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.

The Desk

This is where we started...

And this is where we ended up...


But of course this begs the question: Where is all that stuff that had been laying on the desk?

Well, much of it went into the garbage. The books were placed in a stack on the bookshelf for future minimizing, and the papers that were deemed "not garbage" went into two in-baskets for "future minimizing efforts".

I will note here that one thing I do not want to do is to just move stuff from one place to another. For instance, clean up the desk by just relocating papers to the kitchen table. With this in mind, going through paper is going to be a major task today.

Several times during the previous year my wife and I have spent multiple hours trying to locate a receipt or a bill that we needed. Here's one thing I have learned: Piling papers on the desk is NOT filing.

The goal at the end of this minimization in the office is to have way less paper to contend with, and to be able to locate papers that are important or that will be needed again. Papers needed for taxes, for instance, or warranties and bills.

Both Leo Babauta and David Allen both have strategies to go through and then stay on top of paper. The key is to get through the stacks of stray paper quickly, have a plan ahead of time on what needs to stay and what does not, and a strategy to not allow the paper to get out of control again.

Right now I am really pleased with the desk. It makes me happy just to look at it, and I feel motivated to sit down and use it to write. Having a de-cluttered space to work in seems energizing, and isn't that the point in minimizing... to get rid of the excess junk that is weighing you down and find your true self.

Next up... the paper in the corner.