Operation: Compact Disc

Last summer, I launched a major clean-out and decluttering attempt in my bedroom at home. It was fairly successful-- at the end of it, I hauled out three or four boxes worth of papers, plus more full of knick-knacks, and donated or sold a small stack of books. But twenty years worth of clutter does take time to fully sort through, and so I have opted to continue it a little bit during this winter break from school.

The targets: my knick-knack shelf and my CD collection.

Operation: Knick-Knack was easy. I've accumulated a number of small porcelain objects through the years via gifts from friends and family members, and I realized that they were all doing nothing but gathering dust. Meanwhile, there were too many for me to really enjoy the ones that had the most treasured memories attached to them. So I went through the shelf and pulled off all but the ten most important, and added them to the giveaway (or throw-away) box. I've never been able to do this so easily before. I think I've finally come to the point where I'm realizing that memories don't need to be attached to stuff...and it helps that I have very limited recall of most of the stuff I am getting rid of anyway.

Operation CD, on the other hand, was a bit more complicated. Confession: I am a serious musical addict. I love playing and listening to most genres of music, and my iTunes library currently holds over 15 days worth of songs. Before the days when iTunes was my primary music player, though, I collected CDs. Some came from my parents, some were gifts, some I purchased...but eventually I built up an incredibly substantial library. I should have counted, but I suspect there may have been over 100 compact discs in my room. Until yesterday, the cases filled up one CD tower, one set of three drawers, a box, and multiple stacks around the room. The CDs themselves were housed in four full CD wallets.

Clearly, even the things you love (books, music, movies) can become clutter. CDs are no longer my primary means of playing music-- I really only use them in the car. I also didn't necessarily like every, or even most, of the songs on many of the CDs I had. Some of them I don't even know how I obtained. And while it's nice to have the physical copies of the CDs (especially in the event of a hard drive crash), there's a point where you just have to say 'enough.'

So yesterday I decided to significantly reduce my CD collection, which took four stages:

1) Go through each CD wallet and sort the discs back into their original cases.

2) Decide which CDs to keep. Criteria: I must like at least three-quarters of the songs on the album, and be inclined to listen to the CD in the car. Not very scientific, but effective.

3) Sort through the CDs that I am getting rid of and rip the ones that are not on my hard drive onto my computer. Just because I don't want to keep the CD doesn't mean I don't want a digital copy of the song!

4) Put the giveaway CDs in a box and hand off to my parents. They get to decide the next step for the discs, since a lot of them belonged to them to begin with.

OK, so maybe the last stage is a bit of a cop-out. But I'm okay with that, partly because I've achieved my goal to get the CDs out of my room, and partly because they are a lot more attached to some of those discs than I am. Hopefully I can encourage them to reduce their own collection to one that really matters to them, but that's not my call to make. Meanwhile, my room looks a lot better and I can start looking for my next de-cluttering mission.