Municipal Refuse

March of Trash

15 Ways to Leave Your Clutter #1: Municipal Refuse

Power Failures and Freezers

Electricity has been out here since a storm on Friday, and the outage is expected to last at least one more day. The loss of power delays the launch of the channel cards for this year’s March of Trash, but it gives me a chance to focus on freezers. In an extended power outage, almost everyone can expect a problem in the freezer.

Choosing Channels for the March of Trash Scorecard

The 2018 March of Trash challenge scorecard invites you to get rid of 28 items during the month of March, with the items grouped into seven channels, or ways of getting rid of things. The challenge is to get rid of seven items one way, which you designate as channel 1, six items in a different way, channel 2, and so on. There are extra lines in a lighter shade of gray for those inevitable moments when you go over in one of the channels.

15 Ways to Leave Your Clutter

March of Trash

Your main task in clutter-busting is deciding what to let go of, but it makes it easier to know that getting rid of something does not automatically mean throwing it away. When you see something that makes you say, “How could I possibly throw that away?” it helps to remember that you have options. There are multiple ways to throw things away, give them away, or sell them.

This month I will be describing these different approaches as channels. I’ll be featuring 15 channels for the extra stuff that’s lying around your place. With apologies to songwriter Paul Simon, think of them as “15 ways to leave your clutter.” To simplify things, I’ll be presenting each channel right here in the form of a virtual card, about one per day for the first half of March.

15 Ways to Lose Your Clutter:

1. Municipal Refuse
2. Municipal Recycling
3. Swap
4. Auction House
5. Tag Sale
6. Book Drive
7. Sell Online
8. Thrift Shop
9. Compost
10. Give
11. Fire
12. Household Hazardous Waste
13. Specialty
14. Scan and Recycle
15. Delete

March of Trash 2018

March is here and it is time to take out the trash, get rid of the junk, get things moving again. It is time for the March of Trash challenge. The purpose of this once-a-year exercise is to remind all of us that clutter is not an unavoidable fact of life but is something that bends to our individual will.

If you visit the March of Trash challenge page you will see a new challenge scorecard for 2018. This time around, the scorecard is based on channels — different ways of getting rid of things. What are these channels? I’ll explain starting on March 1.

Don’t Be Noble When Choosing a New Year’s Resolution

If the new year’s resolution you choose feels noble, that should be a red flag, a sign that you have almost surely made a mistake.

Getting Unstuck, Literally

I wrote about getting unstuck, and I thought I might lend extra emphasis to my point by providing a physical example. It often pays to consider the literal meaning of words when you’re trying to get at the true meaning. A vehicle is stuck when one or more of the tires is on a surface so slippery, whether by snow, ice, mud, or something else, that the ordinary mechanism of driving forward no longer suffices to get over the next small obstacle.

As long as you are stuck in this fashion, you can’t make any progress until you get unstuck. To get a vehicle unstuck, you may have to go backward or attempt some other alternate strategy just to move the next few inches forward, after which you may be able to proceed in a normal fashion.

Getting Unstuck

People usually don’t set new year’s resolutions because they have just completed big, momentous changes in their lives and they are on a roll.

I am sure that happens sometimes, but more often when people set new year’s resolutions it is because they feel stuck. Things have been the same for so long that they need a gimmick to get going again. The process of imagining a future that is different might do this. The hope is that resolving to change in specific areas will provide the fresh perspective that gets them unstuck.

This hope is one of the reasons people set so many new year’s resolutions. If one resolution can provide the jolt that you need, then maybe five resolutions, five separate, unrelated goals, will provide a bigger jolt that gives you a stronger chance of getting unstuck — or so you might imagine.

Yet if you try this, it doesn’t quite feel right. There is a problem with this approach. When you use a goal as a way to get unstuck, you might get unstuck or you might not, but you almost surely will not achieve the specific goal you had in mind.