults tried to get me to think more grand, but I insisted I wanted bags. My parents got me this beautiful glossy colored bags. I don’t know what to do with all of my containers. I have containers for the containers, especially all the bags. (LOVE all the reuseable grocery bags.) In de-cluttering, I have a challenge. I will decide to de-clutter a box full of stuff. Okay, done, it’s empty. Now what do I do with this empty box?? It takes up the same amount of space as it did when full, so I don’t feel a spaciousness improvement. Also, keeping boxes. I wrote a whole essay called “My Parents’ Boxes” about how I spent half a day breaking down & recycling the lifetime of stored boxes in their attic. Why this love of bags and containers? I’m intrigued. |
| 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? | I’d like to try this. Of course the fear is that I’m only going to have time to get to the visible stuff — over and over again — and never get to the more hidden away stuff. I like the idea of starting with what guests see when they walk in the door. We have a house guest expected in 4 days. I’m thinking about what she sees when she walks in the door, which is a rickety trash-picked shelf with random stuff on it, mostly things I want to remember when I go out the door, but they’ve stalled out. Would it be possible to address this visible little clutter collector? |
| Here’s your chance to ask Gayle and Ed any question you’re curious about. It need not be related to this survey’s topic(s). If we think that your question—and our answer—might be useful or instructive to The Clutter Fairy Weekly audience, we’ll share them in an upcoming episode. | My husband and I don't run our dishwasher — we just wash the dishes by hand and use the dishwasher as a drying rack. It stopped working awhile ago, due to disuse. The appliance repair guy came this week, and said the dishwasher was too far gone to clean & was a health hazard. (Please don't judge!) So I'm thinking of getting a new dishwasher, and actually trying to use it. They say a dishwasher actually uses less water. Maybe if we upped our clean factor for our dishes, it would spread to the rest of the house. BUT, if we get a dishwasher, how can this not be a source of continual grumbling and discontent? We'll run it at night, and unload first thing in the morning. But I know my husband won't remember to unload. (He agrees with this, I think.) "Hoping" it'll work out (his method) I just don't think it will. I can come up with approaches, but my "yeah but" brain jettisons them. —(Have a card with his name and mine on the dishwasher. When I unload it, flip the card to his name, and he does the same YEAH BUT he won't remember to flip, plus I'll have to remind him anyway.) —Come up with some task he can do around the house to make up for me mostly unloading the dishwasher. YEAH BUT, I don’t know, this feels weird! When we get in this YEAH BUT space, it feels like resistance. What to do? I think I really do want to try again with a dishwasher, but I can't trust our future (next week) selves to work it out. So my question is about dishwasher domestic harmony. But it's also about that YEAH BUT resistance place and what to do when we find ourselves there. |
| Future topics | Feng shui — is it helpful? Thank you! |
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