Friday, July 23, 2010

Moving and the Spirit of the 100 Thing Challenge

So we’re moving to Austin Texas. A new job with AMD is taking me there, along with my family. I feel very fortunate to have the job, especially since they are paying for my relocation. We’re now in the middle of going through everything in our home of 27 years, deciding what to take with us on the move, what to give away, and what to throw out. We’re constantly amazed at what we decided to save over the years and view this as an amazing opportunity to significantly declutter and simplify our lives.

I’ve always been fascinated by the “100 Thing Challenge”  promote by Dave Bruno – reducing your personal possessions to 100 items. It occurred to me that this would be a great opportunity to actually give that a try since I'm going through all my possessions and deciding what to keep and take with me anyway. What a great way to make a break with the past and start a new approach to living.

After giving it some thought, I began to question what I would really gain from strictly following this challenge. Instead, I decided it would be better to focus on the spirit of the challenge and significantly reduce my clutter in order to become less focused on, and bound by, a large collection of possessions. I decided to adopt a "filter" that would help me decide what to keep and what to get rid of as I went through things.

The first pass filter I chose is fairly simple: If something doesn't make me a better person or help me achieve my goals, then get rid of it. You can't be too strict about this, so objects headed on the way out from the first filter get a 2nd chance: if they make my life easier, or bring joy into my life on a regular basis (preferably at least weekly), then they could stay.

I've been making some occasional exceptions to these rules, but I find that they do a great job of helping me make decisions to get rid of all sorts of old stuff that would otherwise be difficult to decide on. After you build up some momentum, these acts actually end up becoming rather cathartic and liberating. I'm beginning to think that it's healthy for people to undergo such purges on a regular basis now. I've been way overdue for one.

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