Peter Walsh

Clutter War II: Attack of the Giant Baby

Merlin Mann — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:58:02 -0400

As of next Sunday, our lovely daughter will have been with our houshold for six months (Happy Half-Birthday, Eleanor). It’s a good arrangement, and we’re all pretty happy about the whole thing so far. But, to look around our house, you’d think we were raising a small army of babies, each of whom has their own Amazon Prime account and an addiction to things that are shaped like giraffes.

Oh my, the stuff. The baby stuff. Everywhere. Means of conveyance, swingy seat, Bumbo, squeaky toys, fuzzy toys, toys for biting and bending, jammies, jackets, socks that do and don’t look like shoes, amusing hats, blankets, books, rattles, pacifiers, cleaning supplies, extra diapers — plus of course, there’s the raw tonnage of stuff belonging to the caretaking adults that has been displaced or disused as a result of the occupying baby’s needs. It is a scene, man, I can assure you. And there’s not an iota of blame to place on the actual baby; it’s all us (and mostly me). [By the bye, for an illuminating look at the perils of the creeping ParentCrap industry, have a look at Parenting, Inc. It’s chilling. And, for me, personally damning.]

At any rate, as we approach that august 183-day mark in our little girl’s life, you might be able to guess where my head is right now. Yep. It’s on clutter, and on what I need to do to get my face back into Peter Walsh’s excellent de-cluttering book as a means for regaining domestic sanity and striding toward the possibility of a life without tripping, piling, or losing what’s left of my sleep-deprived mind.

But let’s start with first principles:

It’s All Too Much
by Peter Walsh

Well, obviously for me, it starts with re-reading It’s All Too Much (isbn.nu | library search). As I’ve said before, this is a fantastic book that distinguishes itself by helping you understand why you have clutter, rather than just trying to help you find new places to store and “organize” it. Author Peter Walsh encourages you to imagine the life you really want, and then ruthlessly purge the items that are keeping that vision from becoming a reality. Pure gold.

Now, if you don’t have the time or inclination to look at the book with me right now, or if you’re one of those smarty boffins who points out that this would represent yet another piece of clutter — or even just to bring existing Peter fans back up to speed — here’s some posts from my previous excursion into the world of It’s All Too Much. It was a bracing sprint that helped me rid myself of crap that had been doing nothing for my life for years:

My War on Clutter - “Although no official record of the conversation exists, I would not be surprised to learn that I tried to talk the staff who delivered me into letting me keep my first diaper; just because — y’know — you never know when it might come in handy.”
My War on Clutter: Never “organize” what you can discard - “The truth is that this is like covering your tumor with a bandage, and without thoughtful paring-down, all those crates and boxes and storage spaces do nothing to improve the basic problem.”
My War on Clutter: The Tools to Purge BIG - “I cannot overstate the importance of making a zone like this early in your project. You must know without hesitation that whatever you run across — no matter how big or bulky — will find a temporary home in your dump zone before quickly being whisked out of your house forever.”
My War on Clutter: Inspiration for Independence Day - “If my own clutter war is piquing your interest in improving your surroundings, tomorrow could be the occasion for you to put a few minutes toward making a dent in your own pile.”
Vox Pop: Converting clutter from trash to treasure - Readers share their excellent suggestions on responsible, useful ways to repurpose trash into someone else’s treasure.
More from Peter Walsh on clutter, quality of life - “Capacity is only worth building when it’ll be used in the service of stuff you really want.”

Thing is, I now return to this book and this mission with a renewed level of resolve because I have to face the previously unthinkable; we must convert Dad’s entropic home office into a nursery suitable for a shiny little baby who doesn’t appear to enjoy sleeping on USB cables and books about developing in ShockWave (yes, thanks, there’s still lots of “low-hanging fruit” remaining).

So this new adventure begins. I hope to share some of this parent-focused de-cluttering with you over the next couple weeks, so pop back by if that appeals. For what it’s worth, I hope it will also have tidbits that appeal to the child-free or child-neutral amongst you.

As I returned to It’s All Too Much in the last week, I was struck by a line that sounded like something straight out of my Time & Attention talk. In introducing a chapter on the excuses most people give for suffering clutter, Peter Walsh says:

Everything in your home is there with your permission.

And it’s true. Or putting just a slightly sharper point on it, it might be said that “Everything in your home remains there with your permission.” That clutter becomes a tiresome houseguest that you just don’t have the heart to throw out. And he keeps inviting his messy friends who also have decided to camp out on every available surface.

So, if you’re the sort of put-together life hacker who would never accept a lame project or a pointless task, what sense is there in not applying the same rigor to your surroundings? Exactly.

Anyhow, here I go. Wish us luck. And, as ever, I hope you’ll share your thoughts on how you beat the crap back after your little one arrived and took over. I’d love for Eleanor’s second six months to take place in a comfortable, clutter-free house that baby, parents, and giraffes alike can enjoy.

”Clutter War II: Attack of the Giant Baby” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 21, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

More from Peter Walsh on clutter, quality of life

Merlin Mann — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:26:32 -0500

Oprah’s Clutter Man: “It’s Never About the Stuff”

Clean Sweep’s Peter Walsh (previously) has a new book out, and Mediabistro had the chance to chat with him while he was out promoting it.

While I wish Peter had held out for a more cromulent title (“Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?” Ouch.), I so admire this guy’s grip on what clutter does to your mind. Or at least what it does to mine.

Typically swell quote:

Our show was never about the stuff. I told the producers early on that you can only organize so many closets and garages before people lose their minds… We all have stuff. What we had to do was tell people’s stories through their stuff, and see them realizing what their relationship to the stuff had become.

and, later:

What is your vision for the life you want to live, and do your life choices reflect that vision? Specifically: Is your home a space for the life you want?

Ours is a culture based on the idea that whenever you run out of space, you should just pull up stakes and move five miles west. Then you can be happy. Is it any wonder that we seek organization rather than deletion as the solution to an overwhelming problem? Yeah, I think this goes well beyond not being able to find a business card in your junk drawer.

Capacity is only worth building when it’ll be used in the service of stuff you really want. Whether that’s calendar events, your Fabergé eggs, or those crusty Lean Cuisine plates from last summer, the quality of matter that you allow to stay anywhere in your life eventually starts rubbing off on everything it touches.

”More from Peter Walsh on clutter, quality of life” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 19, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Peter Walsh's clever hanger trick

Merlin Mann — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 06:39:40 -0400

Here’s one of my favorite life-hacky tips from Peter Walsh (guy from Clean Sweep, author of It’s All Too Much, and inspiration for my recent War on Clutter).

After you’ve done a major purge of your closet, remove all the remaining clothes that live on hangers, and put them back in backwards, such that the open end of each hanger now faces you. Got it?

Then, mark your calendar for six months (or whatever) from today, and go back to your business as usual. Except that after every time you wear a shirt or a jacket or a skirt or what have you, when you replace the item, make sure the hanger faces the opposite/usual way (with the opening in the back).

When your n months have passed, and your calendar reminds you that it’s time, open your closet and remove every piece of clothing on a backward hanger; the chances are good you can give it away without the slightest pain, because you just clearly demonstrated that you don’t wear it.

Here’s why I love this.

I’ve said before that, in my estimation, a life hack is any kind of trick that forces the Smartypants part of your brain and the Dumbass part of your brain to stay in proper communication.

You think to yourself “Oh, I wear this all the time. I couldn’t possibly throw it out.” But humans are notoriously awful at accurately estimating these kinds of things — I know I am anyway. And it takes stupid tricks like this to prove what inevitably happens when we let our Dumbass run off-leash.

In the same way that you can’t lie to your iPod, a good behavior-based life hack like this one will ensure that what you think is happening is supported by the evidence of what’s really happening. Just a trivial bit of physical-world intervention will — as my friend, Mr. Veen says — make the right thing into the easy thing.

”Peter Walsh's clever hanger trick” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak Weekly 47: Merlin's picks

Merlin Mann — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 07:06:51 -0400

MacBreak Weekly 47: That’s Our Shooby!

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Scott Bourne, and Alex Lindsay

Universal challenges iTunes, iPhone hacks, and our software picks of the week…

Here’s a direct MP3 download of MBW 47.

This time we did our usual weekly software picks, but I also got to choose our Audible.com audiobook of the week. Can you guess what it is?

Audible.com Audiobook Pick - It’s All Too Much - I was glad I got a chance to mention the book that inspired 43f’s current series on clutter. Peter Walsh offers a perspective on getting rid of clutter that goes beyond shuffling and organizing “stuff,” to breaking down the emotional barriers that make you keep so much crap in the first place. Highly recommended for rethinking the way your current possessions (and the space they inhabit) map to the life you want. Also, if you’re not up for joining Audible, the audiobook is also available on iTunes, plus there’s always the dead tree edition.
(Hear Merlin’s Audiobook Pick at 00:59:10 of the podcast.)
Software pick - Mozy - Mozy (say: MOH-zee) is an online service that securely backs-up your files in the background. It’s easier to use than most online and S3-based services and much more robust than Apple’s .Mac and Backup.app. Mozy has a “set it and forget it” functionality that might save your butt. You can even schedule backups and throttle bandwidth usage during the day. The Mac-friendly version is in beta, but seems to work fine; free account gives you 2GB of storage while $4.95 gives you “unlimited” space each month.
(Hear Merlin’s Software Pick at 01:11:56 of the podcast.)

”MacBreak Weekly 47: Merlin's picks” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 06, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

My War on Clutter: Inspiration for Independence Day

Merlin Mann — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 11:08:15 -0400

Tomorrow is the Independence Day holiday here in the US, so a lot of folks reading this will have the day off from work. If my own clutter war is piquing your interest in improving your surroundings, tomorrow could be the occasion for you to put a few minutes toward making a dent in your own pile.

Here’s some inspirational (and cautionary) links to get you started.

Unclutterer: Tips - A major tip of the cap to Jerry Brito and his pals at Unclutterer; in addition to having great tips on doing more with less, this is the site where I first learned about Peter Walsh’s book, It’s All Too Much, which I will freely credit with kicking off my recent spree of de-cluttering
Declutter 101: Declutter Strategies - This is the first place I ever saw the “four box strategy.” While this amount of sorting is a little more nuanced than my own scorched earth approach, it’s much more appropriate for people with minor clutter issues or who are just in need of a little regular maintenance.
Declutter 15 Minutes per Day - If you can slice through the velvety nougat of prose in which they’re suspended, Fly Lady’s tricks are almost always fantastic. This page pulls together some of her best tips in one place. Highly Recommended and very life-hacky.
OC Foundation: Hoarding Introduction - Information on understanding and treating compulsive hoarding. Hoarding is real, widely misunderstood, and totally sucking for everyone it touches. While not the garden variety source of clutter, it’s something to be aware of if the clutter problems of you or someone you love are spiraling.
Squalor Survivors - A support site for compulsive hoarders and anyone living in squalor. The before and (yikes, even some of the “after”) photos from this site’s contributors are dramatic, to say the least (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Collyer brothers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Perhaps the most infamous compulsive hoarders, the Collyer Brothers lived and died surrounded by “over 100 tons of rubbish.” That’s in one Manhattan apartment, mind you.

Do yourself a favor, though. Don’t just read and gawk. Take at least one step today to do something that clears a single small area or that ensures one dead piece of your world gets delivered to the curb.

Whatever your current state of clutter keeps you from doing (or being), remember it all starts with the first piece of junk you move out of your world. Talk about independence.

”My War on Clutter: Inspiration for Independence Day” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 03, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

My War on Clutter: The Tools to Purge BIG

Merlin Mann — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 05:43:44 -0400

[This is a first-person account of what’s worked for me in preparing to gut the crap out of my house; you should feel free to do or not do any part of this — or just adjust the recipe to whatever suits your own needs, hangups, household fetishes, and budget. But you knew that, right?]

My past attempts at removing clutter have consistently bottlenecked at a few common points. Often I wasn’t really committed to the idea of a full purge, so I’d ignore whole boxes of memorabilia. Other times, my goal was primarily aesthetic, so I’d end up shoveling things into pretty boxes and “organizers”. But I finally realized what’s really been stopping me from accomplishing anything substantial. It’s so simple and so dumb that I’m embarrassed to admit it: my garbage can was too small.

Yeah, I mean that both literally and figuratively. Because part of my success in purging this time around has come from thinking much bigger in every way — I want bigger changes from throwing out more stuff including the big dumb items that won’t fit in a garbage can. Here’s some tools and processes that have helped me.

Basic supplies

The Brute Trash Can
Merlin’s new best friend

First, I went to the store and bought two 32-gallon Brute trash cans, ten 12-gallon boxes, and a huge-ass roll of contractor bags.

One Brute can is for straight-up trash, and the other is for recycling (primarily paper); each gets lined with a contractor bag. If you’ve never used a contractor bag, you’re in for a treat — these things are tough as nails and can take almost anything you throw at ‘em without tearing. You can even drag them to the curb without a peep.

The boxes I use to temporarily group and store stuff like DVDs, CDs, and books — stuff that has made the first cut of de-cluttering, but that still need to be re-evaluated once I can see all of each item in one place (more on this in Walsh’s book and in an upcoming post). These boxes aren’t cheap, but they’re sturdy, they stack neatly, and you can see the contents without needing to mark them. To me, it’s worth the dough, because speed and convenience are factors, plus I can eventually reuse a few of these for actual long-term storage once I’m done (and any remainders will nest neatly in a stack).

Establish a “dump zone”

TIP:
Use red gaffer’s tape to lay down a perimeter around your Dump Zone. Make it easy to see when you’re ready to schedule another dump run or drop-off.

Next, we cleared a space in the back of the garage to use as a “dump zone.” Any non-perishable trash, recycling, and large, unbagged items go straight into this area as soon as they’re identified and ready to go.

I cannot overstate the importance of making a zone like this early in your project. You must know without hesitation that whatever you run across — no matter how big or bulky — will find a temporary home in your dump zone before quickly being whisked out of your house forever. Seriously, if you could have gotten rid of that coat rack any other way, why haven’t you? Put it in the dump zone, and get back to work. Volume, volume, volume.

Schedule the funeral

Try Freecycle:
Freecycle connects people who want to get rid of stuff with people who want that stuff. Purge with a conscience, and do someone a proper. Learn more from Unclutterer.

Finally, decide on your strategy for how the stuff will get out of your house, and schedule it. Whether you plan on dump runs, putting stuff on Craigslist, donating to Freecycle, or renting a 9-yard dumpster (yeah, I did that once), do make a hard appointment in the next week for making sure that this stuff will disappear — even if that’s an appointment with yourself, get it on the calendar and honor it.

Want to know what I did? I hired SF Hauling (Yelp). Tell James that Merlin sent you. These guys were amazing. I set up a time, they came to the house, and for a surprisingly modest price, they loaded and hauled my stuff away to be recycled or dropped off at the dump. In 15 minutes their guys filled a pickup truck, and I didn’t have to lift a finger. (Hint: try searching Yelp or Craigslist to find a similar service in your area.)

But why does this scheduling matter? Why is this crucial to success? Why can’t you just keep a casual pile of “to donate” stuff in a corner forever? Because you must not live with the stuff you’ve decided to get rid of, and setting a date-certain for when it will go away gives you incentive to fill your dump zone with as much crap as you can. If you hesitate here, I guarantee that you’ll end up right back where you started — you’ll have wasted your time moving a bunch of shit from one place to another, then the cycle just starts over. Trust me: I had the coat rack to prove it.

Schedule it now.

Once more, unto the breach

10 Excuses:
Peter Walsh’s book, It’s All Too Much, explores 10 excuses people give for suffering clutter. Excuse #1 is “I might need it one day.” Know what? You won’t.

Once you have the tools you need and have scheduled your crap’s means of egress, then you can spend all your available time up til dump day filling bag after bag with dumb stuff — and you’ll never have to hesitate, thinking you’ll overfill your city trash can or overwhelm the recycling dudes. You can just focus on moving huge volumes of junk into the dump zone and out of your life.

Drawers full of broken pencils? Into the bag. Boxes of magazines you’ll never read? Into the bag. Cupboards full of “collectible” cups and baskets of single socks? Into. The. Bag.

Like I say, you should do whatever works for you, but like any life-hacky trick, remember that this works because you’re setting rules and accepting constraints. If you could do this without a system, why haven’t you?

These are the basics of my system, and they are working for me. More on the subtler processes of uncluttering forthcoming. But, whatever you do: think big and then get going.

”My War on Clutter: The Tools to Purge BIG” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 03, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

My War on Clutter: Never "organize" what you can discard

Merlin Mann — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:32:11 -0400

One of the most basic concepts Peter Walsh talks about in It’s All Too Much brought a total breakthrough for me. If the stuff that you accumulate doesn’t help get you closer to the life you want to have, it’s simply not worth keeping. Period.

Obviously (and unavoidably), this goes for a family room that’s turned into a junk drawer for DVDs and books, and you can clearly see it evidenced in a kitchen where no flat surface is free of junk mail, bills, and newspapers. Those you can’t miss.

But, for me, the real story is about the ways you try to solve clutter problems solely by getting more space or obtaining more containers — jamming all those DVDs into cabinets and stuffing those newspapers into bigger volume baskets. The clutter doesn’t need a prettier package; it just needs to go. Now, and in very large quantities.

Historically, my “housecleaning” has almost always consisted of precisely this kind of illusory shuffling — just getting things out of sight with only minimal discarding. If I could cram random stuff into a spanking new “solution” from The Container Store, I’d tend to feel like I’d really made progress.

The truth is that this is like covering your tumor with a bandage, and without thoughtful paring-down, all those crates and boxes and storage spaces do nothing to improve the basic problem. In fact, in my own experience, it makes the matter ten times worse, since you generate an entire underworld of physical goods that mean nothing to you. Your home or office becomes little more than a costly bucket for dead and useless crap.

So, above all, my first change in attitude has been about making things that definitely don’t belong go away quickly — not by generating false relevance by “organizing” them. For me, this means the opposite action; disinterring every sarcophagus of crap in my house and, item by item, evaluating how it’s making my family’s life better. You can’t believe how emotionally complex this is for a craphound like me, but once I get started, it’s completely exciting — the illusion that all this junk is making me happy melts away with every scrap of paper or broken piece of equipment I can get out of the way.

Also, I’ve found that something unbelievable and almost magical happens once I get into this mode: I start seeing things that I hadn’t ever noticed. Like the phone cords and SCSI cables.

See: during my last attempt at “cleaning up,” I (seemingly sensibly) focused primarily on organization, or the idea that most of my problem came out of not keeping like with like. So, I was very proud of myself after I’d spend the better part of two days ensuring that USB cables, ethernet cables, firewire cables, SCSI cables, and RJ-45 phone cords were all neatly separated and stored in their proper boxes.

Whoa, wait a minute. SCSI cables? Phone cords?

About half a day into my current scorched earth purge, I glanced across the office to see a box with eight different phone cords in it. Eight. This notwithstanding the fact that I have a single VoIP line and haven’t used a dial-up modem in 6 years. And SCSI cables? My God! I haven’t had a SCSI device hooked to my Mac in almost as long. Yet there they were, nicely organized and ready to serve their non-existent purpose.

Now they’re gone.

I’m finally getting my head around the idea that organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love — it’s not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to impart makebelieve meaning. And even though that 50-pin SCSI cable cost me a fortune in 1998, there’s zero reason for me to have it today. And, yet, there’s an invisible but very real cost associated with keeping it around.

As you wage your war on clutter, you will have many moments where you pause, item in hand, over the trash or recycling and feel resistance and fear. Sometimes its for cause, and you’ll elect to keep it, but also be prepared to let go on an unprecedented scale. Think volume and be brutal in your evaluations.

GTD‘ers know not to let pointless actions into their projects; why would you suffer pointless physical crap in your life?

”My War on Clutter: Never "organize" what you can discard” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 02, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

My War on Clutter

Merlin Mann — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:44:14 -0400

As I mentioned the other day, I learned about the anti-clutter book, It’s All Too Much, when its author, Peter Walsh, was interviewed for the Unclutterer site.

Well, the timing must have been right, because I bought a copy, and by the time I’d finished the first chapter, a switch had flipped in my head. I say “timing” because, while the book is pretty good (if perhaps not particularly groundbreaking), the author’s observations on why people allow themselves to live with too much crap were an overdue existential bitchslap for me. And, I’ll admit, he has simple cures for dealing with this seemingly intractable challenge, and for me that’s a hard combination to beat.

Clutter of every kind has been the default state of my physical world forever. Although no official record of the conversation exists, I would not be surprised to learn that I tried to talk the staff who delivered me into letting me keep my first diaper; just because — y’know — you never know when it might come in handy. Bad habits formed early, bad habits stuck, and, for the most part, bad habits remain intact to this day.

It’s All Too Much
by Peter Walsh

I lugged unnecessary crap through 3 moves a year in college, then entered a young adult life of unopened cardboard boxes and the omnipresent cruft of consumer existence. In addition to being a bit of a pig, I was also what Cory Doctorow calls “a craphound.” I had ersatz collections of stuff everywhere. But it wasn’t just ephemerabilia — I also lived with last week’s dishes, last month’s beer cans, last year’s TV Guide. You name it, I was not throwing it away.

Despite at least two purges of epic proportion in the late 90s, I moved to California with a lot of those same boxes — still unopened — and, although I did leave the empty beer cans in Tallahassee, the bad habits happily flew cross-country with me. Today, despite 7½ years of gentle intervention from a wonderfully tidy woman, I can still see ample evidence of my bad decision-making, twisted sentimentality, and utter failure to sensibly incorporate my worldly belongings into the space that’s available to contain them.

This bit from Chapter 3 of Walsh’s book is typical of the sections I’d credit with highlighting my awareness of the need for a change:

The things you own are a distraction to getting started on the right path. The key to getting — and staying — organized is to look beyond the stuff and imagine the life you could be living. Put most simply: It’s about how you see your life before all else.

Good stuff.

The problem is about more than just cubic inches of physical space — it becomes about cubic yards of mindshare when the state of your surroundings starts to define the promise of your future. The mindless junk of your past crowds out opportunities and sets pointless limitations. Pretty soon those “collectibles” start to seem a lot less valuable, and the baseline junk begins to look a lot less harmless. At least that’s been the revelation for me: clutter is not without its very real costs every day.

Anyway, this is all in the service of saying I’ve now spent the better part of the last 5 days throwing out crap, and I’m just getting started. This has been so alternately exhausting and exhilarating that I wanted to share some of it with you.

So over the next couple days, I’ll be writing about and linking to ideas that might help you wage your own war on clutter. Most of this won’t be brand new insight by a long shot, but if you have the clutter (and the ears to hear about some solutions), maybe you can join me in digging a tunnel to a more crap-free life.

”My War on Clutter” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 02, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Unclutterer talks with "Clean Sweep" host, Peter Walsh

Merlin Mann — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:54:03 -0400

Peter Walsh answers questions for Unclutterer.com

Thanks to my self-imposed media tunnel vision (and the bulging TiVo that enables it), I’ve apparently managed to miss a show on TLC called Clean Sweep that sounds like it’s potentially up my alley. I guess the idea is that they parachute in to crazy-messy houses and help the harried occupants affect a makeover.

The wonderful Unclutterer.com recently interviewed the show’s host, Peter Walsh, and he had a couple interesting things to say about origins of clutter that get to the root cause:

Clutter comes in many forms and the reasons why people hold onto it is similarly complex. There are two main types of clutter: Memory Clutter – which reminds one of an important person, or achievement or event from the past – and I-Might-Need-It-One-Day Clutter – this is the stuff held onto in preparation for all possible futures that one might encounter. Keeping things from the past or sensible planning for the future are great things – it’s when the objects take over that there’s a problem. With many of the people I encounter, their primary relationship is with their stuff. Instead of owning their stuff, their stuff owns them. This clearly is not only unhealthy but also a real stumbling block to happiness and a fulfilling life.

Here’s Walsh’s new book: It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. Already ordered our household a copy.

I’m deeply afflicted with both these clutter types, and I think one intense flavor of Clutter Type Number Two is people like me who hoard stuff out of a fear of future privation. When I was coming up, we used to talk about being a “string saver” — someone who would hang onto ridiculous pieces of crap in the vague hope that it would eventually save the day (or even just save the family $0.02). It’s a hard habit to break, for sure.

Regardless of the cause, it sounds like a big part of his work must be in acting as kind of informal on-site psychologist, talking people off the ledge about the stuff they can (and need to) let go of.

Interesting. I’ll find out for myself when I add it to the bulging Tivo. (Oh, irony, you are a douchebag.)

via: pjdoland’s bookmarks on del.icio.us

”Unclutterer talks with "Clean Sweep" host, Peter Walsh” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 22, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"