When it snows, she has no fear for her household;
for all of them are clothed in scarlet.
Proverbs 31:21
No matter how you slice it, decluttering is a time consuming task. The method most people use to declutter is to go from room to room with a few big bags or boxes. Closets and shelves are surveyed, and we scrutinize item after item, trying to determine if we should part with each one. The chosen items either go into a “give away” container, a “sell” container, or a “throw away” container. People like me have a hard time decluttering because we second-guess ourselves a lot. We also have a hard time parting with things due to sentimental value (and everything could have sentimental value!) and monetary value (as in, “I know we've only used it twice in the past 12 years, but it cost a lot money!”)
A few years ago, I read a book called If I Could Just Get Organized: Home Management Hope For Pilers and Filers by Karen Jogerst. The book is now out of print, but on my shelf is a very dog-eared copy that I think I'll never part with! In a chapter about “Conquering Clutter,” Mrs. Jogerst explained how we can skip past the whole scrutinizing process all together by simply using what she calls a “Miner's Approach.” She wrote, “For the piler who is having a hard time figuring out what to keep and what to get rid of, a miner's approach to this process may help. You see, a miner doesn't look at the whole pile of dirt in front of him. After blasting a hole in the middle of a mountain, a miner surveys the glorious mess he has made, and then he picks the gems out of it. He quickly picks through the debris field, but he doesn't focus his attention on the entire pile in front of him. Instead, he sets his sights on finding only that which is very valuable to him. Then he dumps the rest in a box and hauls it out of the mine!”
Mrs. Jogerst continued, explaining the benefits to this approach:
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“Mining provides a piler with a less overwhelming, backdoor opportunity to comprehend what he/she really needs, wants, uses or has space for.”
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“Pilers are people who are always in a hurry and people who appreciate instant success. Sorting and classifying stuff all day can be a very tedious, overwhelming task for a piler and chances are pretty good that it won't take much for her to get discouraged or sidetracked. Mining a mess takes less time, and the results leave a piler with a feeling of on-the-spot accomplishment along with the motivation to keep going.”
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“Pilers also tend to be sentimental. We hang onto every stray scrap of nostalgia that has vintage potential someday, irregardless of what it seems to be, but mining frees a piler from the need to scrutinize and evaluate each piece of caboodle to the n-th degree and lets her focus her attention and energy on managing the items she really does need or desire to keep.”
By allowing myself to think in terms of what I truly want to keep, rather than what I “can get rid of,” I have been freed from a great deal of stress in decluttering. We keep fewer things, and therefore we have less “stuff” to manage. The house stays neater, and our space is used by the things that are valuable to us.
