What do you do about clutter?

[samingeorgia]

The title says it all. I get several professional and hobby magazines. They have accumulated like crazy; I'm trying to get this place under control. Should I hire one of those "organizing" consultants?

My office is in my home. What used to be confined to a spare bedroom has now spilled over into another bedroom and the dining room. I use the bed in the "spare" bedroom for Work-in-Process and the dining room table for completed work.

I'm getting sick of this clutter!

If I had a wife she would have killed me by now.

[JohnH]

In "Getting Things Done", David Allen recommends the following:

1) Set up a trusted system to keep track of all your open loops and Next Actions;

2) Go to Lowes or Home Depot and buy some crime scene tape.

3) Wrap the crime scene tape around the clutter.

4) Whenever something is removed from the clutter, do what needs to be done with it and put it in its proper place in your trusted system.

5) NEVER allow anything to cross the crime-scene tape in the opposite direction (back into the clutter)

[miatax]

Another recommendation:

Set a little bit of time aside each day - 15 or 30 minutes - and start recycling many of those magazines you know you won't read again. I only keep the magazines with articles I find very interesting and that are applicable to my work.

Best of luck.

[kcjenkins]

You actually know you are not going to read those old magazines. Throw them out, you don't need to pay a consultant to tell you that. Offer them to your local library, and if they take them you can always go there to visit them..

Many of those mags are now available online, or as an emailed pdf to you, check on that and switch to electronic versions of any you can find. The great part of that is that it's SO much easier to research from the archived electronic versions. Hey you

Then when you have cleaned out those, start on your files. Huge external hard drives are very cheap now. buy a decent scanner, and start scanning old files, then shredding the paper files. Hey, you could even pay some teenage neighbor to cut the magazine spines, and scan in those, if you really can't bear to part with them. :rolleyes:

[Lion EA]

I have similar problems, only maybe not as intense. One tiny tip my husband uses for all his professional journals: he skims them, tears out any articles he thinks he really must read more thoroughly, and puts the mags in the recycle bin. Off season (he's a teacher, so that's summer for him) he reads the articles, files a few he thinks he'll refer to again, and gets most of them into recycle. So by the time school starts again, he no longer has stacks but does have a few new ideas in his file cabinet. I've been married to him for over 15 years, and he hasn't bought any new cabinets. He tends to toss a couple of things every time he files a new article.

[samingeorgia]

Good points, all! KC, great idea about electronic delivery of content. I swear I don't see why magazines with serious content (JofA, for example) don't offer an "archive" CD at the end of each year with indexed articles. I'd pay extra for that!

[Randall]

You actually know you are not going to read those old magazines. Throw them out, you don't need to pay a consultant to tell you that. Offer them to your local library, and if they take them you can always go there to visit them..

Many of those mags are now available online, or as an emailed pdf to you, check on that and switch to electronic versions of any you can find. The great part of that is that it's SO much easier to research from the archived electronic versions. Hey you

Then when you have cleaned out those, start on your files. Huge external hard drives are very cheap now. buy a decent scanner, and start scanning old files, then shredding the paper files. Hey, you could even pay some teenage neighbor to cut the magazine spines, and scan in those, if you really can't bear to part with them.

That's what I've done. Started scanning a few years ago. Still have some old paper files to scan. Doing it myself to save money, but it takes time so it's a gradual process. I throw out magazines, but for my old National Geographics, I take them to a local senior residence place, a few at a time. The Director said the residents love them. They may be old editions but they aren't that out of date. I kept the maps though. Love maps.

[kcjenkins]

The library suggestion has two benefits. Say you have 7 subscriptions. Once you know that the library already has a subscription to A, C, and F, you can save money by reading those at the library, and dropping your subscription to them, if you don't actually read them when you get them. And you cannot only clean up your space by giving them to the library, they will keep them in better order than you do, so when you do want to reference them, you can actually find the one you need!

But I really like Lion's husbands idea, too. Only thing I'd add to it would be not to file the paper pages torn out, but to scan them into the computer instead. Reading them on the computer means you can use the tools like "Find" to go right to the part you want to read. And we all keep a lot of stuff we don't really need. I've found that moving some things to a banker's box, with a date on the box, and storing it for a year, makes it easier for me to throw things away. If it's been in that box for a year, and I never looked for it, I can cheerfully dump that box now. This is not for files, of course, those need to be shredded not just dumped. But Scanning them and then shredding the paper file sure does feel good.

[Lion EA]

And we've both dropped subscriptions to almost everything except a local newspaper and a couple of his trade magazines, because we can read all the others online now anyway.