Surely the problem isn't the books, rather the psychic RAM that they take up?

I carry a lot of books around, and I move home about every year, and every 3-4 years I move country. So I've paid again and again for these books. And I've spent many an hour pondering why I have so many, and what I could do to lessen the weight I carry, and I've come to some conclusions.

First, books can have an emotional significance, as can movies and music. Hence we're attached to them, and can't get rid of them without de-valuing the attached emotion. Second, a lot of my books are reference in nature, or rather I want them around for some fact or set of facts therein that I feel I might want in the future. Fair enough. Third, books generally take a lot more time to process than films or music, and it is a solitary affair. Sharing a reading room with a partner just doesn't work. Their sighs, gasps and laughter interrupt, and we want to elicit their attention with our emotive ejaculations.

So what to do? Well, I figured that a lot of reference books are defunct now. They are almost immediately out-of-date when they roll off the printing press, and querying a search engine is so much easier, and pervasive now, what with data phones. So out they go, unless there is some valid useful reason to keep them. Seriously, if you're still holding onto that computer book because you spent your hard earned cash on it, well, when's the last time you turned to it? So my advice is to dump all your reference books, unless you use them on a regular basis.

Then there's the question of the books which are not simply reference books, but which have hidden actions and projects embedded within them. We tell ourselves that we'll read the book again, and next time make the summary, extract the wisdom, or capture the action. But no, it never happens. Ever hungry for fresh food, our brains march ever onwards devouring new words and trampling our intentions.

So have a look through your books. How many of them have you said that you'll read again, that you'll summarise, etc. That is the real clutter. I get this feeling sometimes when I look at my filing cabinet, because I know I've just filed some things there without stripping them of their actions.

If you think hard about it, you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have, which is that we've led sloppy lives, committing ourselves to hundreds of projects and actions which we've never completed. That's the source of our angst. Time to go through your wardrobe and look at the clothes with actions embedded in them, or the shoes that you never wear because they were bought for some specific purpose which you never engaged.

And then you'll have to sit down and re-evaluate your thoughts about those actions and projects that you mentally conjured up but which fell out of your system.

The stuff you have is not clutter. The bed isn't clutter. The TV isn't clutter. The hi-fi isn't clutter. They take up space, but they don't take up psychic RAM because they fulfil their purpose.

Dave Allen is a genius, and that angst you feel is due to the creeping inbox syndrome.