Where can you reduce clutter in your life?
I sometimes think of about clutter as open tabs – the low-grade pressure running in the background, the feeling that life is always slightly unfinished.
We’re in the declutter process at the moment. We’re currently living in a five-bedroom house, and in a couple of years we plan to be in a two-bedroom apartment. We’ve given ourselves two years to pull it off, and we’ll need all of it.
So I’m trying a different framework. Instead of “How do we get rid of stuff?”, I’m asking: Which tabs are draining our attention? Which ones can we finally close? Because every shelf and cupboard is also a small claim on your future time: maintain me, sort me, move me, decide what to do with me… one day.
Here are some of the tabs currently open in my head.
Books: Most of mine will go. Everything I need can be digital, borrowed, or accessed through a library. Given that our books currently fill a large library room, that will be radical. My wife loves the feeling of a book in her hand, so she’ll work out what’s worth keeping and what needs to go. But for me, the rule is simple: if it’s not essential, it’s not coming.
Paper: Old uni notes. Printed articles. Documents we kept because they felt “important.” A lot of it is just deferred decision-making in manila folders. It can go. If something matters, we can find it again.
Photos: Decades of them. This tab is emotional as well as practical. We’ll have to do a serious cull and digitise the rest. I suspect it will feel like revisiting rooms in the past—keeping what we love, letting go of what we don’t need to carry forward.
Cars: Mine will go. I want to live in a way that doesn’t require a private vehicle—walk, public transport, rideshare, carshare. This tab isn’t really about a car. It’s about building a life that’s lighter, more local, less dependent.
Clothes: If I don’t wear it regularly, out it goes. Not “just in case.” Not “one day.” Regularly. I want less decision fatigue and fewer hangers holding onto imaginary versions of me.
Garden equipment: No need for a lawn mower or whipper snipper in an apartment. In the future, we’ll pay a gardener when we need to—and let go of the fantasy that we’ll always live the same way we do now.
CDs: We gave our CD racks to a 16-year-old who’s collecting old CDs from op shops. Apparently physical media is making a comeback. Who would have thought? Either way, streaming will be the household default.
Recipe books: Digitise what we actually return to. Let the rest go. We don’t need three shelves of inspiration.
Linen: We’ll need to cut back to a fraction of what we currently have. It’s amazing how many towels and sheets multiply quietly over the years, like they’re breeding at night.
Furniture: Much of it will have to go, but we won’t be throwing it out. We don’t want anything for it except respect—good homes, people who will use it and look after it. I’m not into cheap, disposable furniture. I’d rather own less, and own better.
Artwork: We have more than we can hang in an apartment. We’ll keep what we love most and find good homes for the rest—places where it can be seen, not stored.
Use it or lose it. Cull hard. Keep what we genuinely love and actually use. And when we give things away, we’ll do it with respect. We don’t want anything for these belongings except good homes.
Two years. A lot of tabs.
In short, I’m not chasing an empty house. I’m chasing bandwidth—a life with fewer open loops, less background noise, less “we should deal with that one day.” Not minimalism for its own sake, but space for what we actually want to carry into the next season.
The Afterword 
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