Cleared entryway remains clear because we put our bags away after our trip © All rights reserved

Would you mess up this hallway after a trip?

It’s not that the hallway is perfect yet. It’s that this half of the hallway is so much better than it was a few weeks ago, thanks to all the clutter clearing we’ve done. I can’t take credit for the  improvement. My SO did it, so I don’t have before pics, but when I walked in from my trip, schlepping heavy bags, my feet aching, and pooped to pop, I stood stock still and smiled. My back actually straightened, despite the weight of the bags hanging from my shoulders.

I don’t know about you, but when I come home from a trip, I’m so tired I tend to drop my bags in the entry way, change into my jammies, turn on the tube, put my feet up, and fuhgeddabout everything else. Often as not, I’m skirting those unpacked bags for days. Okay. I’ll admit it. Plenty of times, I’ve kicked them aside and left them for weeks.

After all, when you’ve been gone there’s so much catching up to do, right? Email, Facebook, Twitter. The milk is sour and you forgot to replenish the coffee before your trip, so you have to make a quick run to the store. Laundry overflows the hampers. What’s new, right? But now you’re forced to wash a couple of loads or wear that too tight blouse with the missing button in the back of the closet.

It’s easy to drop the bags and leave them.

Resist

Imagine what it will be like to come home from work tomorrow and NOT trip over those bags. More importantly, imagine finding your toothbrush and deodorant in their rightful places in the morning when you’re rushing to get ready for work. Unpack. Now.

That’s what I did. Seeing that clean floor, that uncluttered space, there was no way I was dropping my bags and leaving ‘em. After I unpacked, I put the bags away–where they belong! That’s gotta be a first.

For once, the day after a trip, I woke up to a tidy entry way, to my toothbrush in its holder, and my dirty laundry in the hamper. Boy, did that feel good.

Sure, there’s a pile of unsorted mail and a lot of junk on the hall table. You can’t see all that mess in this pic. But further down the hall, you can see signs of more clutter. It’s not perfect! But if you had seen this hallway a few weeks ago–boxes piled four feet high and junk on top of them–you’d know why it feels so good to keep it looking like this.

Breaking habits is worth the trouble

Breaking old habits is difficult. This image, with its bit of cleared space and clean floor gives me hope that I can have a tidy, clean house one day–and every day. I am beginning to look forward to a time I can invite friends and family to my home without embarrassment.

What’s next

Tomorrow, I’ll give you a quick update on a problem solved and show you what I accomplished today.

Cupboard crammed and inefficient© All rights reserved

Where’s the bubbly?

You can’t see them here, but there are two bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne buried in this mess.

What you probably can see is how difficult it is to get to any single item in the pantry.

Shopping trip? Good luck putting new purchases away!

This mess and a few others in my kitchen slowed me w-a-a-a-a-y down during the heavy holiday cooking season and nearly caused a nervous breakdown last weekend when I was getting ready for our big party.

Time to make a change

First up: Where to store the wine? Clearly it does no good hidden in this cupboard, and it makes use of this space grossly inefficient.

What to do with it? Open another cupboard.

Inefficient use of storage space© All rights reserved

With empty storage bottles and an assortment of baking, cooking and serving supplies, this cupboard is a nightmare to use. What’s more, the door never stays latched!

But hey! Though you cannot see it in this photo, that top shelf is the perfect height for a small wine rack.

I bet I could fit my cookie sheets in with the muffin tin and pizza pan if I cleared out some of the stuff I never use.

Take that tea kettle sticking up (white with spout) near the back. It’s a relic from my office days. Now I’m retired, do I really need it? I’ll set it aside for possible giveaway on Freecycle.

Aha! There in the back right corner is the wine gift tote I looked for over the holidays. I’ll store it up high, with things we use only occasionally, and which also happens to be the first place I looked when I hunted the tote in December.

And looky there, right next to the wine tote: My electric knife. Boy have I needed that since  I started baking bread. That will go in the bread/slash odd utensil drawer I cleaned out Tuesday.

Old urban buildings make for creative storage solutions

Urban apartment life: Storage drawer does double duty as bread drawer (homemade in the brown paper bags) and odd utensil items© All rights reserved

There’s no other place in our hundred-year-old, city apartment kitchen for the bread or for the out-sized food processor wheels, my stainless steel funnel, pastry cutters, butcher’s twine, and now the bread knife. This drawer is it.

Tuesday, thanks to too many bread crumbs flopping around in the drawer, I woke to ants on my bread. This drawer, with bags of bread tossed in on top of all these implements, had become an ant magnet.  I pulled it out, washed everything down with hot, soapy water, let it all dry thoroughly, and chose carefully what went back in the drawer. Anything that fits elsewhere got a new home. Only the most essential tools stayed.

Along the way, I dug through my closets and found an unused plastic tub to contain the bread and inevitable crumbs. I can dump those crumbs easily every day now.

You might be wondering about those brown bags. Like I said, I bake our bread. We like it crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. Storing it in paper bags keeps it that way. If I stored it in plastic, that crust would moisten and soften. I need only a small space for the bread, because I bake a new loaf every couple of days, just enough for the two of us.

Rackin’ the wine

Reorganized bottles, baking tins and wine rack© All rights reserved

Back to the task at hand. After a quick run to the nearby hardware store for an inexpensive wire wine rack I’d had my eye on, I reorganized that bottom cupboard too.

Now all the refill bottles I take to the bulk section of my local Whole Foods Market are in one place.

My baking sheets and wire racks are altogether too. I’m not done with that shelf yet. It needs a rack to hold the pans so they don’t get scratched. I saw a wire rack file folder at the hardware store yesterday. That might be just the ticket. I’ll let you know about that.

What makes me so very happy, though, is that I have room for three more wine bottles on the rack. That means when one of my favorites is on sale, I can buy one or two bottles and not have to worry about where they will live when I bring them home.

Easy pickings in the pantry

Pantry items much more accessible now© All rights reserved

As for those eye-level pantry shelves that have been such a bane the past few years–vast improvement! I can see every item when I open the cupboard door. What’s more, I’ve grouped like items together–beans and rice (in the plastic yogurt tubs) on one side, the few canned goods we keep on hand in the back, stacked two at a time, coconut milk on coconut milk, emergency soup stock on soup stock. Easy pickings! No guessing what’s on the bottom.

How I feel

Fantastic! These cupboards look small in the picture, and they are tiny compared to the pantry shelves I had when I owned a home, so I need to manage them well. I feel good about making this start toward more efficient use of our limited kitchen storage space.

What’s next

I’ll be out of a town for a few days, and this is the last of my clutter zapping this week. Looking to next week and what I’d like to accomplish, I realize these little bits I’ve tackled so far are in the easy category. They give me a feeling of accomplishment, take away some of that nagging feeling I get every time I open a drawer or cupboard, and ease my daily work life.

Elsewhere in the house, I have bigger messes. Monster messes. I have to admit: I don’t know exactly what I’ll find. They are a huge drag on my psyche, and always an embarrassment when company comes.

Next week, I hope to begin making progress on some of the scariest clutter. We’ve shoved most of it into closets. Let me tell you, we take our lives into our hands every time we turn a closet door knob.

While I’ve been eager to clean these little messes, I’ve happily extended my clutter clearing time to one hour, even two hours, some days. To keep myself going on those big messes, I may need to stick with the original plan: Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Force myself to quit when it dings.

We’ll see how it goes.

Red tulips in vase© All rights reserved

Zip, zap, pow! Moving it out!

Rule number one: Even if you don’t have time to take pics and write about it, keep clearing that clutter!

I was so busy getting ready for a big party at our house last week that I didn’t get a chance to take pics and post my clutter zapping progress, but I didn’t let that stop me from clearing messes.

First up, the shelf in the picture you see here. Two dozen jars of jam have been sitting on that shelf since last summer–strawberry, plum, pluot, blueberry. Lots of yum factor, but lots of eye wear and tear. I just never seemed to find the right place in our small apartment to store the jam.

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. I couldn’t have those jars out during the party, could I? Forced to find them a home, I did. Not the best of homes yet. That will have to wait till I get to the closets and can clear space there. One step at a time: That’s all I’m asking of myself.

Rewarding ourselves for a job well done

Having unjammed the shelf, I had room for flowers in the dining room for the first time in months. Aren’t the tulips gorgeous this time of year? Every time I walk into the dining room, I smile and my spirits lift. As a reward to myself for continuing to clear the clutter in my life, I plan to keep something beautiful and alive in this space going forward. If you’re in process of clearing clutter from your life, or thinking about getting started, find a way to reward yourself along the way. Incentives are wonderful motivators.

But wait! There’s more!

As I mentioned earlier, I was getting ready for a big party last week. How to balance the cleaning, cooking, shopping with my body’s need for breaks and rest? Adding even fifteen extra clutter zapping minutes a day felt like too much with all on my agenda.

I admit, I’m no spring chicken. I get tired. When I get tired, my joints lock up and refuse to bend. I’m forced to rest. So when I needed a break from cooking, scrubbing and moving, I sat down to my computer and cleared some of the clutter that’s piled up there in the last few years. You heard me right. Years.

Got mail? Zap it!

Stuffed with more than 750 emails, my inbox was downright scary. Truth is, I almost dread opening my email every day. Plus the desktop on my PC was so full of icons, I got dizzy looking at it. Those icons, shortcuts to files and folders we use every day, are time savers, right? When I started going through them, I couldn’t remember why most of them were on my desktop. Some were docs I’d sent to myself from work, so I could work at home–for a job I left three years ago!

So every time my muscles and back squeaked louder than the ticking clock–constantly reminding me how much I had left to prepare before the big day–I sat down and gave them a break. I cleared out most of those useless shortcut icons from my desk top. Then I started in on the emails.

Why, I had unanswered emails from 2006! How important do you think they were last week if I hadn’t bothered to answer them in nearly six years? Zip! Zap! Zam!

It’s not that I don’t intend to keep up with my email. Law knows I answer as many as I can get to each day. It’s impossible to keep up! Do you find that so for you? If not, puh-leeze, share your tips in the comments below! Meanwhile, every time I took a break last week, I went through the emails, one at a time.

A lot of them were easy: Feeds from organizations, other bloggers, and newsletters to which I subscribe. Anything older than yesterday, I dumped. Then there were the emails from family members and friends. You know how it is. You get a wonderful, newsy email from your sis and you save it to savor and respond to with care. But before you get back to it, it’s buried forty or fifty deep and you forget about it. That happened to me more times than I’d like to say. Boy did I respond to a few with a red face!

Prioritizing email with filters keeps you organized and saves time

To help me manage my emails better and save time, I set up some filters. Now, my email client shunts every new email that has to do with  my volunteer work, for example, directly into a folder with the organization’s name and the word “Unread.” That way, I’m not distracted with those emails when I’m sitting down to respond to family and friends. By the same token, when I’m devoting time to my volunteer work, I work from that folder alone, eliminating distractions from other emails popping into my inbox.

This single step has saved great swaths of time the past few days and helped me stay focused on the work at hand. So I took it a couple of steps further. All those feeds from organizations, bloggers and online publications I read regularly? I created filters for those as well. It’s much quicker to follow a thread in one of my active forums when all the emails with updates land in a box just for that forum.

This method also helps me understand better which feeds never interest me enough to open and read the entire article. Slowly, as I discover what I’m not reading, I can easily unsubscribe and cut those emails altogether. This leaves more time, energy and focus to enjoy the cute pictures of grandkids, nieces and nephews, and all the other updates from the most important people in my life: My family and friends.

By the time Friday came, despite getting thirty to forty new emails every day, I had that backlog cut to just over 500 unanswered, unfiled, or unread emails. I’ve kept at it, too. At this moment, the count is 454.

How I feel

To be honest, with 454 unread emails to go, I feel a little overwhelmed with the task at hand. Yes, I’ve kept up with the new stuff, and taken care of a few old ones along the way this week, but I’ve a long way to go to managing my email effectively. One step at a time.

I’ll keep whittling away at them and let you know down the road how it’s going. I’ll also let you know if I’ve come up with any good tips for keeping the overload factor down. Of course, if you have any tips to share, I’d love to hear them.

What’s next

Tomorrow, I’ll share my successes so far this week. I’m excited about them!

Jumbled mess under bathroom sink

Sometimes a small change can make a HUGE difference. I hate to admit it, but I let a lot of stuff go the last few years. Look at this mess under my bathroom sink. Most of those bottles are empties. Never got around to rinsing and recycling them.

Washing the bottles in the kitchen sink

Perfect fifteen minute clutter zapper task! So I pulled those bottles out and rinsed them clean. There were nine of them, and by the time they were thoroughly rinsed, pumps and all, twenty minutes had passed. Never mind I was off by five minutes. Job well done and all that.

And hey, the under sink space looks a whole lot better!

But what to do with all those bottles?

As much as I love Mrs. Meyer’s products, we’ve stopped buying them. We simply cannot justify bringing all those one-use plastic containers into our home any longer. We’ve been making some of our own cleaning supplies for years. Now that we know that many of our one-use plastic containers could end up in the oceans, choking sea turtles, filling the gullets and guts of pelicans and puffins, well, we just have to find alternatives to plastic.

I’ll advertise most of these cleaned bottles on Freecycle, to see if anyone wants them. A few I’ll keep and reuse for the cleaning solutions I am learning to make from simple ingredients like vinegar and Borax.

Not finished yet

I know. The plan is to clear clutter for fifteen minutes a day. And some days, that’s exactly what I’ll do. But today, well, I just couldn’t stand the filth. It doesn’t show so much in these photos, but it looked something like that mess under the kitchen stove I showed you in yesterday’s post.

So I grabbed a couple of extra rags, got down on my hands and knees and pulled everything out of that cupboard.

Half an hour later, the washed shelf liners were nearly dry and I’d found a used container from the kitchen to hold the discarded toothbrushes I save for cleaning those tight spots and between the grout. Plus, a lucky find! Last month, before the holidays, I looked all over the house for my homemade carpet and upholstery cleaner, with its recipe taped right to the bottle. I know I looked under the sink too, but it was buried so far back, I missed it. Today, voila! I’m especially happy to rediscover this recipe, because none of the recipes I found online worked as well as this stuff.

Easy homemade carpet and upholstery cleaner

In case you’d like to try it, here’s the recipe. It’s not mine. We got it from a book, or maybe from a Public TV fundraising special years ago. I cannot for the life of me remember where it came from, or I’d give credit where credit is due.

Before I share the recipe, please read and take to task these few words of caution before you mix or use this stuff:

1) Ammonia is caustic. Keep this out of the reach of children, and Google first aid for ammonia spills before you begin to mix or use the solution.

2) NEVER, NEVER, NEVER mix ammonia or vinegar with chlorine bleach. Together, they make an odorless gas that can kill you.

3) Test the solution in an inconspicuous area of your carpet or upholstery and let it dry overnight before you use it to clean anything.

Got it? Good. Here’s the recipe.

3/4 C Water
3T Dish soap (unspecified)
1t Vinegar
1/2 t Ammonia
Beat to a frothy lather and apply to carpet or upholstery, having first tested on an inconspicuous spot and let dry overnight.

And now, the clean, much improved bathroom under-sink cupboard

Under Bath Sink, Nice and clean

Ta da! Here’s the cupboard after fifty minutes, start to finish.

How I feel: Pleased as punch, if I do say so. Lovely feeling to get something like this off the back of my mind, where it’s constantly hovering, sucking up energy.

Up next: I still have that table full of holiday gifties to finish packing and mailing. I’m determined to get them ready for the Post Office before Monday. That means I’ll be working on them over the weekend, since I failed so miserably to get them off this week. Consequences, consequences!

Coddling malaise with time-wasting drivel

So right off the bat, I allow myself to become totally distracted the very next day. It’s not that I was humongous busy, though I should have been. It’s that I suffered a little set-back in the depression department. There I was, all eager-beaver on Monday. On Tuesday, all I wanted to do was crawl under the covers and suck my psychic thumb. I didn’t. But being productive was a struggle. Instead of half an hour, the dishes took me two FULL hours. Instead of taking the next step to get my packages off the table and out the door, I succumbed to the mindless dribble of Spider Solitaire for another two hours. Make that three. I’d get up to do something and forget what it was. I’d dabble with something else, then get lost in sorting the tableware.

That’s the thing about clutter. It messes with our minds. Or maybe our minds are messy to begin with, and we let the clutter pile up outside, reflecting what’s on the inside.

As if Tuesday wasn’t bad enough–and not that Wednesday was bad, mind you; it was a wonderful day–but on Wednesday I did not make good on my pledge to myself, publicly stated here for anyone who happens by to see, either. My sweet granddaughter came to play Wednesday. All day. I did pick up a few things here and there, and put them in their proper places, to be sure. In fact, I spent thirty minutes tidying the house, so technically one might say I did clear clutter that day. But it didn’t feel the same as taking that next step I’d promised. And there surely wasn’t a moment to stop and write about it.

All is not lost

Dirt and crud on floor and baseboards behind stove

But yesterday. Yesterday was different altogether. Yesterday I absolutely HAD to mop the kitchen floor. No getting around it. It wasn’t that dirty, but I cook a lot, and when I cooks, I spills. That’s all there is to it. I have to mop frequently. If I don’t, the ants will march in and carry the entire room into their holes between the walls. Before I can mop, of course, I must vacuum, and feeling extra industrious, I decided to pull out the stove and refrigerator and mop beneath them as well. It had been a while, and with all the extra holiday baking and saucing, I knew there would be some messes. See what I mean?

You don’t think that’s clutter? Believe me, all that cat hair and grunge is cluttering up my clean floor. What’s  more, I found a fur ball under there. The kind the cat upchucks. You bet I cleaned it up..

The refrigerator wasn’t as bad, because I pull it out about once a month to vacuum the coils (Saves energy, saves the environment and Planet Earth, saves $$$).

Total time: About thirty  minutes, including waiting for the floor to finish drying after I swished a clean rag to sop up most of the wet.

Floor and baseboards clean; The tiles are marbled, so they look spotted, but they were gleaming

How I feel: Surprisingly good, for something so small and mostly unseen.

Only I know whether the floor beneath my stove and refrigerator is clean. The thing is: I know. So I’ve been going around all day with a happy little smile on my face, glad that mess is gone till the next time I boil something over and it drips down and through all the creases and crevices. Sadly, there will be no more cat hair cleanups. Our bundle of furry joy left us a while back. Of course, there’s that silver lining of no more cat hair! Still.

I’m not even going to put a next step down, because that didn’t work so well on Monday. I will come back tomorrow, though, and show you the mess I cleaned up today.

Unsent Christmas Goodies and other debris litter our dining room table

Holiday cheer languishing on my dining room table

This is my dining room table today, two days after New Years, littered with unsent Christmas goodies and paraphernalia. I know. Who sends their holiday packages long after the diaper clad baby has given Father Time and his murderous scythe the boot? Perhaps I’m the only one. Sigh. I’m determined to get my packages in the mail this week. I’ve set the timer for one hour. Let’s see how much I accomplish. While I’m working, a little back story.

Want to know how bad it is in my house?

Two years ago, on New Years Day 2009, I began a program to de-clutter my house. For fifteen minutes a day, five days a week, I would clear some small bit of the clutter from my life. Seemed doable. Fifteen minutes. We can do anything for fifteen minutes, right? And the payoff! A whole year of 15 minutes, 5 days a week, why that’s 52 weeks times 5 days times 15 minutes  = 3,900 minutes = 65 hours! That’s more than a week and a half of full-time work.

That figure alone is incentive enough to clear, zap and zip those messes away, wouldn’t you say? Not to mention what I could do with that week and half next year if I keep the clutter cleared once it’s gone. Vacation anyone?

All I can say is: Life got in the way. I’d like to say life got in the way of posting and writing, which it did, but truth be told, life got in the way of clearing the clutter. Not that I haven’t kept at it, but I stopped doing fifteen minutes a day, and the clutter I managed to clear barely kept pace with the clutter I managed to make.

So.

My pledge

New year. New start. Five days a week, fifteen minutes a day, I will clear clutter. Some days, I may spend more than fifteen minutes. Some days I may spend hours. But Monday through Friday, unless I am unable to work at home, I will spend a minimum of fifteen minutes clearing the clutter in my home. As often as possible, I will record my clutter clearing journey here.

There’s plenty of clutter to clear, especially after the holidays

If you think my dining room table is bad, you should see my hallway, my living room and my bedroom. Christmas cheer everywhere. Today, I gave myself a jump-start: One full hour of clutter zapping. In a moment, I’ll show you how far I got, starting with the dining room table, but first, I needed to visualize the feel-good that would come from spending my time this way instead, of say, baking that sweet potato pie my sweetheart hankers after.

Incentives

I’m imagining some of the good that can come from zapping the clutter from my dining room table.

• We’ll be able to eat dinner at the table for the first time in weeks (cloth napkins, candles, beautiful heirloom casserole dish bubbling with cheeses and goodies)
• We can enjoy a vase of cut flowers (organic, fair trade, of course) on the table any time we like
• The dining room/study will be so much more pleasant a place to live and work (Our apartment is too small for a separate study, but roomy enough we can fit the desk and an unobtrusive file cabinet neatly on one side–when we keep it tidy, that is)

One hour later

Some of the goodies packed in box and labeled for mailing

By the time I located the right box, found enough packing material to pack three jam jars and one cookie jar for a safe journey out-of-state, most of my hour was gone. The good news: The first of three packages is ready to mail.

While my table is as messy as ever, I’ve made progress, and that feels good. I also managed not to eat any of  the Triple Ginger Cookies, which are fabulous. The recipe is not mine. You’ll find it at 101 Cookbooks.

How I feel having accomplished this much

A bit disappointed, actually. Having given myself an hour, I thought I could pack all three packages, but it is easy to forget how much time careful wrapping and stuffing take, especially when packing glass and food items. On the other hand, I’ve made progress, and that is always a good feeling. I’m off to grab a load of laundry from the dryer in the basement (three floors down), fold and put away (Avoiding more clutter!), then to the Post Office where I can mail this first package.

Next

Pack the second and, if I’m lucky, third boxes, however much I do in fifteen minutes. Of course, I may choose once again to give myself extra time, but that’s a choice to make tomorrow.

Copyright notice: All text and images are under copyright. No part of this post or its images may be reproduced or reprinted without written permission from the author.

Fourth desk drawer functional again

Much better.

Bottom drawer--tools and envelopes found

That’s the last of the desk reorganization. Small chores, easily accomplished in a few fifteen minute sessions.

How I feel: I’m relieved to have completed clearing another entire area, no matter how small. This is going to work.

Strategy update: Followed my own advice and set the timer when all I really wanted to do was change to my jammies and crawl under the covers with a cup of tea. I still need to solve the problem identified last night of what to do with items that have no designated home, like dead batteries waiting to be carried to the recycler.

Next: Tomorrow is Saturday, but I’m planning a fifteen minute maintenance session with the desktop this weekend. More to come on the why and the what of that.

Messy third drawer

Oh boy, this is getting better and better. Clearing the third drawer, I found a motherlode of scotch tape in every type we might use, a ton of post-it-notes, and our entire supply of paper clips–large, small, fancy, plain. For at least six months, I’ve had to dig and dig to find a clip when I needed it.

How I feel: Maybe it’s the time of night that I post here, but I feel giddier and giddier at the prospect of eventually getting everything in my house as tidy as these drawers.

All things useful visible and handy in third drawer

Strategy update: There are some things, like dead batteries, that I simply do not know where to put. Think overnight about a strategy to handle things like that so I don’t spend half my fifteen minutes trying to find their true home in the chaos of the rest of the house.

Next: Start clearing Drawer Four. There are five in all in the tower that serves our desk, so getting close to the last.

Second desk drawer spiffed up with unused storage space available in back

Second drawer was easy to tidy. (Forgot to take a before pic, but here’s the after.) Started on third. It’s going to take a bit more time, as you can see from the image below, but in the two drawers, I’ve already found–and put away–some “lost” and much-missed items.

Finds:  A baggie full of recycled rubber bands; an old pair of glasses in a case; a handy dandy, tape measure we use for a quick read when planning a project; and DP’s calligraphy pens which, amazingly, still flow perfectly with ink.

Third drawer is a bit messier than the second

How I feel: Rather amazed how much lighter I am each time I do this. I arrived home flinching with back pain as I dragged my sorry self up three flights. After nibbling away at the clutter and achieving this tiny success, I feel as if a weight has lifted, far larger than the work accomplished would warrant.

Strategy update: Next time I feel I just cannot do the fifteen minutes, set the timer and give it a whirl. Clearing clutter energizes!

Next: Finish Drawer Three and, time permitting, begin Drawer Four.

Top desk drawer tidy with its pens, markers and other tools easy to get to and use

It took only a few minutes to finish tidying the drawer. I found enough quarters to do a load of wash, a hair band, an old grocery list, a Starbucks receipt, a pretty read bead (to what, for Pete’s sake?), and glory be, my pocket knife. I’ve been wondering where that thing got to for two or three years now. A good pocketknife is as useful in emergencies as the proverbial hairpin of old. I put it in my handbag, where it belongs.

I chose not to test every pen and marker for ink. We’ll discard them one at a time as we use them. The good news is, most of the pens in our drawer are refillable, as opposed to the disposables we used to buy by the gross. Sure, we still have to dispose of the empty refills, but they’re much smaller, and at least fifty percent of their packaging is recyclable. The other good news is, I found refills for most of the pens, as well as leads and erasers for the automatic pencils. They were lost under all the junk.

How I feel: Pleased and a little giddy to have nicked away one tiny thorn in my daily life.

Strategy update: Always go for the solution that will take the least time overall. Faced with a slew of pens and pencils that may or may not have outlived their usefulness, I could have spent another evening or two testing them one by one. That would have been a waste of time. Next time we pick up a pen, it will take one second to pitch if it turns out to be useless.

Next: Dive into drawer two.