Last fall I was enjoying a beautiful fall day with my friends Adam and Michael and discussing Michael's recent #OneMonthGoals personal challenge. For the month of October he challenged himself to eat vegetarian and was considering a minimalist challenge for November. This intrigued me. The way it would work is that on the first day one item is given away/thrown away/donated. On the second day, two items need to go, on the third day three items are gone and it continues until day 30 when 30 items need to be eliminated. On my drive home, I thought more about this and decided I'd present it to my husband, Brian. I wouldn't say our house is cluttered but it was definitely time to clean some closets and cabinets.
Brian was 100% on board and we set up a few ground rules as we set out to eliminate 465 items from our house:
1) We allowed ourselves to work ahead. So, if on a weekend we wanted to get rid of 100 items we checked off multiple days. This was helpful because weekdays can get busy and I knew we wouldn't be successful if we set out to clean a closet at 9:00 at night.
2) There was a large bag of clothing that I had been carrying around in my trunk for weeks and I wasn't going to unpack it to see how many items were being given away. Instead, we'd allow bags to be weighed and count that. If I remember correctly, the bag was 8 pounds so we counted that for Nov. 8. The weighing option came in handy when throwing away pens, pencils, markers and all the other random items or pieces of paper that were in a junk drawer. It seemed like a more honest way of doing things.
3) We didn't need to purge together. We could work independently and log it on the calendar that was on the refrigerator.
The first half of the month was pretty easy and as it turned out the last half of the month wasn't bad either. In fact, we were so successful that we are planning on doing this challenge again in April because we didn't even touch the garage and I'm sure there's plenty to be discarded in there.
For the month of January, our family has decided to do a challenge together. We're calling it the Try Something New challenge. Everyday, someone in our family needs to try something new. Sometimes we'll do it as a family, sometimes it might be just one person. We've already picked two recipes to try this week, borrowed a game we've never played and created a long list of ideas to draw from all month.
I think it's going to be a great month!
