Co-Conspirators get things done
Sep. 2nd, 2021 07:18 amI had a productive decluttering evening yesterday. The stack of boxes of paper that have been living as a half-wall between my kitchen and craft room are now reduced by more than half. (They've been going by halves over a long period.) This is thanks to ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thread_walker who came over to hang out and do embroidery and egg me on. Eight boxes that were labeled with combinations of "old financial records, correspondence, misc. paperwork, really need to sort this out" have how been converted to a set of boxes for recycling, a set of boxes for shredding, a half-box of a lifetime's correspondence with immediate family dating back 50 years, and a half-box of random things that I'm keeping that have a specific known home they need to go into.
The remaining 5 paperwork boxes include 2 boxes with the paper files of various fiction projects (dating back to high school) that need to be sifted through; 2 boxes with research materials an journal offprints that weren't in a format to be easily scanned so they didn't get farmed out with the scanning project; and 1 additional box of financial/correspondence/misc that was on the bottom of the stack and so didn't get taken care of yesterday.
There's also a file drawer and shelf of more recent financial records (everything since moving into this house) that I need to consider. All my financial records get scanned (or downloaded) now, so the idea of keeping the paper copies in case of IRS audit and whatnot is somewhat obsolete. (I mean, if I were audited and could produce scans of the necessary records, I assume that would be ok?)
In any event, the psychological barrier was "it's easier to keep everything than to figure out what I need/want to keep," and that was easier to do when I had a set of boxes where everything was more than 10 years old. I mean *really* more than 10 years old. Like: going back to my college days years old. I also don't need to keep old xmas cards, or correspondence with people I don't even remember or who haven't been part of my life for a quarter of a century or more. It's not like some day I'm going to be famous and someone will try to reconstruct my biography from the letters people sent me. But I needed the momentum of doing it all in a rush to break through that.
It's funny: so much of my younger life was focused on gathering up the things I wanted to make my life what I envisioned it could be. And now -- let's be optimistic and say "in the second half of my life, after 50" -- I'm more focused on pruning away the things I no longer want, no longer need, or that get in the way of the interests I've narrowed down to. Will I ever do anything with this? Read this? Make this? Use this? Or does it represent an abandoned fantasy? And the old financial records aren't even that. They represent an anxiety about letting go of anything that might possibly, remotely, implausibly be useful to me some day.
thread_walker who came over to hang out and do embroidery and egg me on. Eight boxes that were labeled with combinations of "old financial records, correspondence, misc. paperwork, really need to sort this out" have how been converted to a set of boxes for recycling, a set of boxes for shredding, a half-box of a lifetime's correspondence with immediate family dating back 50 years, and a half-box of random things that I'm keeping that have a specific known home they need to go into.The remaining 5 paperwork boxes include 2 boxes with the paper files of various fiction projects (dating back to high school) that need to be sifted through; 2 boxes with research materials an journal offprints that weren't in a format to be easily scanned so they didn't get farmed out with the scanning project; and 1 additional box of financial/correspondence/misc that was on the bottom of the stack and so didn't get taken care of yesterday.
There's also a file drawer and shelf of more recent financial records (everything since moving into this house) that I need to consider. All my financial records get scanned (or downloaded) now, so the idea of keeping the paper copies in case of IRS audit and whatnot is somewhat obsolete. (I mean, if I were audited and could produce scans of the necessary records, I assume that would be ok?)
In any event, the psychological barrier was "it's easier to keep everything than to figure out what I need/want to keep," and that was easier to do when I had a set of boxes where everything was more than 10 years old. I mean *really* more than 10 years old. Like: going back to my college days years old. I also don't need to keep old xmas cards, or correspondence with people I don't even remember or who haven't been part of my life for a quarter of a century or more. It's not like some day I'm going to be famous and someone will try to reconstruct my biography from the letters people sent me. But I needed the momentum of doing it all in a rush to break through that.
It's funny: so much of my younger life was focused on gathering up the things I wanted to make my life what I envisioned it could be. And now -- let's be optimistic and say "in the second half of my life, after 50" -- I'm more focused on pruning away the things I no longer want, no longer need, or that get in the way of the interests I've narrowed down to. Will I ever do anything with this? Read this? Make this? Use this? Or does it represent an abandoned fantasy? And the old financial records aren't even that. They represent an anxiety about letting go of anything that might possibly, remotely, implausibly be useful to me some day.
