Ask yourself regularly whether things can be thrown away. You can do this at the end of the day, week, month, or year. In fact, you don’t have to be too precise about the periods, just so long as you make the decision to do it with a degree of regularity. It could be just a question of thinking, Oh, I haven’t checked for a while—then having a look and getting rid of anything unnecessary.
• Receipts/shipping notices
• Household account books
• Spare buttons and keys
• Warranties/contracts
• Product instructions
• Memos stuck on the fridge or on your memo board
• Stationery and other small items in drawers
• Ties, socks, underwear
• Books, magazines, clothes
• Receipts/shipping notices
These are useful in case there’s a problem with a product or delivery. (I’m ignoring here their use in recording household accounts or applying for expenses.)
Once the products have been used or the delivery has been made, however, their useful life is over. Don’t leave them in your bag or wallet. Every time you go shopping or open your wallet, get rid of any that you can.
• Household account books
A lot of people like to keep records of day-to-day expenditures, and although they generally use a new account book each year, they tend to keep old ones. They can be good mementos, and it is surprising how often one wants to refer back, particularly to the previous year’s accounts.
So when you buy a new account book, keep last year’s. But, at the same time, discard the one from the year before. Or, if you don’t feel comfortable with this, keep each book for two years rather than just one.
This regime of conscious, regular discarding means you will never accumulate more than a fixed number of account books.
• Spare buttons and keys
Spare buttons lie forever in sewing boxes and drawers. Spare keys tend to be kept long after we’ve forgotten what they’re for.
When you throw away an item of clothing you’re not going to take the trouble to seek out the spare buttons and throw them away too. So in due course, you’ll have buttons that you don’t want. That’s why a regular check will help.
If it looks as though you’ve accumulated a lot of buttons or if you have a lot of keys jangling about on a fob, sift through them to see if they’re all necessary. Some of them will almost certainly not be.
• Warranties/contracts
Warranties for electrical goods and furniture tend to last between one and three years. Contracts are often for between two and five years.
When these periods are up, the documents become redundant. The best approach here is to keep all your contracts and warranties together, then look through them on a regular basis. This might be at the end of the year, or perhaps whenever you put a new document in the file. If you then find one that has expired, you simply discard it. There’s no difficulty deciding—an out-of-date warranty is no use at all.
Unlike warranties, instructions don’t have set time limits. But that doesn’t mean we have to hang on to them forever. Is it really worth keeping vacuum-cleaner instructions? And how long do you have to store advice on what to do if you think there’s a problem with your heater or how to clean an electric fan or a leather jacket?
There’s a difference between manuals that can be used for troubleshooting and ordinary instructions we get with products. Don’t confuse them. Once you’ve gotten used to a product, think about throwing the instructions away.
Treat them in the same way as warranties and contracts—store them all in a dedicated place. And whenever you put in a new set of instructions, check through the others to see if any can be discarded. Don’t be tempted to keep them because they have the manufacturer’s customer-service telephone number and it’s a pain to make a separate note of it. If you don’t have that specific number, you can always use the company’s main telephone number and ask to be put through to customer service or simply look it up online.
• Memos stuck on the fridge or on your memo board
Information on a sale or an exhibition, the school-lunch schedule, bills, telephone messages, a review of a book you’re thinking of buying, etc. Any or all of these might be fluttering on the fridge door or a memo board. Sometimes you knock one down as you brush past. When you pick it up you find that the sale is over or that you’ve passed on the message already or that the lunch schedule is for last month.
Make a point of checking through all of these whenever the space looks crowded or when something falls down. From my experience, one can always dispose of at least one-third of the memos on display.
• Stationery and other small items in drawers
Every household has one or two drawers where people shove miscellaneous items—stationery, nail clippers, unused films, compasses, glasses cloths, etc. They might be in your telephone table, or your china or kitchen cabinet. You may have a desk drawer at work which you use in a similar way.
If you find these drawers easy to use, then that’s fine. But do they sometimes get so full you have to press the contents down to shut them? If that happens, you need to sort out the contents. You’ll probably find old memos, receipts from last year, pens that don’t work, old snaps, a sticky, old sweet…
Every time a drawer starts to look full, check through it. Otherwise, you’ll always be having to push down the contents to close it. It may even jam shut, and exist only as a mysterious closed drawer.
• Ties, socks, underwear
A frayed tie, a sock with a thinning heel, old underwear—even if you notice them, it’s difficult to throw them away. You tend to think you’ll wear them just once more. Or some fastidious people may decide to wash them before discarding them and then once they’ve been washed, put them straight back in the drawer.
Get in the habit of regular checking. These are small items, so the overall volume won’t be large, and they’re surprisingly easy to throw away. It’s up to you what cycle you set, but checking once in spring and once in autumn can work well.
• Books, magazines, clothes
My survey suggests that books, magazines, and clothes are the three things that people find toughest to discard. Creating more disposal opportunities must be a good idea. A system of regular disposal will not automatically make these items easy to part with. But I’ve listed them under this strategy just in case it helps you deal with them.
The previous two strategies involve disposing of things once they exceed a certain quantity or after a certain amount of time. This may be easier said than done though and things will still accumulate. So creating a regime of regular disposal will help.
Of course, it won’t stop things accumulating between your regular clear-outs. And the more they do accumulate, the more onerous the regular checks will be. So this approach is particularly effective for items which accumulate relatively slowly, and when it’s easy to identify whether they are necessary or not. Although I’ve included books, magazines, and clothes in this section, please be aware that the strategy may not work very well with them if it’s the only approach you use.