Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
You Can’t Take It With You
There’s a problem with storage. Many of my clients think, I just need more storage. Sometimes that’s true, but often, they already have plenty of storage, they just have too much stuff.
People say to me, I’ll just scan it. Okay. Then, when you have five hard drives, what are you going to do with them? Sometimes I think paper keeps us more honest: When our file cabinet is full we know it is time to purge. When our external hard drive is full, we just buy another one. But why? Do we really need all those documents? And searching for one important document on an old backup can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. To me, it’s better to make purging a regular maintenance chore than to constantly expand your storage.
Or people say, I’m going to get a space at Manhattan Mini Storage. Okay. Sometimes I get this, if you have a very small apartment and you have a few boxes of mementos or old tax returns, or if you want to store bulky seasonal things like beach chairs and sleds. Again, though, I would caution: Be careful. If you have filled your closets and you’re just storing things that you really don’t need anymore but you are having a hard time letting go of, I think you are letting yourself off too easy. If your closet is overflowing, it may be better to spend some time purging rather than rushing out to rent a storage unit.
Sometimes I go to a new client and they’ll say, I’m thinking of having a wall unit built, because my stuff won’t really fit into these four bookshelves anymore. Alright. Who doesn’t like a built-in wall unit? But it may be that you need weeding more than custom cabinetry.
I don’t want to be dark, but you can’t take it with you. We aren’t like the pharaohs: We aren’t buried with our riches. Maybe I’m morbid, but I like to think that someday, when I go, my children will have a nostalgic weekend sorting through my well-organized stuff. They’ll be able to find the will and the important financial documents easily, and they’ll be able to enjoy looking at the mementos, because there won’t be an overwhelming amount of them.
To me, the goal of organizing shouldn’t be to get as much as possible into as little space as possible, it should be to be able to access what you need, and to develop the habit of maintenance, so you only have what you need at any given time.