This isn’t a label like ‘Christmas decorations.’ This is a timeline sticker.

If you have a basement or garage or even an attick full of boxes, grab some small colourful stickers and write the year on the sticker and smack that sticker on each box!

The next time you open up that box, stick a new, different coloured sticker on it. You can even stick it right over top of the previous sticker.

If you open the box seasonally or occasionally use the year to label it. If you are in the box a handful of times during the year, label it with the month.

It’s a simple trick, but if you have a lot of storage boxes and you notice that some rarely get a new sticker, consider just getting rid of the whole box! Let’s say you started this is 2020, and you have recently stumbled upon boxes that still say 2020, there’s likely nothing inside that box that you will miss if you just grabbed that box and drove it over to a donation centre.

You may think you need to store all kinds of things in your house but until you start assessing whether you actually use the stuff or even access the box, you may be holding on to a bunch of stuff for nothing!

You can even take it one step further to really make the most of your tracking. Use the outside of the box to jot down a list of the items within the box. You can highlight the items on the list as you use them. If you find that you access the box often throughout the year, but, you only use a couple of things from the box, again, consider whether it’s worth keeping the other items that you rarely, if ever, use!

Often, we hold on to things not really because we know they are there and we need them, but because we fail to stay on top of what we do own and what we do need.

Being more aware of what we have and how often we use our stuff can allow us to declutter in a more positive permanent way because we see the visual that we don’t infact use certain items. The awareness rids us of the burden of keeping it for one day because in however many years, the item just isn’t used. That means those items can be safely given to someone who will use it without the guilt of the possible consequence of donating it and then missing it.

These stickers help with the awareness and create a new reality where we can plainly see that we don’t need everything we own simply because we own it.

Go label your boxes or storage bins and start gaining awareness over the things you never touch!

Thanks for coming home!