March of Trash, Day 10

It is the miscellaneous nature of clutter that makes it a challenge. You can’t erase clutter with a few proclamations. Every item requires new thinking and a fresh decision about where it goes.

Some decisions are easier than others, though. One of the easiest actions to decide on is to return something you borrowed to its owner after you are done using it. It might be embarrassing if you have held the item for a long time for no particular reason, but regardless of the details, returning it is still the obvious thing to do.

March of Trash, Day 7

A light-bulb moment — realizing that the oversized bulb perched precariously on the old piano (that’s another story) was a standard, working 100 watt light bulb, ready for use in a porch or garage fixture or perhaps a lamp that would accommodate its oversized globe shape. No one seemed to know what lamp the bulb had come out of or why it was sitting on the piano, but that didn’t really matter at this point. Placing the bulb in the cabinet where light bulbs were normally kept, it was ready for its next use.

March of Trash, Day 4

Halfway through the first week of the March of Trash, the obvious enemy is the tendency to postpone action until later. The idea of this month-long clutter challenge is to create a habit of addressing clutter. To make this work, you may have to uproot an existing pattern of thought. Whenever you put off action in a specific area, it is based on the assumption that, in the future, action will become easier. But is this idea true? Ultimately, no. It is action itself that makes further action easier. The mere passage of time actually makes action harder.

March of Trash, Day 1

The March of Trash kicks off today. Participants are setting out to be “everyday clutterbusters” for the month of March. With less than four days of planning and preparation there wasn’t time for a big buildup, but even so, I have heard of at least six people participating. I consider that a pretty strong expression of grass roots support, considering how few people have heard of the challenge at all. If you’re just getting started, visit the March of Trash Challenge page to get the details and download your scorecard.

I started my March of Trash by tossing some of my leftover food containers. These are the polypropylene tubs and lids that restaurant food arrived in. They are dishwasher-safe and microwave-ready, so it’s useful to have them, but I need only a few. I kept the best ones and threw the rest in recycling.

There are two pieces of clutter — not mine, but from today’s efforts — that are worth looking at. I think they represent some of the most immediate challenges you face when you look for clutter. The decorative border shown here looks like it ought to be good for something. It’s a wall decoration that would typically go along the top of a wall where it meets the ceiling, perhaps above the wallpaper on a well. But it is a piece only five yards long, effectively shortened by stains near one end, so it is not so easy to imagine what room you might decorate with it. It is “new” in the sense of never having been used, but it has been sitting around long enough to be considered old. No one knew where it had come from. It looked like something to donate to Re-Store or Goodwill, where someone might find a use for it.

Introducing the March of Trash Challenge

This March, I’m challenging you to throw junk away every day for the entire month. Read all about it:

The March of Trash Challenge

Dynamite and Other Old-Year Debris

People save things they would be better off without. This turned up in the news yesterday when a woman discovered, in a box of her late father’s possessions, among what looked like rolls of coins, enough dynamite to level a house. The story at CBC News:

Dynamite found in Cabbagetown home

Evidence Piles Up Against Multitasking

If you are “good at” multitasking, recent research on the subject hasn’t been good news. In one study after another, multitasking has been shown to be bad for productivity — you could get the same things done faster if you could address them one by one. Multitasking is as bad for your mood as it is for your brain. It tends to leave people feeling frazzled, distressed, depressed. It rewires the brain in a way that reduces a person’s effective intelligence, and not just a little, but well below the level of a fully functioning adult. Much of this change in brain structure persists — researchers don’t know for how long, perhaps weeks but perhaps years, but either way, for some period of time your thinking capacity is reduced for everything you attempt, whether multitasking or single-tasking. This effect is so pronounced that some have said quite bluntly that multitasking causes brain damage. Researchers trying to find the exceptions, the people and situations for which multitasking has a beneficial effect on productivity or at least mood, keep drawing a blank. Every task they can think of testing is made worse by trying to do it at the same time as any other task.

And now there is worse news than all this, when it comes to multitasking. Multitasking never gets any better. It only gets worse.

Curing Complexity, One Piece at a Time

I want to talk about the factorial function. It might seem an arcane piece of mathematics but it is valuable because it provides a way to measure the chaos that ordinary daily life can so easily turn into. Specifically, if you have a certain number of things to do, the factorial function tells you how many choices you have for the order you can do them in. Obviously, the question of sequence is only one aspect of the complexity that comes when you have many things, and it is not necessarily the most important question, but it is close enough, and it is a simple way to look at it mathematically. The factorial function shows you the way complexity grows when there are more things going on. The growth of complexity is faster than people intuitively expect, and the factorial function shows this to you.