Think outside the toolbox!

Here’s how I organized it. The discarded materials were gathered together to give to Goodwill, they are all still usable, I just had too much!

When I finished I had a shelf that had about 1/4 of the material, but it was much more approachable, and allowed for about 90% of the craft types that it did before the purge. That’s a pretty good clutter trade-off. Like any other decluttering project, just getting started creates nearly all the momentum you need to finish.

Good luck!

Quick Halloween Rocking Gravestone

There’s lots of articles on how to safely use public internet access, but frankly, if you don’t own the environment you are subject to keyloggers and other nasties that makes it hard to truly have peace of mind on using your precious email account.

So why risk it at all? If all you are trying to do is send a safe-arrival email, remind the neighbor to let the cat out while you’re traveling, or send a quick digital photo to a friend, simply create a ‘throw-away’ email account that you don’t care if it gets compromised.

The fastest and easiest way to do this is by using gmail. Simply send your main email an ‘invitation’ on the bottom right. When this email arrives a few moments later, create a new email account. If your main email is foo@gmail.com, you might use travel.foo@gmail.com for ease of memory. It’s probably a good idea to change up the password a bit as well from your normal password.

When you travel, simply use that email to send and receive email. Tell your friends if you like or send them a quick mail as you go (from that account) saying that you’re travelling and using this email for a bit. They may not remember or use it - to be candid if everyone had a different email while travelling it would be pretty annoying, but if you need to carry on a dialog with a specific person it will work (especially if they can just reply).

Since your travel email has nothing to do with your ‘normal’ email there’s no risk and you don’t have to bother with over-complicated security rituals. To be clear - your new email protects your main email because they are completely disconnected. If you start to create online banking accounts, trade stocks, or send gushy love letters with your travel mail, any mail you send and receive under that account is not auto-magically protected! It’s just a separate email with no ‘history’.

You can also forward select mails from your mail account by filtering to your travel email. Obviously if you are too comprehensive with the forwarding you’ll defeat the purpose of the travel email. You might forward mail from a few selected friends or work colleagues and not sensitive mails from banks, etc. Or just the opposite - allow alerts from your bank or financial instituation to go through and nothing else.

There are other alternatives - such as using a ‘catch-all’ email account associated with a personal domain, or a pre-existing but rarely used email (perhaps one left over from your DSL/Cable account you never use?). But I prefer the disconnected-ness of the throw-away gmail account.

When you return either retire the gmail account or use it on your next trip!

In honor of our efforts to return to the moon (personally I think we should just go straight to Mars, but that’s another story), why not recycle a few boxes for your kids and put together a Lunar Excursion Module for your kid!

It goes together quickly with a box knife and hot glue (it won’t last forever but you can’t beat it for speed).
The bottom is open (or you can make a door in the back).

Cardboard rivets also work well.

Shred-It is hosting ‘community shreds’ at various venues around the U.S.

This is a good (free) opportunity to purge paper from your house.
Securely (and environmentally-sensitively) destroying one of the 1.51 cu ft ‘book boxes’ of data can run you about $25. If you’ve ever sat down to destroy one of the boxes through a consumer-grade shredder, this is a bargain, but free is even better.

Here’s the events near Seattle.

They are typically hosted in Office Depots and banks.

Preparing for a ‘Shred’

What would be the worse thing that could happen if you couldn’t lay your hands on that piece of paper again? Learn about document retention guidelines and take the opportunity to clear your house of unwanted paper.

Convert Paper to Electronic Where Appropriate

I’ve managed to clear out a lot of paper recently by signing up for online billing for a few services. The company saves money by not mailing you statements, so as a ‘quid pro quo’, the will often make accessible years worth of old statements. I then save the PDFs of the old bills for the things I think are worthwhile (like bank statements, but not utilities). The older statements will usually ‘rotate off’ after some time (years). Unfortunately, most of these sites do not have a sophisticated way to automatically download fresh statements, so once I’ve ‘caught up’, I make a calendar entry to catch up again in another year or so.

Saving the PDFs directly from the source may or may not be easier than scanning in the documents. I prefer the PDFs from the source where possible as the old statements can be physically challenging to scan.

Once you are caught up, you can revert to paper billing if that works better for you.

The paper version of the statements can then all be shredded.

If it’s truly important not to lose the info, then you should apply reasonable practices in backing up the data and securing the data.

Attend the Shred

You might check to see if there’s a ‘maximum’ you can bring. I called about an earlier one and they allowed one of the ‘book boxes’ per person in line. I don’t know if that’s standard or just the locale near me. If it’s one person per box, you may want to adjust your strategy. One location was up to one 32-gallon garbage container, which is lot of paper.

I made this connection from an unexpected place, and thought process it started was surprising, so I thought I’d share it on a ‘technical decluttering’ blog. Skip reading now if this seems painfully obvious!

The second law of thermodynamics states the the universe tends toward ‘mixed-up-edness’. This (unrelated) article on creationism, beautifully written by Richard Dawkins from the in The Guardian had a particularly nice summary, from which I’ll excerpt a section:

The Second Law states that, in a closed system without external energy fed in from outside, entropy always increases. Entropy is often said to mean disorder, but in some ways the word “mixed-upness” (Willard Gibbs’s coining) fits better. A familiar metaphor is that of a library. If the readers in a library always leave books lying around on the tables, or shove them back on the shelves at random, the library will become increasingly disordered. To remain in a state of order, it needs an energetic librarian, constantly working to put books back on their proper shelves, and constantly checking the shelves for misplaced volumes. It is not that libraries have a magnetic attraction or an urgent drive towards a particular goal state called disorder. It is simply that the number of states of a library that we would call disordered is much greater than the tiny minority of states that we would recognise as ordered. There are many more ways of being disordered than of being ordered. No work needs to be done to drive a library toward one of the many states that we call disordered. It will just happen, willy nilly, unless energetic work is done to prevent the otherwise inevitable slide downhill into disorder.

So what does this have to do with clutter?

Simple. Like the library example, the more stuff you have, the more ‘disorganized’ states that it can be in. It’s not that you or your housemates are inherently sloppy (they may well be), it’s just that the more stuff you have the more energy you need to put ‘into the system’ to keep it organized. It’s not clear whether it’s a little or lot more - but it’s more! So getting rid of clutter, even a little at a time, has multiple virtues. Not only are you organizing or cleaning up an area at the time you are actually doing the initial work, you are investing in minimizing that energy, now and forever!.

It’s very zen and logically follows right to the end - an completely empty house takes no time to organize! So clearly there’s a middle ground wherein you maximize enjoyment and usefulness of your possessions, yet have removed the most onerous clutter.

It’s like ‘compound-interest’ for decluttering.

Once I saw this, it was obvious in retrospect. For example by reducing my game collection by 2/3, it’s made organizing, shelving, and finding the remainder quicker and more pleasant. I found myself taking better care of the remainder, and not dreading organizing them, and therefore rediscovering favorites and actually playing more games, from a ‘better’ subset remaining. Same with books.