January 25, 2011
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The part of decluttering that cracks the mind
Is the decision-making. Here’s some advice from The Spacialist. It’s about a guy with boxes from his grandmother’s estate. It reads in part:
He let me know that the biggest organizing challenge for him was to determine whether an item is worthy of keeping or not.
Below are 3 of his items that I’d like to use as examples. I’ll show you how I helped him understand their “value” to him.
So, we stumbled upon his childhood dog’s collar, his first PEZ dispenser and his Grandmother’s lemon reamer.
We determined that there were 3 kinds of “value” for him:
· Emotional Value
· Useful Value
· Monetary Value
So for the dog collar:
· Emotional Value: High
· Useful Value: None as he doesn’t have a dog anymore.
· Monetary Value: None
We determined that although the emotional value was high, that this moment of rediscovery was the very moment that he had been saving it for. He enjoyed the moment and the memories and released it.
PEZ dispenser:
· Emotional Value: High
· Useful Value: Low. He doesn’t eat PEZ nor does he have a decorative use for it.
· Monetary Value: Appeared to be high but once he checked the market value on e-bay, he determined it wasn’t worth his time to go through the process of actually selling it.
So, since “emotional” was the highest of the 3 values, he decided to keep it for fun and slipped it into his desk drawer. Now it hangs out there and every time he reaches inside he sees it and smiles. Now that’s value!
Lemon reamer:
· Emotional Value: High
· Useful Value: High
· Monetary Value: None to sell it, but to him priceless.
The emotional value was extremely high because he has sweet memories of making lemonade with his Grandmother during the summer. The reamer was also quite useful. He never bought one all these years because he had been looking for one just like hers. Little did he know it was waiting for him quietly in an old storage box.
We popped it right of the box and into a cozy drawer in the kitchen right next to the lemon zester and vegetable peeler. It was a perfect home.
