Finally home again

[carbonel]

The funeral and three days of shiva are over. I am possibly more peopled out than I ever have been in my entire life -- so of course tonight I'm going to a public event. I won't have to talk much, though; I'm just there to listen to Abby Franquemont, who is a Big Name in the world of spinning.

I'm also taking a two-day course from her over the weekend, which I'm very glad I'm back in time for.

My house is a disaster area, and I don't even know where to start. Note that this is nothing new. It was a disaster area before I left. But two weeks with my neatnik mother makes it look worse than usual. Just before I left, I hired an organizer to help get the place into shape, and then had to put her on hold because of all the other stuff. The essential problems are a) I don't have places for everything, b) I have too damned much stuff, and c) I'd rather do other stuff than organize/clean/put stuff away. I'm working on a) and b), but I'm not sure there's a cure for c).

Comments

[guppiecat]

I didn't mean to imply that it was that sort of emergency house-cleaning, just that processes would be similar. And frankly, of those I've done, I preferred the one with the living inhabitant.

In general, the way I've done it before is to clear a room (or yard if weather and situation permits) and quarter it. One quarter means toss, one quarter means keep, one quarter means "decide later" and one quarter is a staging area. (If needed, you can add a fifth category for "emotionally triggery, I don't want to look at it again", which is stored elsewhere.) Then, the person who owns the stuff is given 10 seconds for each item to decide where it goes, the rest of us playing mule. Once one quarter is full, stuff is boxed up and put/thrown away.

Eventually, you do this to each room and wind up with a big pile of "decide later". Then you come back the next weekend and tackle that.

Recursive dependencies are, in my opinion, best handled by documenting what the tasks are. This can be done in a "decide later" phase. How it's done depends on you. I do most things in Trello these days, but some people work best off of dated notecards taped to the item in question.