Be Organized Now

  One of my favorite authors on the topic of clutter and living clutter-less is Sandra Felton, author of Messie No More and The Messie's Manual , now updated to The New Messie's Manual .  Sandra, herself a "reformed messie" [sic] has some useful surveys helping people get clarity about the base reasons for their struggles with clutter.   via GIPHY Sandra has broken down cluttering behaviors into essentially 3 categories: "Saving" clutterers, "Messie" clutterers, and "Time Wasting" clutterers.  In summarizing Sandra's categories, I've consolidated them into only two: "Saving" and "Messie" clutterers.   I'm also including some anti-clutterers thoughts  (AC T ) , to help you work toward a new mindset for managing possessions. As was outlined in this post , one part of the problem with "M.E.S.S." is often emotional , and Sandra's breakdown covers a large number of the emotional factors. They will

  Decluttering your spaces is a whale of a decision-making "fiesta".  As an organizer, I find it a pleasant kind of challenge, but that's beside the point.  The big deal about all that decision making, however, is that you're left with a hefty pile of things to be dealt with in one of several ways: keep them,  give them away,  sell them, or   trash them.   And trashing them can often be quite a puzzle and cause some real angst.  Fortunately, there are some great options for many of these items, and I'm giving a big shout out to AARP for a recent article they published about this topic (they publish some really great material on downsizing , pertinent to the decluttering process whether you're moving households or not!). The November 2022 AARP bulletin included "How Do I Get Rid of This? A handy guide for disposing of those items that shouldn't go in the trash".   Sadly, it is not available on their Bulletin website, but it is a very helpfu