One Less Thing
A few years ago, at the beginning of our journey, we did the 365 Things challenge, where you find one object in your house each day that you don’t need and you get rid of it. You donate it, or sell it, or otherwise find it a home. At the end of the year, we had found probably three times that many things and our house was much, much more beautiful.
This is a great way to kick start your new life as a minimalist, if you haven’t already. If you start it, keep a notebook and record each item you get rid of, so you can see your progress. You can even record your reasons for choosing that particular item. Take a picture of the object each day, so you can go back through a year from now and see all the crap you had that you didn’t need. It’s so freeing to look around and find that you have some empty space where before you had meaningless clutter.
We haven’t repeated the challenge, but to keep up the decluttering mentality and to hold ourselves accountable, we still find one object once a week. If you aren’t ready for this to be an everyday task, once a week is a fine place to start too. Once a week, look around your house and find some object that you can do without. (Actual trash does not count.) Maybe it’s something that has a duplicate. Maybe it’s an old book you can donate to the library. Maybe it’s a shirt with a hole you know you’re never going to sew up. Maybe it’s equipment from an old hobby you’ve lost interest in.
Whatever it is, give it away or sell it or donate it. Try not to put things in the trash unless they are actually broken. In a year, you’ll have 52 fewer things in your house. You will have sent those objects out into the world to find new homes where they will be loved and appreciated in a way that you didn’t. You’ll have saved a person from spending money on a new item, and you’ll have saved a fraction of the earth’s resources by seeing to it that these items will be reused instead of replaced with new ones. You might even have made a little money!
