{"id":5005,"date":"2017-05-16T15:31:27","date_gmt":"2017-05-16T19:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/?p=5005"},"modified":"2018-10-09T16:53:01","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T20:53:01","slug":"365146-updating-my-life-3-bookcases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/365146-updating-my-life-3-bookcases\/","title":{"rendered":"365+#146: Updating My Life #3-Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Now that one office file cabinet is pretty much pruned and reorganized, I decided to tackle my two bookcases which hold work related books. I had a happy conundrum. Friends who were moving out of town offered me one of their bookcases. It matched my main bookcase in size and style so I was happy to take it. The problem is that I now had 10 shelves available to fill rather than just 8 (My second bookcase was a shorter one.) This seemed like an invitation to save everything plus possibly add some more books \u2013 certainly not the goal of a declutterer. So, how did I justify filling 2 more shelves? First I put the disintegrating old 3 shelf bookcase out for the trash. Then I needed to decide how to use my new space.
\n6 ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Position the books better<\/strong>. Some of the original books were crammed into fewer shelves by stacking extra books horizontally on top of the vertical books. Now I had space for each book to have its own proper space.\"\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Re-organize the books<\/strong>. I had five main categories of books \u2013 prayer, marriage, parenting, programs, and miscellaneous (peace, justice, simplicity, environment, and supplies like folders, notebooks, etc.) Now I had room to keep the main categories together so I could find stuff more easily.<\/li>\n
  3. Remove duplicates<\/strong>. I found 4 duplicate books that I didn\u2019t know I had. Now I have some to give away.<\/li>\n
  4. Remove obsolete items<\/strong>. I realized that my Singapore son was storing an old boom box on one of the bookcases. I hadn\u2019t pressed him to take it with him because it had this clever function of being able to copy tapes. Aha! I may be a \"\"<\/a>baby boomer but even I<\/em> realize that few songs are on tape these days and even fewer working boom boxes remain that can play tapes. He confirmed that I could take it to the E-waste recycling drive sponsored by Cohen Recycling<\/a><\/strong>. My husband added his failing laptop computer to my tech clean-up.<\/li>\n
  5. \n
  6. \"\"<\/a>Fill extra shelves with stored books, thus freeing up table space<\/strong>. Tables are meant to sit around or to hold frequently used items. BUT, I had one table that was mostly holding boxes of my books (and file boxes of my husband\u2019s paper work). I\u2019m not in charge of Jim\u2019s supplies, but I felt good about emptying 3 boxes of my \u201cbooks for sale\u201d into my extra shelf space.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    3 LIFE LESSONS<\/strong><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. It\u2019s easier to find things<\/strong>. Periodically going through stuff I\u2019ve had \u201cforever\u201d helped me recognize what\u2019s changed in my profession, what\u2019s no longer necessary, and to find what\u2019s still relevant.<\/li>\n
    2. The internet as storage space.<\/strong> As I let go of paper stuff (books, files, handouts, etc.) I kept asking myself: Is this already on my computer or in the cloud? If so, I don\u2019t need to keep all the paper back-up. This presumes, of course, that I also have a logical, useful way of categorizing information on my computer.<\/li>\n
    3. It\u2019ll be easier on my kids<\/strong>. I\u2019m not planning on dying soon, but one never knows. Having recently gone through my mother\u2019s stuff after her death, I realize that sorting through another person\u2019s memorabilia is a bitter-sweet experience. On one hand, the memories it evokes are precious and priceless. But on the other hand, a lot of the sorting is time-consuming and wasteful. The temptation is to just throw it all away.
      \nI\u2019m still in the active working phase of my life so I still need reference books, outlines of talks, and professional resources. There will be a time for me to prune much more of the traces of my life, but I don\u2019t want to save so much that the important stuff is thrown out with the trivial because it\u2019s just too much to review.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Now that one office file cabinet is pretty much pruned and reorganized, I decided to tackle my two bookcases which hold work related books. I had a happy conundrum. Friends who were moving out of town offered me one of their bookcases. It matched my main bookcase in size and style so I was happy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[14,28,27,33,6,43],"class_list":["post-5005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paper-less-lent-2","tag-books","tag-electronics","tag-memorabilia","tag-organizing","tag-recycling","tag-tmi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5005"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5042,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions\/5042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}