I have recently allocated additional storage units for my stuff, and I have been conducting an orderly move-out of my stuff from house basement / garage / elsewhere - and I have been noticing a very curious effect -
Volume of stuff ( in the space being moved out of ) has been getting reduced, but clutter - stays about the same, or worsens significantly.
Me, being a contrarian on the subject of "hoarding", as on most things, I wasn't surprised in the slightest to see this counterintuitive effect, but it got me wondering - what's happening ?
See, I've been focusing on moving out *organized* stuff - stuff in containers - boxes, mostly - while leaving clutter behind, so that I can do a final sweep with my main organizing system reasonably deployed and operational in the new space.
What stays behind is loose contents that have been sitting on surfaces and everywhere in between.
This, I think, comes from elimination of surfaces.
What happens when you have a thing to put down, and no surface to put it down on ?
That's right, you either leave it suspended in the air by magic, you keep juggling it like an expert juggler, you hang it off the ceiling, or.. if you don't have any of those abilities or hangable arrangements.. you put it down somewhere, anywhere - on the floor, or on an existing pile of other such things.
Hello piles again.
But this is only natural - when you have nowhere to put stuff, and you have to put it somewhere, you put it wherever.
I know, the proponents of discarding will have an easy answer for this - but I'm not doing that in a hurry, in the midst of chaos.
This is perfectly normal, par for the course for what I'm doing, and it will be possible to deal with this quickly enough once the turn comes.
Plenty of things will find their homes, and just like there's been no signs of improvement despite improvement in volume, there will be rapid and visible improvement once the time comes.
Interesting, that.