Tag Archives: 100 days

DAY XCIII

100 Days, , ,

Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life (©2009) by Gail Blanke is written in a breezy, informal, almost stream-of-consciousness style that ultimately begins to feel rather forced and disingenuous. She totally lost me on page 171 with, “I hadn’t heard back form a financial institution about whether or not they were sending me to Dubai to give an important speech to some of their most valued people in the Asia Pacific Rim.” Nevertheless, I slogged through the book to the end, wading knee-deep through the author’s gloating anecdotes about winning a regional swimming competition at age 12, ibeing the manager of special promotions for the New York Yankees at the age of twenty-four (“Yup. The only woman in Major League Baseball with what they called a front-office job”) and appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, of course she got the Dubai gig. The brief sections on “re-inventing yourself” were nominally interesting, but beyond that, I found the book lacking in helpful advice and I found little in the examples and anecdotes to which I could relate.

DAY XCII

100 Days, ,

Finished reading Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding (2nd edition, ©2014) by Tolin, Frost, and Steketee. A statement on page 45 made me laugh out loud because it so accurately describes my response to little bits of string, cardboard, or plastic packaging materials:

People with hoarding often run into trouble because of their intelligence and creativity. One way this occurs is when the person engages in over-creativity – the tendency to think of more and more uses for an object.

The passage goes on to describe a hypothetical situation with cardboard toilet tissue tubes! Yes, I periodically begin to compulsively save cardboard tubes because of their potential uses in diorama projects. Sometimes, when the clutter is particularly bad and I can’t find the box in which I’m collecting tubes, I simply pitch them into the room, intending to put them in the appropriate place when I get around to clearing the room.

Eventually I go on a cleaning binge and discard all the tubes. They burn really well in the fireplace… altho’ that is another potential reason to hoard them. Currently, however, I do not have any cardboard tubes stashed anywhere… altho’ yesterday I was tempted by an even more desirable paper towel roll tube!

Other than the quote above, I did not find Buried in Treasures to be particularly helpful or enlightening. Of course, being the third book I’ve read in the past few days on the same topic, it was unlikely that I would discover anything particularly new. Buried in Treasures takes a “workbook” approach to the process. To me, it seems like the book itself could be distracting, as it is filled with forms to fill out, surveys to take, and “experiments” to complete. The process as outlined in this book calls for quite a bit of writing. It’s an excellent book for people who like to procrastinate. There was a time when I would have happily immersed myself in the surveys and introspective writing exercises. At this point, I’m looking for insight into the psychological aspects of being attached to “sentimental” items, for practical tips on cutting ties with things and getting rid of stuff, and for motivation and “pep talks” to keep me rolling.

I have taken at least three filled trash cans out to the big trash can since starting to read these decluttering books, and I’m putting items to try to sell on eBay into a couple of clearly marked tubs. I am going through my boxes and tubs again, sorting things a bit better, and trying to thin things out. It’s slow going, and I still hang on to too much stuff. I also cleared away more outdoor clutter, like piles of yard debris and some broken tools and containers. I have some areas in mind on which I’d like to focus my attention next.

Additionally, having completely read three two-hundred page books, I think I have read more books in the past week than I read in all of last year! And I didn’t buy any of them!

We took some containers to a rental storage facility today. This will be a temporary situation, for no more than three or four months, in an effort to get the house cleaned up and listed for sale. Of my containers, I only took boxes of books today. I had thinned my book stash pretty thoroughly last summer, or so I thought. I still had seven tubs of books. I’m sure I could thin them out a bit more. I will do so before we actually move, if, indeed, we are able to sell the house.

I did not run today, but I got plenty of exercise moving boxes and tubs, plus cutting up a considerable pile of yard debris.

DAY XCI

100 Days, ,

Jogged 12.7 km today at a 7:18 /km average pace.

Finished reading the second of my library requests last night, The Secret Lives of Hoarders (©2011) by Matt Paxton. This book was skewed slightly toward providing the friends and families of hoarders insights and suggestions on how to deal with people who have a hoarding problem. The tone was lighter but more practical than the previous book, The Hoarder in You, that I recently read, with less psychological examination and more direct ways to work with a person who has hoarding or clutter issues.

The two most interesting points for me:

1. The author, who is a professional house cleaner, rates hoarders or clutterers on a five level scale he has developed over the years. He explained that in the early days of his business, “the scale that my company used was a pretty subjective one and based roughly on the number of dead cats we found in a house.” He then continues, “after years of working with clients we’ve refined our language.” I found this highly amusing, because according to his description of his current scale, I would rate myself a solid “2” on his 5-point scale (with 5 being the highest level of squalor). If someone were to carefully sort through my belongings, they would find precisely two dead cats – one a completely mummified cat carcass I discovered under a house many years ago, with the second being only a skull.

2. The author, Matt Paxton, states that in his experience as a professional cleaner, 99% of the “collections” he sees are worthless.

This last statement leaves me thinking about the things I intend to get rid of by selling on eBay. My spouse occasionally helps out one of our neighbors with filing and organizing. The neighbor pays her twenty dollars an hour for her work. When I list items to sell on eBay, at best I can process two or three items per hour, and that doesn’t necessarily include the time required to photograph the items and crop and tweak the photos, and it certainly doesn’t include the time (or space) spent storing the items or shuffling them around while I’m looking for something else. With occasional exceptions, the final “take” after paying eBay and PayPal commissions and shipping costs on any single item is often less than twenty dollars. And of course there’s always a significant portion of listed items that do not sell. Is it worthwhile, then, to keep boxes full of items that I intend to sell on eBay? I’m getting better about this in that I no longer keep items that will likely bring less than ten dollars. This is a result of rising shipping costs making the sale of inexpensive items impractical for the casual “garage sale” level seller like me. Now I’m starting to think about the rest of the items I retain for future sale.

DAY XC

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Last night I finished reading The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life (©2011) by Dr. Robin Zasio, the first of the “decluttering” books I requested from the library a few days ago. I found it an interesting and helpful book – I have already donated a box of magazines to the library book sale that I’ve been lugging around for fifteen years!

The main idea I gleaned from this book is the concept of “cognitive distortion,” of seeing or thinking about things differently than they actually are. In fact, I strongly, strongly recognize about eight and a half of the nine listed cognitive distortions detailed in Chapter 5, including:

  • All or none thinking, or dichotomous thinking: you see all things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you believe yourself to have failed.
  • Over-generalization: a single negative event seems to you a never-ending pattern of defeat.
  • Discounting the positive: you reject positive experiences by insisting that they don’t count and ignore successes.
  • Mind reading: you negatively interpret the thoughts or feelings of others even though there are no solid facts that support your conclusion.
  • Fortune-telling: anticipating that things will turn out badly and treating the prediction as an established fact.
  • Catastrophizing: expecting the worst possible outcome and responding as though your prediction will come true. This tends to lean toward highly exaggerated conclusions.
  • Emotional reasoning: Assuming that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are.
  • Should statements: you try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts. The emotional consequence is guilt and a perpetual feeling of failure.
  • Labeling: an extreme form of over-generalization in which, instead of identifying an error in your thinking, you attach a negative label to yourself, such as, “I’m a loser.”

I found the book easy to read, straightforward, and helpful in understanding the psychological side of not just cluttering/hoarding, but of low self-confidence in general.