commandments of clutter - triage. transcribe. ?

[psocoptera]

Trying to sort through pile of old papers. Argh. A few things are fairly clear - play programs, ball booklets, they're over and done, to be saved (or not) as a record and memento. The rest is a great heap of incompleteness... reviews for restaurants never visited, opening paragraphs of stories never written, song lists for mixes never made. Those NYC maps I might want next time I'm in NYC. What do I *do* with that stuff? I hate to give up on the potential each paper represents - that fic (I still could write!), that restaurant (might be really good!). I also don't want to end up mummified in an accretion of little scraps of paper I might someday act on. If I file them, they're nearly as lost... files are like a dead space, an archive. If I let my desk stay buried under them that chokes off a possible active space where things could get done.

I don't know if it would really help or not, but I want a catchy slogan for reducing clutter. Like how reducing waste has "reduce reuse recycle". So far, I have come up with "triage" and "transcribe" for a parallel slogan. ("Transcribe" since I think I'd rather have eight zillion little text documents than the corresponding pieces of paper... they're lighter, for one thing.)

Can anyone think of a good third? Do you think the "3 Rs" are actually useful in motivating individual behavior as opposed to, like, corporate awareness? Does a good anti-clutter meme have the potential to, say, help my mom clean the house? Or me? (I'm kind of picturing a logo, too... some kind of triangle with arrows converging on one of the points to imply shrinking, maybe.)

Comments

[tapas.livejournal.com]

The clutter experts on TV (I watch Clean Sweep sometimes on TLC, motivates me to tackle my own endless piles of Stuff) have a routine which goes something like:

1) When did I last use this?
2) When do I expect to use this again?
3) How easy would it be for me to replace this in the unlikely event I did at some point in the future want to use it again?

This isn't designed so much for paper things, but some of the same ideas apply. If you can't remember when you last used the info on this scrap of paper, you have no concrete use for it in the future, and you could reasonably easily find the information in, for example, a web search, then throw it out. They make exceptions for things that have sentimental value, but only if you have them in some kind of display unit where you can see them and appreciate them. Newspaper from the day you were born in frame on wall of den = sentimental value. Newspaper from the day you were born sitting in box in basement waiting to mildew = junk. Intellectually I agree with this, but emotionally I can't do it. I've got 20 or 30 heart shaped muffin tins that belonged to my grandmother. I've had them over 8 years and I've never used them. I have no real plans to use them in the future. But yet, I'm having a hard time letting go of them even though I have other kitchen things from my grandmother that I do use on a daily basis.