Getting unstuck

Seems my recently restarted water habit is really making a difference weightwise, I´m down another pound from yesterday. And, I was not repeat not hungry all day. The water/tea cup is sitting next to me while I write this, and it`s been refilled twice already.
One advantage this cup has is that I use it for different beverages, just rinsing and reusing it.
This has already made a difference in my office, where I used to keep different drinking vessels for tea, coffee, and water. As I am notoriously bad about putting those away after use, that meant all three of them sat out on the sideboard nearly all the time. And, as they were open cups, I had to get up away from my desk if I wanted to drink something, or risk dumping the contents on the keyboard. In a place where business can be quite hectic and you sometimes end up with several (paper) files open at the same time, the latter is a real danger. Thus, I ended up not drinking enough most of the time, having just one cup of coffee over lunch break which ended up getting cold a lot of times because of interruptions.
Today, the only cup outside is the new one. It´s sitting on my desk, out of harm´s way but close enough to grab and have a sip of what´s in it. The old cups have gone home with me, and I am seriously considering tossing at least some of them.
And I am finally hydrating myself regularly.

Isn´t it amazing how changing your surroundings can solve several problems at once?

What keeps amazing me, though, is how fast stuff can accumulate just by trying to find the ideal solution for a given problem.
I know that a lot of problems can be solved by using what you already have.
For someone who has a lot of clutter, it is relatively likely that they might already have a solution. The catch is that you must remember that you already have the item, and then you must be able to locate it within a reasonable amount of time. So, what happens usually is that you give up and purchase another one of the item in question, while the old one continues to languish in whatever clutter limbo it finds itself in.

I used to call that the "198 nails"-paradox.
Suppose you need one nail for hanging a picture. At the hardware store, you find only a box with 100 nails in it. But that doesn´t matter, after all, there will be more pictures to hang in the future.
So, you have your picture up on the wall and a box with 99 nails left.
The next time you need a nail, perhaps a year later, you absolutely can´t remember where that box is, or that it is there at all. You make another trip to the hardware store, and in the end, there are 198 unused nails somewhere in your household, if you could only find them. But, guess who will be taking another trip to the hardware store when there is the next picture to be hung?

One other clutter culprit is trying out different solutions for a problem. There´s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion, as long as you can afford the different models of whatever you´re trying to find the  perfect solution for. I have, for example, tried out several different kind of bags, totes, and knapsacks for carrying around my netbook. Some of them proved to be a real hassle to drag around, with straps that kept sliding off my shoulders, or were cutting into them, or they were just a nuisance to carry if I wanted my hands free.
So, I have in my possession several laptop bags that are not likely to ever get used again by me.

And, instead of discarding or donating them, I have allowed them to take up precios closet space-because they are almost new, and one doesn´t discard things that are new, or does one?

In economics, that´s what they call the sunk cost fallacy.
And it is something that  I have to keep in mind when decluttering. If an item has outlived its usefulness for me, there is no reason to keep it (veritable keepsakes and heirloom pieces excepted, of course). And that holds especially true if the item outlived its usefulness because I have acquired something that is more suited to the task at hand.


I´ll have to watch what I do with those cups I´ve taken home....


Julia