Clean up all the clutter!

I'm reading a book titled Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life by Gail Blanke. The idea here is that clutter makes you feel like crap. If you throw it out, you feel liberated. A pleasant side effect is that your mind also tends to clean itself up.

I'm totally into cleaning and throwing stuff out. Unfortunately, Cindy's the opposite. She's a bit of a pack rat. Last night I told her I got her a book from the library and I showed it to her. She read the title and laughed at me.

First, I'm amazed that the book is so long: 200 pages. I'm skimming it. Do I really need to read 200 pages of this? Sure, it's a good idea. But a whole book? There were 20 holds on it at the library and Amazon readers give it 4 stars. So apparently it's successful, and needed in the world.

(A side issue: I've noticed a lot of books centred around one, single, common-sensed idea. I don't think this is a great trend. Books should have tons of good and interesting ideas. But I suppose in this day and age of short attention spas, these are the kind of books demanded by consumers.)

Second, the "50 things" actually means "50 groups of things". In other words, you can't just throw out 50 CDs. That only counts as 1 thing.

Finally, I'm still amazed at how much stuff we have in our house. Specifically our basement. I can't believe that that stuff fit in our last (small) apartment in downtown Vancouver. I'm baffled.

I like a nice, clean email inbox.

I've never understood why people keep hundreds or thousands of emails in their inbox. Don't you like a nice empty inbox? A clean box with just a few emails that have just arrived?

I like to create folders and move the emails into the appropriate folder. The fewer folders the better. "To Do", "Archive", "Hold". That's it.

This way I can keep my inbox as a to do list. Usually I start the day with about 20 emails. Then maybe another 20 arrive during the day. My goal is to get my inbox down to zero before I leave.
If I need to find an email in the past, I just do a search for key words.

Cindy hates that I've set up our home email this way. She often gets angry when she can't find an email that I've moved into a folder. She's one of those people that hold all their emails in the inbox and her system works perfectly well for her.

By the way, I also love an empty computer desktop. I try to have as few items on it as possible. I can't stand cluttered desktops. I have 5 items on my computer right now and I'd love to only have 2. The problem is I'm "sharing" a computer and I don't want to ruin my co-worker's system when she comes back from leave.