I am not a tidy person. Clutter is the most obvious thing you would notice if you walked into the bedroom/office I have worked out of since I was 14 and in this challenge it is that place that I will aim to declutter. Working and playing and sleeping in the same room is something most teenagers and young adults have to do. But sometime between being 16 and being 22, I realized that the room had far more uses and purposes than it had space and equipment to cater for. And what you find starts happening is a form of microliving – open plan living taken to an extreme.
One corner of the room is an office, another corner is the sleeping area. There’s a music area in between. And a library near the door that is, by even the most conservative of estimates, going to overpopulate the shelves it has been allotted in the very near future. But of course the office – when you have to deal with companies house and the HMRC – starts producing tonnes of paperwork, which creates a need for files, which creates a need for more shelves.
Combine all of that with my blatant lack of organization and the result is what most parents and teachers around the country would refer to as a pig sty. Throughout my childhood, my messiness (there, I’ve said it), created a timeless reason for my mother to shout at me, but now, it has finally become a problem for me. I have reached a time in my life where I hate mess. I think it started a few weeks ago when I attended a film-making seminar in London. The hotel I stayed in that weekend was so clean and tidy and I liked it. Why couldn’t my own living quarters be like this? Largely because I don’t pay a Polish woman to come in at 11 o clock every morning to make my bed, change my towels and throw out all the crap I have accumulated the previous day.
A few days later began my tidiness challenge. Could I keep my living quarters tidy for 28 days? And if I could, how would this impact on my life?
So the tidiness challenge will be a two part challenge. The easy and simple bit is to tidy up the bedroom/office and the hard part is to change my behaviour patterns so that I – the cause of all this bother – do not continue to produce what I can only call “tat” at the rate I have been for the past 11 years (and probably before).
What is tat? It is all that useless junk that you think you should keep but have no defined use or place for. The bits of paper the bank gives you that have numbers on them that you don’t want to throw in the bin in case Osama Bin Identity Fraudster happens to frequent your drive in search of victims. The lovely and often really cool but completely surpluss to requirements freebies that various companies distribute (and I can’t say no to). And random possessions that you do have, need and occassionally use, yet have no official place in the room.
In the tidiness challenge, if my name was George Bush, I would be declaring a War on Tat!
Declutter Tips: How To Prevent The Build Up Of Clutter
Reasons Why Clutter Builds Up:
I had a look through all my clutter before I threw it all out. It seemed to be broadly categorizable into four groups, each having its own solution for preventing further tat.
Group #1: Things That I Told Myself I Would Get To Later But Never Did And I Have Now Lost Interst In
To declutter, The Solution to this is to set a rule: If you aren’t going to do it now, and it won’t matter if you never do it (ie. nobody is going to fine you, ask your for money or repossess your house because you didn’t do it), then just get rid. Throw it out. You might feel nervous for a few seconds, but by this time tomorrow you’ll have forgotten all about it.
Group #2: Things That Were Genuinely Once Valuable But Have Since Devalued So Much As To Be Demoted From The Title Of Useful To The Title Of Rubbish
These items, like accessories that went with mobile phones I no longer use – because they actually no longer work – were good when they came in the glossy shiny box, and are actaully still perfectly funcional now, there’s just nothing to do with them. They are, when I am pushed to admit it, totally useless to me. To declutter, I may not throw them in the trash if that would feel wasteful, but I can give them to charity or oxfam or something.
Group #3: Things That Seem Important Enough To Keep But Actually Are Not Important At All
This category is mainly populated by paperwork from various institutions. Banks are again a major contributor. They send loads of letters and because it came from the bank I am hard wired to horde it somewhere, ironically, in a fashion whereby if I ever did need it, I would neither know that I had it, nor where to find it. Another type of item that falls into this category are gifts you were given by friends that you said were very useful but actually knew were useLESS and I’ve kept them because I’ll feel really guilty if I throw them out.
To declutter, they should simply be shreaded and thrown out straight after opening.
