Diary written in 2011. The concept of ā€œ[Itā€™s as if thereā€™s nothing you canā€™t take out when you need it. It may be the guidance of wife, who is getting married six months after this.

from Hatena2011-01-25 When I told people that my room was untidy, they told me to ā€œthrow it away, throw it away,ā€ but I had trouble thinking of what to throw away, so it would be easier to just climb up on the roof of a building and throw myself away, etc. I was once mistaken for suicidal.

Even those who say, ā€œThrow it away,ā€ donā€™t throw themselves away or renounce their entire household, which means that they are not throwing anything away, but are able to implicitly judge what to throw away and what not to throw away.

On the other hand, people (including me) who seem to be hoarding things they donā€™t need have not developed the ability to judge what to throw away and what not to throw away. They make procrastination decisions about what to throw away and what not to throw away, and they take the option of ā€œkeeping it for nowā€. It is impossible to say to such a person, ā€œFirst, letā€™s throw away what we donā€™t need. They canā€™t judge what they donā€™t need.

In the past year, I have grown from ā€œPeople who canā€™t get rid of itā€¦ā€ to ā€œI will be able to put away the five-story cardboard tower that was piled up in the middle of my room for six months after I moved in and pull out the hot carpetā€ to ā€œI will throw away about 200 kilograms of booksā€ and ā€œI will throw away six bags of used clothes. I have grown up to be able to make decisions such as ā€œthrow away 200 kilograms of booksā€ or ā€œthrow away six bags of used clothes! So Iā€™ll summarize what I want to say to my old self now. By the way, I canā€™t tell you much about myself because I am still a useless person who canā€™t even cook rice and eat it with furikake (sprinkles) on it.

  • ā€œI canā€™t throw this away because Iā€™m going to use it.ā€

Do you keep duct tape? If you donā€™t, please read something else. Now, if someone says, ā€œI need that duct tape and I need it now,ā€ can you get it out right away? If you canā€™t get it out, itā€™s as if it doesnā€™t exist.

I wrote ā€œstring + tapeā€ on a transparent shoe case I bought at Daiso and put it together as soon as I found it there. There were 2 balls of vinyl string, 2 balls of hemp string, 3 rolls of gummed tape and 1 roll of curing tape.

Tools, writing utensils, etc., were gradually ā€œput in placeā€ and collected there as soon as they were found. My life improved when I could find what I was looking for quickly. Until now, he had always put his keys in a certain lock box because he had trouble finding them when he left the house. It is not only keys. It is necessary to decide where all the ā€œthings to be usedā€ should be so that they can be taken out immediately when they are used.

  • Socks I made a box for socks, which is a kind of ā€œmake a certain box. As I cleaned up the room, socks came out from here and there, so I washed them and put them in the box and ended up with about 20 pairs. I ended up with about 20 pairs of socks. The reason why I had to buy more socks as soon as I ran out is because they have no place in the house!

As a result, the sock box is no longer able to hold all the socks. Do I need 20 pairs of socks? Letā€™s throw out the old ones first.

  • Books Books are hard to throw away. But recently I had an eye-opener. Bestsellers can be thrown away and then acquired again.

The rest is an extension of what weā€™ve been talking about. A book has no reason to exist if you canā€™t get to it quickly when you need it.

  • Food Throw away anything that has expired!

When I was stressed out, I bought some half-baked snacks at a 100 yen store and left them there for a very long time, but under normal circumstances, the delicious Kit Kat would have turned white and plummy, and the rice crackers would be completely damp.

If we are careful not to buy & receive things that we have no vision of using up, and if we throw away things that have expired, we will have less stuff!

  • Quantity of objects In the first place, an ever-increasing amount of stuff is not a good state of affairs. If more things come in than are consumed or thrown away, there will be more and more things. If people with poor material management skills fall into such a situation, it will only get worse and worse.

The only way to avoid a situation where books overflow from the bookshelves and pile up all over the place is to reduce the number of books by one book for every one more book. You can give them to people, throw them away, sell them to used bookstores, but you have to let them go anyway. As Drucker. also says, to do something new, you have to get rid of the old things that are not creating value.


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