What to do with the stuff that didn't go in the garbage?

If you saw the post from earlier today you know that while the office and the desk are looking nicely minimized - except for books, which will be dealt with later - there was a big pile of "stuff" that came out of the office, and from on and around the desk.

The question I posed this morning was: When you minimize, what do you do with all this stuff? If you look back at that post you will see the mess that minimizing the office caused. The repository of all that junk was the entry-hall to my house, and the kitchen table. Jump back one post to see the chaos, but this is what the two dump-sites look like now (still in awesomely artistic black and white)...

And the kitchen table...
Now of course, you want to know how the magic happened. Okay, here's the secret...

Toss what you deem is not usable, and then pack the rest up like this...

And then go find one of these...

That my friends is the whole secret.

Now of course there is a bit more to the story on the office than the donate-able things that came out of there. As you can probably guess, the place was filled with papers and that is the harder nut to crack.

This is a process, right? Tonight I will start on the big Paper-Sort-of-2012. That may be the most challenging thing I have attempted so far, but I have faith that I can get it done.

One thing that will make it easier is to have a plan ahead of time for what gets kept, filed, and immediately trashed. Both David Allen in his book Getting Things Done, and Leo Babauta in his book The Power of Less, have instructions on how to do this kind of purge.

I will offer a simple method to go through my oceans of paper tomorrow.