Digital Decluttering: Finishing the Job (Premium)

As you probably know, I’m a big proponent of decluttering. The aim is to live a more mobile and minimalist existence that is less about being surrounded by stuff and more about focusing on what really matters. This includes digital decluttering, which is perhaps misnamed, as it involves replacing physical things—books, photos, videos, music, and more—with their digital equivalents. For example, you can store your entire library in the cloud and carry around a Kindle that’s smaller and thinner than a single paperback book, while physical books take up a lot of space. (And are kindling for some future fire, too.)

Decluttering makes moving—being more mobile—easier. And while you may have no plans to move anytime soon, the accumulation of stuff is what makes moving feel like a non-starter in the first place. We spent 15 years in the same house and knew we wouldn’t move while the kids were growing up, but my wife and I began decluttering nonetheless and have done so on and off ever since, for two reasons: we had dreams of eventually splitting our time between two places, one of which would be international, and it was clear early on that there was a constant influx of stuff coming into our house. If we didn’t actively work to triage that and remove as much stuff as possible, we would end up like so many other homeowners and simply fill every nook and cranny.

If you followed me in my pre-Thurrott.com days, at the SuperSite for Windows or even before that, you might remember my “Everything Must Go” events, which were attempts to put electronics I would never use again in the hands of people who would appreciate them for free. More quietly, my wife and I have done things like that locally too, giving away PCs and other things to church groups and the like, and giving away or selling things via Facebook groups and Craigslist.

Tied to the decluttering, I would perform regular cleaning rituals in which I would go through all of the bins and cubbies in my office and all of the boxes I stored in the cellar—I never threw out a container for any electronics that came into the house—and get rid of as much as possible. And in a weird way, this became an off-kilter superpower: I became very good at cleaning and organizing the clutter. I would get rid of stuff, yes, but I would also organize what was left so that it seemed like less junk than it was.

(In a weird coincidence, right after I wrote about this, I learned that this kind of thing is called a “doom pile,” where “doom” is actually an acronym that stands for “Didn’t Organize, Only Moved.” Incredibly, this is yet another symptom of ADHD, “a common cleaning tactic people in the ADD/ADHD community [use] to help reduce the visual clutter that can impact [one’s] productivity and mental health.” And a sobering reminder that my superpower may be more off-kilter than I knew.)

But it adds up. And it seemed like no matter how much we got rid of, there was always more stuff to take up space in our home. And now, having moved recently yet again, and into a much smaller space, I can look back with some embarrassment and reveal a sad little secret that bothers me every time we move: we have items that we’ve moved from house to house over the years that we’ve never opened up and looked at, let alone triaged and gotten rid of. Not a lot of it, thankfully. But decades worth.

I mentioned in passing the benefits of moving from physical books to electronic books above. This is based on experience, as we’ve moved a large book collection back and forth across the country more than once. As bad, we had books stored in my parent’s attic in Massachusetts from our move to Arizona in 1993, and they later moved them to the garage out of worries about the ceiling, and then many of the books got moldy and had to be thrown out. What you learn, eventually, is that a book collection is mostly something to look at, not something you read again and again. And it’s pointless, except perhaps as art.

But it’s not just books. Among the items we’ve moved from home to home to home are rolled-up posters in shipping containers on which I wrote “Thurrott 99” in Sharpie, indicating that they date back to our move away from Arizona in 1999. Untold aged electronics, from proto-smartphones and PDAs to little tablets, netbooks, and more. Clothes, inexplicably. Our CD collection, though we did finally get rid of that before we left Massachusetts in 2017. Ditto for VHS and DVD libraries. Cassette tapes, many dating back to the 1980s. You know, junk.

I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing: that items have moved with us, opened, over five (!) moves, or that items I could have easily gotten rid of when we still owned a home but are now problematic because we live in an apartment and just don’t have the space to cover it up anymore. We had to rent two storage areas here at the apartment complex because we have extra stuff, and while some of it is somewhat defensible, like a couch, a mattress, and some other furniture, some of it is not. (Granted, these spaces are very inexpensive to rent.)

But it doesn’t matter. This is the time to finish the job.

I started with the electronics, separating them out into piles of pre-smartphone devices, Windows phones, iPhones and iPods, wearables, tablets, PCs, and more.

Where I could, I brought them back to life and, if needed, reset them. Where appropriate, I donated.

(I did save one thing, the original iPhone, which came up lame, sadly. It had (mostly) worked the last time I checked it.) Where not, I recycled locally.

That work is almost done: I have a few random smartwatches and wearables to get rid of, but the pile went done pretty quickly. Note that every single item had moved with us from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania 6 years ago and then sat in our cellar for the duration. Stupid.

After that, we have a much smaller pile of newer electronics that we’ve actually been trying to sell locally for the past few months. In this case, I didn’t procrastinate, we just haven’t found homes for this stuff. If it goes on much longer, we’ll just give them away. But because we have much less space now, this stuff, like the other electronics noted above, has been sitting out, visible, in our dining room. So there is an incentive to get rid of it. And so we have, and will continue to do so.

Once that is done, I will turn my attention to my little office nook area. I don’t have a dedicated room in our apartment to use as an office, so I’ve instead commandeered a corner of the living room for my home office. This includes a desk and chair, of course, and my computer. But there’s also a kind of alcove-type area where I put one of the two storage containers that were in my previous home office (which you could see behind me in podcasts) and, less organized, a pile of stuff on the floor. This needs to be dealt with, though that will be interesting because I will likely need to keep some of it, and I need to find homes for it all.

And then I will hit the home stretch. This is where I expect things to slow down, however.

In the fabric and wicker bins in my storage container, I store items like cables and adapters, but there are also some bins with odder items. One has the several physical books I’ve elected to hold on to, for example. But a few contain bags of items—newspaper clippings, kids’ drawings and other creations, random loose photos both big and small, and lots more—that I need to organize, scan, store in the cloud, and then dispose of. These are the items I couldn’t scan with the high-speed photo scanner I used four years ago to scan all of my photo album-based pictures because they’re too big and require a flatbed scanner.

And that flatbed scanner is among the items that are in that pile of stuff on the floor in front of my storage container. It’s part of an all-in-one printer I would have otherwise gotten rid of before our most recent move, but I held onto it for this reason. And sometime soon, next month I hope, I will begin that work.

I’m not looking forward to it. But I am looking forward to being finished with it. I’ll chime in again when that work starts.