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> How I Cleaned My Room

  Separation of Functions
  Multiple Passes
  De-Sentimentalization
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How I Cleaned My Room

Until fairly recently, I had a bunch of stuff in my old room at my parents' house. It doesn't matter here what kind of stuff it was; what matters is that (a) there was a lot of it, so that it would have been burdensome to move it out and keep it, and (b) it had huge sentimental value to me, so that it would have been painful to throw it away. I didn't want to leave it there, but I couldn't figure out what else to do with it, so I did nothing, and the stuff just kept sitting there in my room.

Actually, I didn't quite do nothing. I kept coming back to the problem—sitting down in my room, staring at all the stuff, messing around with it, and wondering what to do—and gradually, over the course of several years, I developed a process that I found satisfactory. Then I used that process to clean my room!

The process, of course, is what I want to tell you about here. I don't think you'll want to use it as it stands, it's a bit too specialized for that, but maybe you'll find some of the ideas useful. And if not, well, at least it's another example of how to work with your mind rather than against it (Don't Fight Your Mind).

As usual, I've organized the details into independent subessays. The structure isn't the best, since most of the real content is in the third subessay, but hey, it's better than nothing. Thus, you may wander through these topics as you please.

* * *

Well, I shouldn't have published the table of contents before the essays were done, because of course the structure changed. Here's one more subessay.

 

  See Also

  Story of My Room, The

  April (2007)
  December (2007)
  May (2007)