Making Space...

Earlier today the video below popped onto my Youtube feed.  It's six months old, but its topic is timeless.

In this video Dawn fleshes out the concept of The Silent To-Do List, but gives credit to where she got the idea (the video below). 

Original video found at Simple Victoria: 

And Victoria got the idea from the book, Goodbye Things by Fumio Sasaki - which I'm now listening to on Hoopla.  

I think Dawn does a great job of simplifying and at the same time giving some very good everyday examples of things that end up on our Silent To-Do Lists.  The concept immediately resonated with me.  BTW, you might want to skip to 1:30 in the first video, though, just to cut to the chase.   And Victoria has some real gems in her video too.  

Seriously... if you're ever lagging in decluttering motivation, I suggest checking out this not-so-obvious idea.  

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To be honest, though, I came up with this week's haul before watching the videos, but the idea of a silent to-do list is still very relevant.

First up, I went through a small storage cabinet in the garage this week, and emptied at least half of the cabinet:

Normally, I don't count recyclables, but I had put several more glass jars in this cabinet than I photographed.  For some reason I was collecting them out there and they were taking up space.  A few went under the kitchen sink for putting grease or other food stuffs in that I don't want going down the drain and the ones pictured got recycled.  And I just want to point out that this is a second ice cream bucket that has surfaced during this clean out. 😄  Otherwise, like most of my decluttering, I found quite number of little unremarkable things to rehome.  Thirty things in the picture above.

And then I remembered that I had decided some weeks ago to get rid of a shoe box full of CD's we'd obtained many years ago when attending and working at homeschool conventions.  Working meant we didn't have time to attend as many workshops, so we brought home bunches of recordings to make up for what we missed.  Some of these might have even gotten listened to.  😉  I can't help but think we have more than this somewhere in the house, but so far this is all that has surfaced:

Here's where I'm applying this concept of the Silent To-Do List:  I've held this collection of CDs back from my weekly Making Space posts because it is very tempting to think that I might like to listen to some of these recordings - not everything is homeschool related, and there are some topics that I might honestly find interesting still at this point in my life.  But you know what I'm going to do?  Scrub that idea out of my brain, and erase it from my Silent To-Do List!    What a relief!  Simply deciding up front I'm not going to listen (or re-listen) to some old CDs makes my to-do list 36 things shorter!  😃

If you're at all curious about this concept, watch the first video above especially.  And then look around and see what you can remove from your Silent To-Do List!

Making Space Week 46:  877 things gone!