Declutter your life with high-tech help
Now that it's finally feeling like spring outside, the pressure is on to do your annual spring cleaning. Just yesterday, we told you how to clean every room in your house, but today we turn your attention to decluttering, that oh-so-important aspect of getting your life in order (just ask Marie Kondo).
Dana Gehry, a personal organizer with Syystema, uses the word "purging" to describe what it is to de-clutter your space. "It's all about making space and paring down," she says, so that you don't get bogged down and distracted by stuff you simply don't need.
Apartment Therapy has a great guide to apps and gadgets that can help you declutter (because paper is just so 1995). Among the site's recommendations are Bevy, a service that allows you to put all your photos and videos in one place; ThredUp's clean-out kit, through which you can get rid of clothes (and earn money doing so); Decluttr, a site that allows you to sell all your old media (DVDs and CDs, anyone?); Clutter, a storage service with a really easy online interface that also does all the work for you (including packing and labeling your stuff); Texture, a sort of Netflix for magazine subscriptions that gives you unlimited digital magazines for $14.99 a month and finally, instead of books, the Amazon Kindle Unlimited, which gives you access to over a million e-book titles for $9.99/month.
When it comes to apps, Gehry warns against using ones that are too new and being "too much of an early adopter," before the kinks are worked out and apps perfected. (Also, there's always the danger that they'll close down.) Gehry once lost all of her calendar information using an app that wasn't yet perfect (no, it wasn't Google).
The very act of looking for tech apps to get you organized is a good start already. "Tech organization apps are often for people who are already in an organized state of mind," says Nicole Abramovici of Genius Organizing.
Abramovici has several she recommends to clients: My Things helps you keep an inventory of your stuff (in your storage space, for example); and Stylebook helps you keep an inventory of clothes and also helps plan your outfits. But the "special charm relevant to decluttering" is that it keeps track of how often you wear something, so you can decide whether or not it's worth holding onto an item that's taking up space in your closet.
Should you decide to ditch some things you barely ever wear, you can use the Goodwill app to find out locations and store hours (and drop-off times) and donate away.
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