How to really declutter your life
In the past year I've changed countries three times.
- From Hungary to Sweden: 2 big suit cases, 1 small suitcase and 2 bag-pack
- From Sweden to Estonia: 1 big suit case, 1 small suitcase and 2 bag-packs
- From Estonia to Brazil: 1 big suit case, 1 small suitcase, 1 bag-pack
Before my first move I watched the Marie Kondo documentary and I thought I would nail it. Sadly, expectation vs reality ended up being something like:
After three moves paying a lot for extra luggage and having to carry those around I realised that I don't want nor need to have all that. It was time to:
When we had the first pandemic hit in Europe and travel bans started, I was in Estonia (at the time I was living in Stockholm). I wasn't planning to stay there longer so I went with a small suit case with the idea of spending one week. In the end, a week turned into three months.
I managed to live 3 months with a small suit case without buying not even one extra pair of clothes. This made me realise: It is doable to live with less.
So why did I still own so much? I believe the pandemic made us spend more time at home, and this made our so-called “necessity” of buying more clothes and staying “on-trend” diminished. As our plan for the next year is to be free to move around as we don't really know the new adventures that await us.
I want to own less.
That was my objective and made me think on how I could achieve it. On every move, even the last one, I was using the same methodology: going through my closet looking at clothes one by one and asking myself: do I really want this? Do I use this?
It did work, to some extent, considering the amount of things I brought from one country to the other reduced but that's still quite far from what I wanted. That's the amount of things our friend is holding for us in Estonia:
I want to change that. So I asked myself: what do I actually need?
That made me reflect on things like: do I really need that high heel that I haven't use in the past 3 years? Do I really need 11 different hair accessories?
I understand that is a subjective question and depends on many other factors such as your personality, your work. Everyone has different needs.
So then, I asked myself: what is my objective? By combining those two questions, my conclusion was:
- I want my next moving to be less heavy and stressful
- I want to understand what is important for me and stay on track with an "essential" list instead of buying things for buying things.
In order for me to reach this, I couldn't just do whatever I was doing in the past. Instead, I decided to come up with a new methodology.
Methodology
Take a cup of coffee or tea, put your favorite playlist on and let's get into the step by step guide:
- Spreadsheet
Yes, that's our starting point and you can find a template for it here. The idea behind the spreadsheet is to create an inventory of everything you own. Yes, everything.
- To structure this inventory, I decided to create two main categories with sub-categories on it.
- Personal: Everything related to you that is small enough to carry on a trip. Such as your clothes, your personal computer, tooth brush.
- Home: Everything that is a house component that you wouldn't take with you such as TV, decoration items, blender.
Maybe you will need more categories. As a 26 year old living at a rented furniture apartment for the past 4 year those two fitted my needs. Now we need to fill up those categories to have a visibility of the amount of items we own.
3. Now we have visibility of our current situation it's time to set up goals on the amount of things from that item you want to own. Taking into consideration your need, personality, wishes.
Here you should be rational with the quantities and try to find the optimum amount to have a comfortable life.
Let's say you want to find out amount of socks you should own. I go to the gym everyday so I use one sock per day and I don't re-use them next day. I usually wash my clothes once a week. Based on that, I know I can't have less than 7 socks if I want to keep my routine of only washing clothes once a week. I used this same approach for things like bras, panties, gym clothes, consumables.
For less essential goods such as accessories this approach wasn't applicable. For those, I decided to think how much I use and get rid of any excess. For instance, I barely use necklaces so there was no reason for me to have 5 of them. Instead, I decided to keep the 3 I use the most.
Now the harder part: goods we are emotionally attached to. Can be something someone gave it to you as a gift and you don't really need it nor use it. For those, I created a folder at my Google Photo account called "Gifts memories", took a picture of them, saved it there let them go.
Final conclusion
By the end of the list I realised that I had 350 items and I would like to reduce it to 231.
Do you know the amount of items you own?
Do you know the amount of items you would like to own?
