The Minimalist Game Conquered

This year the KonMari buzz has overtaken the internet.  You cannot go onto any social media platform without a plethora of posts or videos showing people either joyfully or with much stress and moaning and groaning piling heaps upon heaps of stuff onto their beds.  While I knew I needed to do a good declutter, and why not in January when it was cold out and I was hibernating inside the house anyways, the thought of unloading whole closet and cupboard fulls at a time was just too much for me.  I work from home in child care and pretty much use most of the space in my house on a daily basis so that principle was just a no go for me.  And unless I take a vacation to declutter who on earth has hour upon hour all in a row to devote to such a thing?  So in pondering how I would like to approach the task of mindful and intentional decluttering, I came across a little thing called "The Minimalist Game".

The basic premise was to take 30 days to declutter a whack load of stuff.  On day 1 you get rid of one item.  On day 2:  two items, on day 3:  three items and so on and so forth until day 30 when you've worked yourself up to 30 items that day.  You get the picture.

Now this sounded a whole lot more doable.  It did not require me to unload whole rooms into a pile that would take hours upon hours to go through.  I could take a few moments here and there in the particular room I was in and remove items, still under the idea of "non-usefulness" and "no joy", and let me work at it until I had the required amount for that "day" slot.  If that particular number took me three days then so be it.

NO PRESSURE AND NO STRESS!  As soon as I had the required number a pic was taken and when I had a box or bag full off they went to either donate or trash or recycling.

Can we just pause a moment in this post and ask ourselves why on earth any individual needs to have 24 pairs of 3D glasses in their cupboard?  I have no answer.

I was amazed at how motivating this was.  I started to look forward to what else I could get rid of.  I would scan rooms and areas as I passed through them.  It was very liberating.

Now on that note may I say that I did not touch any of my husband's stuff.  This is important.  You cannot force another person into your decluttering head space.  In fact, in that pile of blu-rays and dvds any that were his I got his permission.  Andwhen I asked if he was sure a few days later, he took another look and took a couple of them back.  Which is totally ok.

And now aren't you amazed that as you scrolled through this post that in about the 6 weeks that it took me to do this I got 465+ items out of my home.  Let's just think about that.  Four Hundred and Sixty Five pieces of stuff that was sitting around my house.  Shocking, isn't it?  I know I was stunned.  I thought it would be hard.  Amazing how something as simple as this can have such a great effect.  Now I'm motivated to go beyond the surface stuff and go a little deeper into the backs of closets, cupboards, drawers and bins.  The things that might require a bit of a tougher decision.

Have you been KonMari-ing?   Or have you been KonMari-ed?