Merge and Purge
It’s time to declutter my home and my business
It’s time to declutter my home and my business
It is officially Fall in the Northern Hemisphere, which usually means cooler weather and more time indoors. Things people usually do around this time of year: switch their Spring/Summer wardrobe for Fall/Winter, rake falling leaves and harvest the plants and clean out the garden, deep clean their house and redecorate with warmer colors and heavier fabrics, and prepare for the upcoming holiday season.
In the Southern Hemisphere it is now Spring, so the above activities are just the opposite.
The Autumn Equinox: How to Apply This Change of Seasons to Your Business
The Autumnal (or “Fall”) Equinox happens in the Northern Hemisphere on September 22, 2021. For the Southern Hemisphere…pamelahilliardowens.medium.com
My husband and I have lived in our present home for eighteen years, and somehow, our house is now filled with STUFF. (“Somehow?” That’s the sound of my husband laughing that you hear in the background…) I still have boxes of stuff that I brought home from my late parents’ house after my sisters and I sold it TWO YEARS AGO.
Eighteen months ago, near the beginning of the pandemic, I moved out of my fully equipped coworking office and started working from home full-time; my home office was also fully equipped. So now I have DOUBLE of a lot of office supply stuff.
Since I’ve hardly gone anywhere in a year and a half and my business meetings are now primarily via Zoom, I have more clothes than I will ever wear. I really am sick of wearing tshirts and jeans every day, but I feel silly getting fully dressed just to go downstairs to my home office.
My husband and I are both writers and voracious readers and we have 100s of print books; some are more than 20–30 years old. Some classics are “keepers,” but seriously, if 2/3 of our books just disappeared, we wouldn’t even know they were gone.
I’m a “gadget girl,” and I usually upgrade my equipment every 2–3 years. So now I have lots of outdated devices, and more cords and cables than I could use in a lifetime.
My Word for 2021: Reclamation — Again
Why I am repeating my 2020 Word for the Yearmedium.com
I finally stopped using actual file cabinets to store paper files years ago, but when I look at my Dropbox, Google Drive, and Evernote files, there are items in there that are YEARS old.
It’s Time to Merge and Purge
So how am I going to get rid of all of this STUFF?? It is said that there are two main reasons that people have a lot of clutter:
They can’t make a firm decision about what to keep and what to discard.
They don’t have a “place for everything” so that “everything can be put in its place.”
My house is almost 4,000 sq.ft. covering four floors and a garage. Whew! That’s a lot of space and just about every room is full.
So the first thing I’m going to do is to put every room, every major device, and every file storage app on a Trello board, along with pictures and checklists.
Next, I’m going to start with the garage, because after I clear out a lot of junk there, I can use part of it for storage.
After the garage, the basement and the third-floor attic/guest room will get the same treatment because I can store a lot of things in those two areas.
My computers and devices are already backed up on an external hard drive AND in the cloud, so I am set there and ready to start deleting files I no longer need. I will work on one file storage place at a time.
One Room at a Time
Then, armed with big black trash bags, empty boxes, a Sharpie, a pail of water and my cleaning supplies, and my toolbox, I will “merge and purge” one room at a time. I will NOT move to the next room until the current room is totally completed.
I will feel such a sense of accomplishment as I finish a room, and by the time the new year arrives, our entire house will be unrecognizable!
Do YOU need to do a “merge and purge” in your personal and/or business life? If so, WILL you do it?
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Well, that’s it for today. I hope to see you again tomorrow!