Friday is cleaning day at our house. I should lock us in the house every Friday.... but well this morning we were off to a huge rummage sale. I purchased some items to resell on the internet and ok a few things for us... the globe puzzle is for geography (that's what I told myself as I wondered if we could even put it together.)
Home, baby care, eating.. and oh yeah Cleaning day. So I started to clean. Put away some clothes - decided I could give away some items yay - decluttering! Then I decided to clean out a box - it ended up being a box of things that had been in my van before I hit a deer weeks ago. Guess what I found? My husband's wallet! He has been looking for that. I threw out trash (why did we box that anyway?) Pulled out a receipt for a gift I was going to give but need to return instead - hope I can find it at the same time as the item. Some baby toys were put in Julianna's toy basket. Then the 80/20 principle occured to me.
If we only use 20 percent of our items 80 percent of the time then there is most like 80 percent of our items we could do away with. Meaning that I should be able to go through any box (yep lots of boxes) and easily get rid of a mere 20 percent of its contents. So I went to get a box. I pulled out the items in it - two unread children's magazines (guess we don't need to renew that one) a magnetc doll kit (dented maybe we can get rid of that too and 23 books. So I only need to get rid of 5 items - that would be easy. I pulled 2 books quickly we could get rid of (Little Runner of the Longhouse and Young Children's Mix and Fix cookbook in case you were wondering.) The Giving Tree a KEEPER - then I pulled 7 more books that could go.
I am a bookseller so I looked up the books before putting them on the front porch to be donated. 3 had members wanting them on paperbackswap and 4 were worth listing on Amazon, So I would get paid for cleaning and decluttering Woo Hoo! And I didn't manage to get rid of 80 percent of the items but I did manage to get rid of more than the 20 percent I was aiming for... Maybe doing that for every box will really help me to declutter more aggressively.
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