Decluttering Mantras

Yesterday's presentation was for wordsmiths, so the organizer tailored it to her audience. "Think of it as editing your stuff," she said. You're creating white space. Less is more. She didn't actually say "kill your darlings," but that's what she meant. "You want white space," she said. "You don't want to walk into a study that's like a bad article."

Clearing clutter is a mental game, of course, so what I appreciated most were the pep talks, the encouraging language, the mantras. "Think of it as breaking up with your stuff," she said. Sort your materials into past, present and future. "If 99 percent of it is from the past then you are keeping the future out. You don't want to turn your home office into a museum."

Or this decluttering mantra: "You are not your stuff." You're not your books or your file folders or your hard-won interview notes. "Learn to detach."

For longtime pack rats like me, these are hard words to assimilate. But the organizer also had this practical, benign tactic. Cull your files. Put the refuse in a bin and move it from the office to the hall, from the hall to the garage. If you can live without those papers for a few weeks, then out they go.

Deep breaths. I'm going in ...


Photo of a cluttered garage will have to do. I have no photos of a cluttered file cabinet.