In honor of College Basketball’s annual competition March Madness, follow our advice to cull your belongings to just a team of winners.
Follow March’s monthly mantra and be Mindful And Reflective.
Every Sunday this month, set up a friendly competition among your belongings. Asking questions can help you “select” your “starting line-up” for coffee mugs, staplers, left over binders, and any category of clothing.
Some people really respond to visualizing:
• imagine you have to move, would you pack something, move with it and use it in your new place? There can be a lot of freedom in imagining yourself in a new place without the baggage, history, volume of stuff you live with now. You don’t have to move to experience this freedom!
The Minimalist movement begs you to ask: Could you live without it.
Of course we could ALL live without many things in our lives…but how do you test yourself?
How do you delay the finality of such a decision?
To TRY living without something, you can create a maybe box.
Create a Maybe Box:
• collect the items you think you can live without
• box or bag the item(s) – use a dark trash bag or a cardboard box. If you have opaque tubs that’s okay but avoid using clear bins. The idea is you don’t want to SEE what’s inside.
• label the container with a future date some amount of time from now. Could be a week? a month? 3 months? In rare cases a year (you don’t want your maybe boxes to become clutter so be very careful with this).
• store the container temporarily somewhere out of the way
• record the future date (and the location of where you stored the container of maybe’s) in your calendar (paper or electronic):
• when that date rolls around, if you haven’t had to go into the “maybe box” for anything, donate it.
Don’t look inside.
Don’t doubt that you can’t live without the items.
You’ve already proven to yourself that you can 🙂
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