Items I no longer keep in my home since engaging in minimalism

1. A giant scarf collection — I edited it down.

2. Plastic bags — I no longer keep the “bag of bags” under my kitchen sink and I don’t purchase “sandwich bags” either. I pack my lunch in a bento box and wash it daily.

3. A million plastic containers in the kitchen and variety of plastic wrap.

4. Baskets and other decorative containers. If you have so much stuff that you are spending money on more containers, it’s time to get rid of things and NOT buy more containers for your stuff.

5. Magazines. I feel like I’m dating myself here... Gen Z and Millennials have zero desire to have this stuff. It’s not even on their radar. I have learned most magazines I can get for free from the library on my Kindle now. I spend very little time reading them that way. Everything is digital now and goes to my Apple News.

6. Essential oils — I used to love having a collection to mix in a diffuser. Now, I just buy ONE blend I like so I don’t have to deal with a bunch of annoying tiny bottles to keep and organize. Tiny bottles are annoying to store.

7. Papers — stacks of papers that are “for later” or “need to be gone through” or “recipes to try one day.”

8. Decorative boxes — They are cute but they don’t hold up over time. They fall apart and the paper bubbles... yuck.

9. Textbooks — You literally NEVER use them again and can’t resell them for value.

10. Old t-shirts — I’m still very proud of the marathon and half-marathon I ran, but I think it’s time to let go of the shirts and tech t’s from those experiences. Keeping the medals is enough. Shirts do wear out and I refuse to keep a tomb of old t-shirts. There’s always another t-shirt to buy... Especially living in the Midwest. We make a shirt for everything here!

11. A DVD player and DVDs. I’m so glad I was always too poor to have a DVD collection now; that would have been such a waste of money long-term! Same with CDs, or any old tech.

Stuff is the enemy! It's baggage, it's clutter, it holds us back energetically... so here's a mini list of items I no longer keep around!

Bonus list: engaging in digital minimalism

If you haven’t checked your email lately, GO! It’s full of emails for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. You can unsubscribe from all of them! Or many. It’s a good time of year to re-evaluate which lists you’re on and why. What value do they bring to your life? This is a good time to re-evaluate because everyone with a mailing list has sent out at least one email in the past week. You can ALWAYS re-subscribe later if you want. (Sometimes I actually do this).

How many hard drives does one need?

Anything you need to categorize into containers is usually something that needs to be trimmed.

I had a container full of thumb drives before this year when I made the great purge. I replaced dozens of little bitty hard drives I’d collected over the years with ONE hard drive that’s one TB in size. Now, I’ve found Apple’s iCloud is more suited to my needs. Apple offers up to 2 TB in iCloud storage as part of its Apple One subscription, just FYI. (No, they aren’t paying me, I’m just a longtime customer and I’m content).

Photo minimalism?

Most of my iCloud is photos and I never take the time to delete old ones I no longer care about. This turned out to be a good thing a couple months ago when a friend took their life. I went back through five years of friendship and was able to recover EVERY photo we had taken together over that time. Every Christmas party, selfie, holiday — I had it all in my iCloud!

This is one area you don’t have to waste your time trimming.

There were a lot of old photos that were meaningless that I could delete, like old photos I created just for this blog. But if you have photos in cloud storage somewhere, On God, let them be. One day, that could be all you have left of someone the way the world is going these days... The best part of those iCloud photos? They were LIVE photos! I could “hold them” with a finger and hear my friend’s laugh again, just ever so slightly.

Keep the photos. Keep the keepsakes.

I also kept a small stack of Christmas cards from the past couple years in my box of decorations. Needless to say, the friends who sent them are gone for good from COVID or forever changed from the stresses of 2020... I had a good cry finding them but am ever so glad I kept those momentos.

Obviously there’s other digital things for me that won’t be minimal such as yoga playlists, files of my writing, etc.

The key is keeping what’s important to YOU both safely and securely. As with anything in life, I enjoy the old saying, “To thine own self be true.” It never steers one wrong!

Need some help becoming more minimalist or just decluttering and organizing this holiday season? Check out the book, “30 Days To Becoming More Minimalist” here:

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