*** minimaxer note: This series gives you a little more detail about why I’m doing this whole minimax thing. It all started with helping my family handle my father’s stuff – I guess you’d call it his estate… Part 1 of 4…
Any move is an event. If you’re moving someone else’s stuff it’s even more difficult, but moving a parent’s stuff after passing is the most difficult because it adds so much emotion to the event.
It’s amazing how much emotion we associate with stuff. Something you would normally think of as junk and ready for the dumpster (when it’s someone else’s stuff) is suddenly impossible to part with. If you haven’t gone through this yet, you’re lucky. For those of you with aging parents, I hope the minimaxer can help you wrestle with the issues and the stuff you are facing in the near future.
emotional stuff
The old saying “you can’t see the forest for the trees” is very apt here. We associate so much emotion with material stuff that it’s difficult to keep on task when packing for a move. Every item can bring back a memory that distracts us from the process and slows down our momentum. The emotion tied up in each item (the tree) distracts us from the process of moving the stuff (the forest).
What makes is worse is that we have to minimize the stuff along the way and this triggers feelings of guilt or remorse. How can we throw away the stuff someone else was saving – which clearly had value for them – without feeling like a bad person?
Fortunately, there are tools and tricks we can use to help conquer the guilt and work through the emotion. We can use computers, scanners, and other technology to get over this hump and keep our momentum to get the move done.
But we need to be careful here too. Just because we are storing stuff in electronic form doesn’t make it go away. We are transferring the space management problem from physical to virtual… which will be a topic for future posts, I’m sure!
tricks to minimize the emotion
The challenge is building a system that helps us keep things moving along as find emotional items. As we minimize, we want to be consistent and confident that decisions we make now to get rid of something don’t torment us later. At the same time we know it’s not possible or desirable to keep everything – that just postpones the problem and makes it harder next time. To help you start crafting your system during this time, here is a technique you can try – scanning.
You may be thinking “Is that your big idea? Everyone knows about scanning old pictures…” I know… it seems basic, and every minimalist will tell you to scan your old pictures to clear out the stacks of paper cluttering up your home. OK, you’ve got it, right? …but wait, there’s more…
Scanning isn’t just limited to paper, pictures, and documents. Expand your concept of what scanning is and you can find ways to ‘scan’ physical objects too. You can capture images of that stuff with your smartphone, camcorder, or gopro.
Plus, scanning doesn’t always mean you have to minimize all the stuff you scan.
For example, you may have a collection of figurines or model airplane engines to deal with. You don’t have space or desire to keep it all, but you don’t want to lose the memory. Clearly there was a lot of pride and passion tied up in the collection – plus there may still be potential value in selling the items.
In this case, you can select one of the items to save as a keepsake. It will represent the collection for you and honor the memory. Take pictures and videos of whole collection, including the item you’ve picked out, so later you can see it in the original set.
Now you can sell or donate the rest of the collection with less guilt – knowing you’ve captured the memory for posterity. You can share the images and videos with your family and recall the stories those memories stir up without having to carve out precious space in your limited home, garage, or basement.
The same tricks works with other stuff you may be wrestling with. Anything too large to fit in your space is a good candidate, and so are items you just need to get of but have trouble parting with. Furniture, radios, magazines, clocks, dishes, glassware, and cars are all items where the scanning technique can help.
This is how we can use technology to make the unbearable task of moving an estate more bearable and efficient. Remember your goal – minimize to maximize – so you can move on and be more productive with the stuff you keep.
keeping your momentum
Plowing through all the stuff is tough – no doubt about it. This is why people dread moving an estate. But if you can build your system, and follow it, you can work through the chaos and come out the other side feeling a sense of freedom and release.
Like everything else we discuss here, it’s important to maintain your focus and success comes from keeping your momentum. The biggest issue again is getting started.
We all handle the anxiety of minimizing stuff in different ways. A common way is to put it off as long as we can, hoping it will just go away if we don’t think about it. It won’t magically resolve itself – we have to act.
In my case I wondered for a long time why I would procrastinate. I knew that whatever I was putting off would have to get done someday… like the estate move. I just didn’t want it to be today. Then I realized it was because I had a vision in my mind of a perfect solution. So I would wait for a time when I could get it all done at once, perfectly like I imagined. But that time never comes… so I wait and wait… and the piles of stuff just get bigger and bigger.
The most important step in tackling the estate move is the first step – starting. Just jump in and start taking pictures, scanning, and doing a video tour of the stuff. Capture all the memories and store them away on your computer or in your cloud drive or dropbox.
Start small and keep going. The emotion will come up again, over and over, but go into it knowing that and know you have a system. Your system helps work through the emotion so you can minimize the stuff and maximize your future with or without it.