Challenge within a challenge: To be tidy and have less; once and for all

Every year since around the age of 10 I have given myself the new years resolution of wanting to be tidy. And every year I fail. I always find something better to do than tidy up. I also have a problem in that I have a lot of stuff. I’m not a hoarder, but I just seem to have a lot of things. I’m not a shopaholic, yet I always have bags of things to be sorted.

I guess the main time I accumulated a big amount of material posessions was when I was at uni, and I have thrown out a large amount of these items since. But life goes on and you need new things as you acquire new skills or new tastes.

I’ve seen those challenges around of chucking out one thing per day and increasing it during a 30 day stint. What I want to do is have throwing out things as part of my daily routine. As bold as it sounds I want to throw out 2-5 things everyday. It may seem bold, but I’ve started doing an audit of exactly how many posessions I own. I haven’t finished that task as it’s a working progress, but with close to 150 DVDs and 45 items of gym wear, I know I can start getting rid of stuff easily.

It won’t be straight into the bin. The things I throw out will be either given to charity or recycled.

Following my journalism degree, I’ve always had a large amount of magazines and paper in general. Years ago I used to collect In Style magazine as I thought it made me sophisticated. And I thought piling up my collection, like Carrie Bradshaw did in Sex and the City with her Vogue magazines would be stylish. What it looked like was a mess and that I was a hoarder. And I decided to weigh my collection which was around 4-5 years old, and it weighed half my body weight!

Today I watched a great documentary on Netflix called Minimalism: A Documentary about Important Things and it was really interesting. And while I may not reach true minimalism, it’s made me realise that most of the stuff I have, I don’t need. I thought this for a while, but now is the time to truly attack the mass of possessions that I own.

I’ll keep a log of what I throw out. Throwing out rubbish such as packaging waste for recycling won’t count as it’s general waste. I think that the first few weeks it will be easy, a bit like with weight loss, the pounds go down a little faster in the beginning. It’s the weeks and months that follow that it slows down. But I hope if I build this little task into my daily routine, my mind-set may shift and hopefully I will own a lot less by the end of the year.

So let 2018 begin, with more tidying and hopefully less possessions!