Don Aslett’s New Broom that Sweeps Clean

Clutter’s Last Stand: It’s Time to De-Junk Your Life! by Don Aslett. Available only in paperback and not available at the library, or at least not at mine. Follow the link to purchase a new or used copy; I promise you that it will be worth whatever money you pay for it.

I mentioned this book in Friday’s post when I discussed burdensome gifts, and I decided that I should feature the book in a post of its own. I mention Don Aslett fairly often; he is my cleaning and clutter-clearing guru. He’s actually more practical and useful than Marie Kondo. She is really pretty extreme, I must admit. She’s good for the initial burst of clearing out, but her daily routines are just too much. I’m sorry, Marie, but I’m not going to put my shampoo bottle away in a cabinet every day, thanking it for its service as I do so! The podcast By the Book explored what it’s like to actually live by Marie’s strictures and the hosts were unified in their assessment that she’s trying for the antiseptic more than the livable. (I’m not recommending that podcast as a whole, but this episode is pretty good.)

So Aslett is willing to admit to his own weaknesses in the clutter area. He’s especially funny about his collection of toilet trinkets: keychains, paperweights, penholders, pencil sharpeners, etc., etc., that people have given to him through the years as memorabilia connected with his cleaning business. As he admits ruefully, he has spent hours over the years “dusting, cleaning, arranging, and protecting” these priceless items. He finally put the whole shebang into a glass display case so that the dusting component was cut down, but he knows he’d be better off if he just tossed it.

Aslett’s philosophy can be boiled down to two main ideas:

1. Clutter complicates our lives. If our homes, offices, cars and storage units are packed with items we don’t even like, much less use, we are spending time, money and effort maintaining those useless things that could be better spent investing in people and in our real interests.

2. You can’t organize clutter. You can store it, but that’s not the same thing as organizing. If you have a whole mess of stuff that you never use, and you buy a set of storage boxes, label each one, and stack them up neatly in your closet, then you’ve invested even more of your life in stuff that you should just throw away.

Funnily enough, I was listening this morning to an episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, and the two hosts, Mollie Hemingway and David Harsanyi, said that they were sick of talking about politics and so wanted to discuss their vinyl record collections. I got bored pretty quickly because they were discussing all these rock groups I’ve never heard of, but I was impressed by the fact that Mollie said she actually listens to her records. Most people who collect vinyl records don’t do that; they just collect them, and organize them, and dust them. Why on earth you’d want to bother when you can just listen to music on your phone I don’t know, but I guess that shows how much of a Philistine I am! (I may go back and listen to the other segments, as I realized when I looked up the link that they also discuss parenthood and current TV shows.)

Back to Aslett: he’s a very funny, engaging writer, and his books have very funny illustrations. He won’t boss you around (not too much, anyway) or preach, but I can assure you that if you’ll read this book you will be inspired to get up off your chair and starting tossing. It’s exhilarating. Try it and see!