#30days Home Organisation Challenge
DAY 26: Do you enjoy turning the paper pages of a good book while relaxing on a comfortable couch after a long day of work, or even on holidays? For many of us, it is a total pleasure, one not quite matched by reading a novel on a hard, cold electronic device. Books and other printed materials have a way of accumulating over the years and taking over our homes. If you are downsizing to a smaller home, or just want to claim some space back, you may not have enough space for all these publications. Here’s how to downsize your reading materials!
JOURNAL:
What does my ideal day look like?
Where would I love to live?
TASK:
Let Go of Books, Magazines & Papers
HOW TO LET GO OF PRINTED MATERIALS
Schedule Time on Your Calendar: The amount of time you allocate will depend on how many books and other publications you own. If you have many large bookshelves stuffed with reading material, consider scheduling several days as opposed to several hours for this task.
Prepare a Staging Area: To make the process easier, think about clearing floor space where you can work. Label boxes with the following categories: pack, sell, recycle, donate, return to someone else and undecided. And keep in mind that many people cannot resist the urge to start reading when they are surrounded by so many interesting items. Try to resist this temptation, because it could substantially slow down your progress.
Work on One Category at a Time: Pleasure reading, fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, and textbooks. Magazines. Cookbooks, gardening, crafts, self-help, reference. Yearbooks and photo albums. Assignments and work projects: pick a category, such as textbooks, and then pulling every book in this category from all the bookshelves in your home into the staging area. Attempt to make a decision on every item in your category before moving on to the next one. If you really can’t make a decision, put it in the undecided pile, but remember that the greater this pile is, the more it will slow your sorting.
Given that so many good books come out each year, how likely is it that you’ll ever reread a particular book again? Seldom does anyone reread books. One way to make it more palatable to part with your books is to start a book journal, in which you create a dated entry for each book you have read along with a short plot description. It can be fun to go back and peruse it from time to time. A book journal frees you up to be able to let go of the hard copy, thanks to the internet, you can always buy it again quite inexpensively.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”