Don’t think: I’ll have another look through and sort it out first. Get rid of it now.
• Junk mail/flyers/ads
• Pamphlets/catalogues
• Files/documents that have been stored away for a long time
• Books/magazines
• Letters and cards
• DVDs
• Clothes/household items you’ve been keeping in cardboard boxes, etc.
• Junk mail/flyers/ads
Get rid of them straight away—when you open your mailbox or when you find them inside your newspaper.
There’s always a temptation to think that even obviously useless ads may contain some information. Don’t look. Just throw them. Only keep ads that may be genuinely useful, such as information on a supermarket’s discounts or a department store’s mailing to account holders. Everything else should go.
• Pamphlets/catalogues
If you’ve acquired them on purpose, that’s fine. But if you’ve been given them at a shop or they’ve been put through your mailbox, they should go immediately.
If they look smart, you may feel like looking at them. Don’t. You didn’t want them in the first place, so just throw them away. There may well have been something attractive in them, but don’t be drawn in—think yourself lucky not to have been tempted into buying something unnecessary.
• Files/documents that have been stored away for a long time
Are these really necessary? Don’t start wondering if there was something important in them—just throw them away without looking. The reason they haven’t been touched is because there’s nothing useful in them.
You bought them, read a little, then put them to one side. You may have thought you’d carry on reading them, but the fact that you haven’t means they didn’t interest you.
Don’t look upon a row of unread books as “sacred.” Pick them up and throw them out. Don’t even look at them. If you see a magazine lying around, don’t think, Oh I might have another look through that. Just get rid of it. You may think you’ll read it sometime, but you won’t.
• Letters and cards
People have put effort into writing letters and cards, so recipients often regard them as “sacred.” And a lot of people enjoy reading old letters because they bring back memories. This makes them difficult to dispose of.
But if you don’t have a strong reason to keep a letter—if the associated memories aren’t very important—don’t feel you should hang on to it. Don’t let yourself be put off throwing them away because they come from somebody important to you or because you might not have taken down an address. If you hesitate, the pile of letters will just build up forever. You don’t have to keep a hundred postcards just because one of them may include a telephone number that you haven’t written down.
Don’t leave them in a box or in a letter rack, just chuck them all out. You’re very unlikely to regret it.
• Clothes/household items you’ve been keeping in cardboard boxes, etc.
Perhaps you put stuff in a box when you moved house and it’s been in there for three years now. Maybe you put some clothes in a storage bin ten years ago, thinking you might wear them again sometime. Items like this are obviously unnecessary. The container you put them into has become like a “black box”—you have no idea what’s in it. Don’t examine the contents—just throw them all away.
The key is simply in not looking.
It’s natural to want to check whether something might be necessary before getting rid of it. But this takes a lot of time, and in the meantime other things are piling up. It’s a task that requires application and energy—deciding whether things should be thrown out is tedious and tiring.
So for the kinds of thing I’ve mentioned above, don’t bother. Just get rid of them. Then it’s all over in a second. Things that were getting in the way are gone. It feels good.