interestingly but probably coinciding with the New Year and resolutions, both the LA Times and NY Times devoted their home sections to clutter and organization.

I found the article I'm pasting below to be an excellent capsulization of some of the issues that cause me (and perhaps others) to have difficulty in letting things go -- to the point where retention makes life more difficult in a myriad of ways large and small.

RESOLUTIONS

Tips to help speed things along

Our homes are bloated with stuff we don't need but insist on keeping. Here's advice from experts in time and money management, human behavior, even feng shui: Maybe these words will motivate you to ju

Janet Eastman

December 30, 2004

Start each day anew

"Before ending your day, take five minutes to put things in order so that you can start fresh the next day," says Valorie Burton, author of "Listen to Your Life: Following Your Unique Path to Extraordinary Success." "When your life is cluttered with old, stale habits, relationships and situations, you prevent new and desirable things and people from showing up."

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Know who's benefiting

"Ask yourself, 'Who are those things for?' " says Webb Keane, a cultural anthropologist with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, Calif. "If they are for other people, do these things help forge relationships with them or merely try to impress them? If the latter, that's clutter. If they are for you, are they part of who you are or someone you would like to become? Not clutter. Do they give you pleasure? Not clutter. Relics of a purchase that you thought would give you pleasure? Or waiting to become a pleasure someday, if you had the time, paid more attention, were a better person? Clutter."

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Decide what's important

Says Jeanne Arnold, an anthropologist with the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, "We cherish certain objects because they are deeply meaningful, and we collect others because they are beautiful or make us happy. These reinforce our family histories or bolster our self-identity and are worth keeping. But the constant pressure to consume means most families buy too much and have trouble getting rid of things they don't need or use."

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Assess the price

"A 10-by-10-foot storage unit in Los Angeles runs $1,400 a year; you're spending real money to store something," says R. Christian Sonne of Huntington Beach-based Self Storage Economics, which tracks the self-storage industry. "Every three months, look at it and see what you can part with."

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Contain the spillover

"Call clutter what it is : another stress creator. Clutter will eventually permeate every area of your home and life," says Tara Aronson, a Pacific Palisades mother of three and author of "Mrs. Clean Jeans' Housekeeping With Kids."

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Face fear of loss

"Those who can't bear to part with sentimental things are afraid of losing an emotional connection with an important person in the past or present," says Glenn Mowbray, a psychotherapist with a private practice in Long Beach. "And those who can't decide what to do with stuff don't want to make sometimes hard choices. Fear of loss, then, is at the root of clutter and must be faced to move forward."

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Just give it away

"People fear being caught unprepared, so they need to ease into getting rid of items," says Mark Ellwood, a productivity consultant who maintains a database on how people waste time. "Put expiration dates on accumulated stuff, no more than one year in the future. Then when the time is up, put it out on the front lawn with a sign saying, 'Free Stuff.' It's amazing the junk people will take away that you never could have sold in a garage sale."

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Pare the paper trail

"Simplify your documents," says Laurel Mann, a financial advisor with Waddell & Reed in Costa Mesa. "You should be safe with the IRS if you only keep financial records for three to six years. With capital assets such as real estate or mutual funds, keep documentation until you reposition the asset to verify your gain or loss."

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Rewire your mind

"Spiritually, clutter is old, heavy, dark energy," says feng shui master Linda Lenore of Menlo Park, Calif. "Organizing it allows the neurotransmitters in your mind to easily relay information, so instead of having a dial-up modem mind, you have high-speed cable connection."

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Janet Eastman

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times