Thoughts on Seasonal Decluttering
Twice a year, roughly around the equinoxes, I go through my things. Not in a dramatic, life-changing purge sort of way. More like how you'd check on a garden — pull a few weeds, see what's overgrown, decide what stays and what goes. I've been doing this for maybe eight or nine years now, and it's become one of those habits that feels less like a task and more like a season of its own.
The spring pass is usually the bigger one. Winter has a way of accumulating things. Papers pile up on the desk. The filing cabinet drawer gets tight. Cables appear in the junk drawer that I can't identify. I find myself with three almost-empty notebooks because I kept starting new ones instead of finishing old ones. The fall pass is lighter — more of a check-in before everything goes indoors for the cold months.
Physical decluttering is the part most people think of, and honestly it's the easier half. You pick up an object, you look at it, and you ask yourself a question. The question varies depending on which book you've read. Does it spark joy? Have you used it in the past year? Would you buy it again? I don't have a single question I use. Mostly I just hold the thing and wait to see if I feel anything. If the answer is a kind of blank indifference — if I can't remember why I have it or imagine when I'd need it — that's usually enough.
The harder part is distinguishing between organizing and actually getting rid of things. These feel similar in the moment but they're fundamentally different activities. Organizing is rearranging. You move the books from one shelf to another, sort the papers into labeled folders, put the cables in a nicer box. Everything is tidier. Nothing is gone. You've spent an afternoon shuffling the same mass of stuff into a more pleasing configuration. I've done this many times and felt very productive doing it, only to realize a week later that I still own exactly as many things as I did before.
Actually reducing what you have requires a different mindset. It requires you to make a decision that feels a little bit permanent, even when it isn't. Throwing away a stack of old magazines isn't really permanent — you could find most of those articles online. Donating a jacket you haven't worn in two years isn't permanent — you could buy another jacket. But it feels that way. There's a small voice that says what if you need it, and that voice is remarkably persuasive when you're standing over a trash bag at ten in the morning.
This is where the maybe box comes in. I started keeping one about five years ago and it's been genuinely useful. The idea is simple: if I can't decide whether to keep something or get rid of it, it goes in the box. The box goes in the closet. I write the date on it. Six months later, during the next seasonal pass, I open the box. If I haven't thought about any of the items in the intervening months — if I forgot what was in the box entirely, which is usually the case — then everything in it gets donated or recycled. No further deliberation. The six months already did the deliberating for me.
The maybe box works because it externalizes the decision. Instead of standing there agonizing over a thing, you just put it in the box and move on. The emotional weight of the decision gets deferred to a future version of you who, it turns out, almost never cares. I'd say ninety percent of what goes into the maybe box eventually leaves the house. The remaining ten percent is things I actually did go looking for during those six months, which tells me they're worth keeping.
I do the same thing digitally, though the mechanics are different. Every spring and fall I go through my files. Old downloads get deleted. The desktop gets cleared. I look through my documents folder and ask myself the same questions I ask about physical objects. I have a digital equivalent of the maybe box — a folder called "review" that I move uncertain files into. Same six-month rule. If I haven't opened a file in the review folder by the next pass, it gets deleted.
Digital decluttering is harder in some ways because storage is essentially free. There's no closet that gets full, no shelf that runs out of space. You can keep everything forever and never feel the physical consequences. The consequence is cognitive instead — the slow accumulation of noise that makes it harder to find the signal. I have a better relationship with my computer when there's less on it. I can't prove this empirically, but I believe it.
People sometimes ask if this whole process takes a long time. It does, sort of. A full pass through the apartment and the computer takes most of a weekend. But it's not unpleasant time. I put on a podcast or some music. I make coffee. I work through things at whatever pace feels right. There's no urgency to it. The goal isn't to achieve some minimalist ideal — I'm not trying to fit my life into a single bag. I just want to be able to open a drawer and know roughly what's in it. I want to be able to look at my files and not feel that low-grade anxiety of things being out of control.
It's a small practice. Twice a year, a weekend. But it compounds. Each pass is easier than the last because there's less to go through. The maybe box gets smaller. The decisions get faster. After enough iterations, you end up with something that isn't minimalism exactly, but a kind of settled equilibrium. Things come in, things go out, and the total stays roughly the same. That feels about right to me.
— K. Vadala