On Throwing Things Away

Confession time: there's a greater than zero chance I'm a hoarder. Every scrap bin, every shelf, every drawer stuffed with leftover vinyl and orphaned hardware is a decision I'm avoiding. That's all it is. Not inventory, backup stock, or "just in case." It's a pile of unmade choices taking up square footage I'm paying rent on.

I cleaned out a storage room last year that had material finish samples from 2003. Samples for a project we finished in 2003. For a client who moved out of state. I'd walked past that shelf maybe a thousand times and never once thought about what was on it. But there it was, eating a little corner of my peripheral attention every single time.

That's the tax. Not the space, really, but the cognitive load. Your brain registers every object it can see, whether you're conscious of it or not. A clean shop thinks faster than a cluttered one. I believe that because I've watched it happen. Years ago when I actually owned a sign company, when we cleared out six shelves of "might need it someday" material, the production floor got measurably calmer. Nobody acknowledged why, the pace just changed.

Throwing things away is also a creative act. You're choosing what matters by eliminating what doesn't. That's exactly what design is. Same muscle, different material.

If you haven't touched it in a year, it's not a resource, it's furniture. And bad furniture at that, because at least a chair gives you somewhere to sit. Get a dumpster. Be ruthless. The shit was never an asset... The clarity is.