I wage a continual war in our study at home - with paperwork, junk mail, flyers, magazines, letters, envelopes, food wrappers, boxes, cartons, bags, wires, books, and various other miscellaneous “stuff”.
If left unchecked, the junk mountain rapidly multiplies, slowly forcing me into a corner of the room. The door no longer shuts. The once clear desk no longer has elbow room. The book shelves carry not only books, but also numerous bits and pieces, precariously balanced in such a way that no books can actually be taken from the shelves any more.
There is a solution though. A drastic one. Casting my mind back, I think it was David Allen (he of “Getting Things Done” fame) that spoke about it on This Week in Tech some time ago.
Scoop everything into a huge box, and store it somewhere else.
It’s akin to picking the room up, and shaking it. Get rid of everything. Over the coming days you can always delve into the box, and get things back as you need them - but you should find yourself doing that increasingly infrequently. After a while you can ditch the box. You’re not going to need it’s contents again - or if you are, it can’t have been that important.
The big problem we all seem to face is throwing stuff away. We might need something! We fear the moment we no longer have something, we will need it. This is of course nonsense. If it were true, nobody would ever move house for fear of misplacing some itty bitty thing from their stuff mountain.
I like the nuclear option - the big box - it appeals to the procrastinatory part of me (and yes, I know procrastinatory isn’t a real word). Dealing with stuff by not dealing with it seems like it would be quite cathartic.