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tanaqui posting in

unclutter

Last year,

fred_mouse made a weekend decluttering post inviting us talk about our decluttering goals for 2018.

I thought people might appreciate a post on the last day of 2018 to reflect on the goals we posted last year (for those who posted them and who want to look back -- no pressure or judgment! I certainly didn't achieve all my goals!) and what we hope to achieve in 2019.

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From:

adair

What a good idea. My goals last year related to books; they were not that specific; get more out of my house and organize the bookshelf so I could find things.

I've done both things partially; I later decided that getting 500 books out was a number to aspire to, and I did remove 343. I am making 500 the goal for 2019 as well, and more importantly, continue noting the number of books I move on in a list on my computer. Watching those numbers go up was more encouraging than I thought it would be.

I have also pulled all the books from my double-shelved bookcase wall, shelf by shelf (a lot of my discards came from the back shelves) entered everything in the back shelf in my LibraryThing account with a shelf location tag - south wall back three west, for instance - so now I can search LT and find the books I cannot see on shelves but know where they are. I also took this time to get at least some authors organized with their books together. It's all a work in progress, but helpful things have happened.

For 2019 I hope to

1. Move 500 books out of my house
2. Organize the east wall bookcases. There are three, and some of them are double-shelved. I'd like to get everything here in LT because some of the shelves are hard to get to; computer desks are in front.
3. Continue efforts to clean up and organize data files; mostly articles that I saved from various sources. Many are not even sorted by topic. They are just in the monthly downloads and not really findable. I plan to do a fair amount of editing also, but I need to push myself to let go of stuff I think is interesting but I will probably not read again.
4. Think and write about why I save so much written material. I used to keep Morning Pages, and I have started them again; bits and pieces of why I save stuff has been showing up there every now and then; I may eventually try to think and write more deeply about it.

It's all about written material, but I have proved this year I can do some of this, so I will work on it next year. Number 4 is a bit of a stretch, I am not sure I want to go that deeply into why I save written material, but I think an aspiration can result in some action, even if it is not completed. My 500 book goal is an example.

From:

tanaqui

I've already congratulated you on getting so many books out of the house, but I didn't realize how much work you'd done on cataloguing some of what's left -- I'm very impressed! Even if you eventually end up with still "too many books", having their locations listed means they're so much more under control.

I really like your next year's goals, too - "do more of the same!" but in a very focused way. :-) I hope writing about why you save stuff helps you deal with the stuff you have, and that you make good progress with your goals, even if you don't hit your targets.

From:

fred_mouse

Congratulations on getting so many books out of the house. Wonderful to hear that you found a method of keeping track of them that you find motivating.

Good luck with your 2019 goals! The written material one is something I can entirely understand. I find drifts of papers everywhere in the house, even in spaces that I think I've already gone through.