Really? I care so little about myself that I bought and stored all this veritable junk?Įlizabeth Griffin I let myself be scared after purging 10 years of paper. When I cleared out my closet, I had eight garbage bags worth of stuff, and it was a real moment of truth.

I'd buy the same clothes over and over again because I wasn't ever sure what I owned - or, more importantly, what I really needed. I made it a priority to take care of myself.įrankly, I was 40-year-old and dressing like a 20-year-old. Where would I naturally drop my keys? Or my purse? I changed where items live so they work for how I use them - and fought the urge to store things in places just because they happened to fit there. Maeve and I walked through my daily life, and she'd ask me to pause at important moments. How many school meetings do I have? How often do I go out to dinner? When I figured out what clothes I really needed in my wardrobe (and what was just extra junk) it was really eye-opening. When I was clearing out my closet, I looked closely at my month. When it comes to decluttering, you can't put the horse before the cart - what works for a friend (or what you've spied on Pinterest) will fail if it doesn't fit into your life. I really took stock of what my day (and week, and month) looked like.

And then I put the ones we didn't save in a black garbage bag, took a deep breath, and walked away. But instead of packing the endless projects away, I used the Artkive app to create digital records of their drawings.

I wasn't willing to let it go, but now it hangs on a bulletin board and isn't stuffed in a drawer. We came upon a lottery ticket that my father had bought not long before he passed away.

How to organize your life as an adult