As I’ve already posted, I’m in the middle of reorganizing my living space. I’m not in full-scale Marie Kondo mode, nor would I ever follow her insipid advice, but I am going through a lot of stuff with a view to finally getting rid of it.

It feels a bit weird though. Much of it is not “unintentional” clutter, but rather something I intended to do and decided today that as a relative priority, I’m just not going to get to it anytime soon. Take for example some decluttering I was doing in my back laundry room to get to some shelves, which once revealed, are filled with a mix of books and papers that I had set aside for some projects.

For example, I have a very large project in mind for when I retire that deals with government, performance measurement, evaluation, etc. And over the last ten years, I’ve accumulated some docs that I will use when I go to write the book that comes out of that project. Some of it I have electronically, most of it I don’t. I’m keeping those docs, but they can be on the back shelves for the next five years no problem.

By contrast, though, I came across some magazines I had for travel destinations. I know what my long-term travel destinations already are, and if / when I get to do them again, I won’t rely on out-of-date profiles. So those were easy to purge.

I had also previously hung on to some science stuff related to physics and near-astronomy topics, but not quite astronomy. Since my interests have narrowed, the broader stuff doesn’t hold my interest anymore. So it’s easy to jettison it now.

But the one that is probably the least organized and the most annoying are some recipes. I had a bunch of recipes that I clipped for certain purposes, some tried, some not. But the bottom-line is that I have more recipes than I will ever cook in my lifetime, and if I need more, there’s this little invention called the internet that has millions more waiting for me to click and search for them. So those too went the way of the dodo today.

I still have a REALLY long way to go, but it felt good to take a break for half an hour and just go through a shelf or two and simply WEED. Once I’m done weeding, I can put all the performance project stuff together on a single bookcase, ready for my eventual retirement project. I’ll even have other room left over too when I’m done purging all my books, but that’s going to take longer too, now that the Library has stopped accepting any donations to their big sales due to COVID. I think I’m going to start boxing them up anyway as I finish with them and have them “ready to go” for when the Library eventually starts accepting again. The only other viable alternative is regrettably the landfill. (No, please don’t say, “Oh, try blah and blah” unless you yourself have confirmed in the last month that they are taking things. I have tried those places, all of them, pre-COVID, and nobody takes books anymore, even though dozens of people will say, “Of course, you can give them to blah”.)

I have 29 days left in my organizing project for the house and I feel generally “good” about where I am in the process, but I have to keep at it.

Today I choose to purge and declutter.

What choices are you making today?