Today is February 1st so I’ve been doing this Year of Less project for a full month now and I’m really really really really enjoying it. I haven’t been doing it long enough for major impact on my life, but I’ve certainly forced a lot of thought and conscious editing of things. I thought I’d give a quick update on that. Numbers wise I’ve gotten rid of 98 things. In 31 days, so I actually think the “how much did you get rid of” part of this is becoming the least interesting. I’ll get rid of a lot of stuff, and that goes without saying now I think.
But what am I getting rid of?
That’s more interesting.
Especially when I have a goal to get rid of one thing a day, and it’s been a super busy day and all the sudden at 10PM I realize I haven’t gotten rid of anything. Which has happened. And then I scramble and find something I have no use for and I can’t believe I’ve been holding onto for some dumb amount of time. When I look at the doc I’ve been keeping, there’s days when I got rid of 5 things, 10 things, 25 things… those are the days when I was actively working on it and are expected. But the days I only got rid of one thing are the days when I probably scrambled a bit. So what are some of those things?
– A remote control to a broken roomba that I threw out months ago.
– A stack of membership cards to airport lounges that expired years ago.
– A keychain flash light that hasn’t worked in a year but I had been keeping in my dresser thinking I could fix it some day.
– A battery charger for something I don’t even know what it could be.
– Box for an iPhone 3Gs. Just the box. What?!
– The charger for the FitBit I lost a year ago.
– Old eyeglasses with out of date prescription and broken frames
This list goes on and on. All of this is obviously junk, but it’s junk I’ve had for over a year in most cases. Junk I haven’t used in over a year in most cases. And since I moved within the last year, it’s junk I packed up and moved with me in most cases. What the hell was I thinking? Forcing myself to find these things and get rid of them is pretty great.
I’ve also noticed how often I’m resisting the impulse to “1 click buy” things on amazon or whatever. I see something cool a friend has, I look it up online and before I realize it I’m staring at it on Amazon. Last year I would have impulse bought the hell out of that stuff. I did impulse buy the hell out of it. Now I’m catching myself, and at the moment I’m bummed, because I have this mental desire to buy stuff. Which is insane, because it’s something I didn’t know existed minuted earlier, and all the sudden I have this feeling that my life won’t be complete without it. But the next day I’m PSYCHED that I stuck to my guns and didn’t buy something I really didn’t need.
Which is really the reason I’m doing this. So that’s pretty awesome. Month 2, here we go!
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