Making Room For Baby – Part Two: “Keep” or “Kill”

In Part One, I talked about the process of decluttering and provided a few tips to help you make room for your coming baby. Now we’re going to figure out what to do with all of this stuff.

When decluttering, I make two piles: “Keep” or “Kill”. The next step is to do something with each of these piles.

What To Do With The “Keep” Pile

Like With Like. Keep shirts with shirts, pants with pants, gardening books with gardening books, etc. Clutter isn’t just a general mess, but an unsorted mess. Once you decide what the keep, put similar things together so they are easier to find.

Scan Documents. I love scanners because I can take a box full of paper and turn it into a small sliver on my hard disk. I am currently in the process of scanning in articles that I cut out of some old magazines. Now, instead of a ton of paper taking up space, I barely notice it. Better yet, I can further sort these articles into folders. Remember “Like With Like.”

File Better. If you have a filing cabinet or bankers boxes and some folders, take this opportunity to label the folders and file bills, receipts, and any other loose pieces of paper you think you still need sometime down the road. I like to keep it all filed alphabetically. Avoid the dangers of “Miscellaneous” or “Other.” They’re just another form of clutter.

What To Do With The “Kill” Pile

Sell It. Who said decluttering couldn’t be lucrative? Post items on eBay, Craigslist or run an ad in your local classifieds. Even if you make a fraction of what you paid for an item, it’s still better than nothing.

Give It Away. Give used books to friends or relatives or a local book sale. This part feels great because you are freely passing along some of your stuff to someone who might truly find it valuable.

Trash It. The simplest, but easily the most difficult step in this process. Whatever you don’t want to keep, or cannot sell or give away, you will need to finally part with it. In other words, throw it out. You will never feel more liberated.

There you have it. Don’t lose sight of the goal – making space for you new baby and all of the furniture and supplies that come along with it. If you don’t do anything about your existing clutter, then it won’t be long until you find it difficult to just walk around the house without tripping over all of your stuff.

Making Room For Baby – Part One: Decluttering

My wife and I come from a long line of hoarders. Growing up, I always had a hard time letting go of stuff, in the hope that I may one day need it. I still have University essays, lecture notes, even scribbled notes and ideas the existence of which I had long forgotten. Until I started the process of decluttering what will become our future nursery, I had no idea just how much stuff we own.

It is easy to overlook the boxes and piles of stuff in the various corners and closets of the house, and when you start the process of getting rid of all this stuff, it can be a daunting task.

To make decluttering less overwhelming, there are a few things you should consider before opening that first box of stuff.

Have a Plan

If you’re like me, you have probably accumulated a lot of stuff over the years that has gone dusty with lack of use. Books, notes, trinkets, memorabilia from events long forgotten – all of this stuff takes up value physical and mental space.

Not only is this stuff always there, but you are always thinking about it. Every time you walk past that pile of books, it’s hard not say to yourself, “I should really do something about those books.” And yet, we continue to ignore the books even when we’re tripping over them.

Decluttering starts with a plan.

How long do you have? Months? Weeks? Days?

The first thing you should do is make a mental list of all the stuff you have. Be exhaustive at this point, because it is better to spend time on the details now than when you’re knee-deep in stuff and then remember another closet you ignored at the beginning.

For us, we decided to concentrate on just one room. And since we still have six months before the baby arrives, we can take the process slowly. We also need to paint and decorate the new nursery, and have decided to set aside about two months to that project. That leaves us four months. This may look like a long time to declutter one room; but it’s surprising how long it can take to get through it all. The important thing is to really assess what is actually in there.

Next, set three or four milestones. Within the four months we have set aside, by the end of each month I want to declutter one quarter of the room. A quarter of a room is not a lot and is not too mentally draining to clean.

And that’s the point. You want this process to be as painless as possible because I need to stick with it.

Start Small

We have no choice but to start with one room, though we could easily spend the next four months decluttering the entire house. I want to keep it simple and start small.

If you don’t want to go through an entire room, start with just the closet, or a dresser, or just one box that you have spent a long time looking at but never opening.

What’s important is that you make a start, even if it’s just small part of your overall volume of stuff. Once you get started and feel the burden of stuff gradually lifting off of your shoulders, you will be more motivated to take on larger projects.

Stay Focused

In our multi-tasking obsessed culture, it is increasingly easier to get distracted from important tasks. When decluttering, it’s paramount that you focus on the main task and not allow yourself to tackle a different project or be pulled in another direction.

The worst thing that can happen is when you start to clear a room and then get pulled into something else that distracts you from the decluttering project. What you’ve done is worsened the clutter worse, because now it’s no longer hidden in boxes or behind closet doors but out in the open piled on the floor.

Stay focused by starting small and continuing until you have finished. It helps to schedule some time devoted to decluttering (perhaps as little as an hour at first) and do nothing else but clean.

How To Declutter: Keep or Kill

My method of decluttering is fairly simple. As I go through boxes and drawers, I make two piles. One is the stuff I keep, and the other is stuff I’m going to get rid of. Ideally, the “Kill” pile is larger than the “Keep”, but with items like clothing that’s not always possible.

As you empty boxes, shelves, and drawers, you can place the “Keep” stuff back in the places (now with much more breathing room) and then start to work on the “Kill” pile.

In Part Two, I will talk about what to do with the various “Kill” piles that you create. Getting rid of the stuff can be just as lucrative as it is liberating.

In the meantime, here are two fantastic decluttering resources:

Unclutterer

Zen Habits

Pregnancy and Productivity

There’s something about slowly growing, human alarm clock that makes me want to get a lot of stuff done. Like now.

I’m a pretty good procrastinator. I like to make plans and lists, and start something for a little while and then put it aside to pick up something else. But the day my wife told me she was pregnant, all of this suddenly changed perspective.

Our life is going to change in a huge way. And while I felt I could mess around in things forever, I realize now that it may be a long time before I get to write and publish a book, hike from Toronto to Hudson’s Bay, win a Nobel prize, etc.. So I plan to get these things done now.

Paying attention to your productivity is not a bad thing, pending baby or not. Here are some resources I feel can teach you a lot more about productivity than I can.

Getting Things Done - By David Allen

Pretty much the current bible of productivity. While it is geared more for the uber-busy executive, this book can give you a ton of great ideas from which you can develop your own system. GTD is a great resource and

43 Folders

This site translates David Allen for the rest of us. Merlin Mann has some great ideas for personal productivity (like the Hipster PDA). He’s really able to dumb down a lot of complex concepts into edible pieces.

Zen Habits

Where GTD aims to keep all of your dozens of actions, projects, and contexts organized, Leo Babauta instead preaches the productivity of less, and a more simple way of life. Given the choice, it’s better to just have less to do than be overwhelmed by a ton of things that you need to organize.

Unclutterer

And speaking of less, Unclutterer is a resource I’m going to know and love over the next eight or so months. As my wife and I start to declutter various rooms of stuff to make space for a nursery, I’ll be referring to this site often.

Most good productivity tips and tools should be free. These are just a few of the many great resources available to help you get your life together in time for the little timebomb of disorganization that’s coming.