From the Editor’s Desk: Always More to Do (Premium)

I’m a world-class procrastinator, and I’ve come to understand a few things about this trait over the years, and how it’s related to other coping mechanisms I employ and to my “doom pile” habits. These things are all interrelated (and ADHD-related, I’m sure), a way to move forward by ignoring problems that in many cases seem insurmountable, an “out of sight, out of mind” thing. I’m sure it’s all very normal, or at least common.

But in confronting some overdue physical and digital decluttering over the past month and a half, an effort that will likely continue for at least a few more weeks, I was reminded of the downsides of my behaviors, and also quite happy about the successes I finally had in this area.

And then I learned that we’re going to move again. And soon. Much sooner than expected. And this was an unhappy reminder of the underlying futility of it all. This was something I had trouble dealing with when we sold and moved out of our house earlier this year: Despite all the decluttering and organizing work I’d done over many, many years, we still had a house full of crap, somehow, and it wasn’t going to all fit in our small apartment. How on earth could this be true?

I can’t explain it. But now that we’re moving again, I am again consumed with dread because we’ve made so little progress getting rid of much of that crap. And that is largely because much of it is in two on-site storage cages which, granted, are inexpensive. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

There are excuses. Even in a best-case scenario, moving is awful. And moving like we did—quickly, and with very little help—was exhausting and perhaps we deserved or needed some downtime. But moving for people like me is perhaps doubly problematic because it lays bare the foibles of my habits. It’s not possible to organize things by hiding them when you move. You have to actually move them. All of them. What was out of sight is now fully in sight, and is thus very much not out of mind. And no one likes facing their failings.

All things being equal, I would have stayed where we are. Though it’s a bit small, with only two bedrooms, this apartment is reasonably inexpensive and unexpectedly quiet (we’ve literally never had a single issue), and I like the people around us quite a bit. I’ve grown to love this little town, and we’ve established friendly little interactions with the locals each day. And we have a favorite new restaurant that we can walk to. This place is not perfect—every time we drive anywhere, it’s 8 to 10 minutes further away, for example, and we really do need a third bedroom—but it’s nice. And I would have stuck with what works. Which, when you think about it, might be its own form of procrastination.

But our hand was forced because Sharon, the woman I often refer to as my stepmother—she sold us our previous home 6 years ago—has unfortunately suffered a series of health setbacks and will be moving in with a sister of mine who created a small apartment-like setup for her in her home. Sharon had used the proceeds from the house sale to purchase a small townhouse that was literally just a block away from the house. And my sisters are going to rent it out to help pay for Sharon’s medical care.

And they asked if we could move in. We’re the obvious choice because we’re part of the family and can take on small issues ourselves that normal tenants would not. And we want to help, of course, so we are also on the hook as needed. Plus, the schedule is perfect: we need to tell our current apartment whether we are renewing the lease soon, but we have until mid-November to move. And my sisters will need a bit of time to clear out the townhouse, while we can also start moving things in at any time. Which might make the move a bit easier if we do it right. And so we agreed. And here we go again.

The futility I mentioned above is related to the notion that there’s always more to do. No matter how much progress you make, or think you’ve made, on whatever project, there’s always more. And I think that is what drives the procrastination. Why even bother decluttering if there’s no real finish line? Or, as my mentor Gary, a professor, put it so hilariously when asked by a student why we were doing something they felt was unnecessary. “Why do anything?” he asked. “We’re all going to die anyway.”

Why indeed.

I confronted this issue in a smaller way this past weekend. As I wrote in Digital Decluttering: Detail Work, Final Paper Scans (Premium), which I published mid-day on Saturday, my wife was heading to Boston for a long weekend, and so I planned to spend the entire time finishing what I thought would be the final pile of loose paper photos, documents, and others items, finally putting this onerous task behind me after what was literally decades of neglect. And I did just that: I worked all Friday afternoon, all Friday night, and all day Saturday, with just two short breaks for dinner on Friday and Saturday. (I always skip breakfast, and I skipped lunch on Saturday.) I scanned in front of the TV during those nights, half-watching movies while working, slowly shrinking the pile of paper. And I did finish it. At almost exactly 10:30 pm on Saturday.

(Had she stayed home, this would have been impossible. My wife is in no way a nag, but she correctly expects normal social and eating schedules, and I would have found myself interrupted at understandable times so we could eat or whatever. With her gone, however, I could cast that aside and just get it done. This isn’t healthy as a matter of course, but I think it’s a good example of taking advantage of a situation.)

I was quite proud of this, honestly. And while I had, and still have, several other projects to complete related to decluttering, this was a big moment. A happy moment.

The next morning, I woke up, made an espresso and starting reading the news on my iPad just like any other day. I had moved the all-in-one printer I used for the scans out of the living room, returning things to normal, and put it temporarily on a chair in the dining room. Out of sight, out of mind.

And God knows how the brain works, but something started nudging at my brain. As part of all that scanning I had done, I had scanned in my high school diploma and for some reason, I put it in a bin of paper-based books we’re saving, like yearbooks, instead of tossing it. I’m not sure why, as there’s no reason to save such a thing, and I’m usually pretty aggressive about that. So I got up, walked over to that bin, and retrieved the diploma. And saw something horrifying I had missed before.

There was a photo book in there. That had somehow inexplicably escaped by previous photo scanning efforts. (I bulked scanned our paper photos back in 2019 and had tossed the originals.) How? I opened it up and saw that there were dozens more photos in there, maybe over 100 hundred. And looking at our digital photo collection, I confirmed that many of them, maybe most of them, had never been scanned.

I wasn’t done. Because there is always more to do.

This was deflating. And while I will detail how I did this later—I found some tools that really helped—I ended up scanning it all before noon. Hopefully, the bulk work here is done, for real this time, but I am trying to accept that it never really ends. That I will continue finding things that need to be scanned or, more generally, will simply continue decluttering and downsizing, in fits and starts, perhaps, because the alternative is worse. And that when we do move again in the near future, this work will in some small way make it easier.

But finding that photo book was weird. And now I feel like I’m living in a Stephen King story. What’s hiding in those other bins and elsewhere in this apartment? Hm.