One I did before this site was started — and one of my favorites.
I donated or threw away at least 2 items every day. There were some rules.
- Must select items daily (can’t pick 6 items to cover the next 3 days)
- If I pick 2 things and see another thing I should donate or give away, I had to take it right then instead of leaving it for tomorrow. I limited this rule to only 1 additional item each day.
- Groups of small like items count as 1. For instance, a stack of magazines counted as 1 thing.
Most days (almost every day), I ended up choosing 3 items — some big and some little. Either way, do the math and you will realize that I got rid of almost 90 things that month.
The Big Lesson: There was a bunch of crap in my house that I haven’t even noticed not having. After considering the dollar value of all the crap I got rid of, I am much better about not buying useless crap.
The Big Effect: Cleaned out a bunch of crap and actually a few empty corners in the house, now.
Difficulty: Hard. While simple in concept, this was one of the most time-consuming 30 day experiments because after the first 10 days (about 30 items) it got really tough to find more stuff to get rid of. I found myself walking around my house, digging through closets and old boxes asking myself, “when was the last time I used this?”