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A review by hazelbright
Year of No Clutter by Eve O. Schaub
5.0
Great book, much deeper than the rote "how to get your house under control" books one normally finds in this category. Like her year-long journey clearing the Hell Room, Schaub does not stop at the surface of things, but provides some profound commentary on the possible evolutionary benefits of having a hoarding personality, the meaning of things in general and how things become conflated with love and loved ones, and the lives of things as they go on in the world without us, freed from their prison under other mounds of stuff.
What Schaub does here that I have not seen in any other book on this topic is to address the emotional part of what she calls "saving." She describes how the capacity to sort through one's things is strengthened with practice, just like any other skill, which is not a new thing, but what she does that no one else I've read has done is to describe how to go about taking those first tentative steps. She provides lots of little tricks to get this done. Moving things to a new place, for example. Things that we can ignore because they've sat there for eons, once moved, become big targets that need dealing with.
If you have a big mess to clean up and want a friend to help you, get this as an audiobook, and the time and work will fly by.
What Schaub does here that I have not seen in any other book on this topic is to address the emotional part of what she calls "saving." She describes how the capacity to sort through one's things is strengthened with practice, just like any other skill, which is not a new thing, but what she does that no one else I've read has done is to describe how to go about taking those first tentative steps. She provides lots of little tricks to get this done. Moving things to a new place, for example. Things that we can ignore because they've sat there for eons, once moved, become big targets that need dealing with.
If you have a big mess to clean up and want a friend to help you, get this as an audiobook, and the time and work will fly by.