Decluttering “challenge” for November

Posted by louisa on Monday 24 October 2011 in decluttering | 14 comments

I’m going to set myself a decluttering “challenge” for November – and I’d love it if some other people joined in.

It seems a good time to do it – the season has definitely turned now (to cold up here in the northern hemisphere, to warm down on the flip side) so we can sort through our summer/winter gear to put it into storage and clear out the surplus at the same time. In the northern hemisphere as well, we’re retreating into our homes more – more time to get annoyed with all the junk and more time to deal with it. And for people who celebrate Christmas and other holidays, it’ll help with the pre-family-descending tidying preparations and a reminder about how this year’s new gifts can be next year’s clutter if not chosen with care.

The “challenge” will be a pretty simple one: get rid of one thing every day In practical terms for me that’ll mean consigning one thing every day to our “to go to the charity shop” box, actually giving it to someone else in person or, for the odd thing, list on eBay/Gumtree.

I’m calling it a “challenge” rather than an actual challenge because, to be frank, it shouldn’t be too hard. I’m going to set myself mini-“challenges” each week too, in addition to the main one, to focus my attention in a few specific areas – but even still, it’ll probably be quite easy. The reason I still want to do it though is to help start to form a habit – to change how I look at things around our home. I don’t know about you guys but I get really blind to certain things around the house then suddenly I see them and think “why on earth have we left that there for so many months?”. Instead, I want to be see everything and think “do we need or even just want that in our lives still? could someone else make better use of it than we do?”. That change of outlook has to start somewhere.

I also want to actually do it every day, rather than just saying “get rid of 30 things in the month” because I think that’ll be more useful for building the habit. With the mini-“challenges”, it’ll probably be about 50 things in total – and if I get my partner John on board, he has to find his own dang 50, no sharing ;)

Anyone else up for it?