Last week I picked up a book from the library about removing clutter from your life called Clutter Free by Kathi Lipp. It’s been an interesting read. As long time readers of this blog know, I’ve had quite the struggle with accumulating and collecting too many things — although technically, I don’t struggle at all with accumulating the things, it’s figuring out what to do with them, where to put them, and how to part with them that’s really the struggle. Acquiring them is no struggle at all!

Clutter Free suggests one reason some people have trouble parting with things is that when it comes time to part with an item, they ask the wrong questions. Often times people ask themselves things like “Would the person who gave this to me be upset if they knew I got rid of it?” or “Do you know how much I spent on this item?” Instead, Lipp suggests you only ask the following three question for any item you are considering parting with:

– Do you love it?
– Do you use it?
– Would you buy it again?

It’s an interesting approach, although for people like myself (who love everything), I’m not sure how effective it will be. I can tell you that shortly after reading the chapter about getting rid of clothes I promptly emptied out my drawer full of “shorts that might fit and/or come back in style someday” and already sent them to Goodwill.

One chapter of the book is a list of 30 things you can part with right now. Some of the tips, like “ink cartridges to printers you no longer own” and “any toys from the Dollar store,” make sense. Others, like “any DVDs you haven’t watched in the past year” and “old computer parts,” are… well, I’m sure she means well.

In the book Lipp also challenges her readers to get rid of 2,000 things a year, or approximately 5.5 things a day. To keep things fair, the author says that items with lots of pieces (a jigsaw puzzle, for example) only count as one item and not 1,000. With this mentality parting with clutter almost becomes a game, although I have to think I could do this for a decade and still not get out of the garage. I got rid of eleven pairs of shorts today so I have one day to think about it. If you’re allowed to count things like individual markers and what not from the junk drawer, I’ll bet I could do 2,000 items before the end of the year, starting in August.

Yes, I think I’ll try that.