The Rules of the Game

This is the second day of my go at The Minimalist Game and if you've read the original challenge you're going to have a few obvious questions for me. Like- why I didn't wait until the first of the coming month to start?

I am an impulsive person. If I wait, I'll either lose the impulse or follow another one. Best to start now. But it was the night of January 19th when I ran across the Game while on a Pinterest bender, so I'm going to have to modify the rules just a tad. I decided I would play catch up. After all, there is less to axe in the first two-thirds of the month than in the last ten days combined. Another option would have been to start with 19 things on the 19th, 20 on the 20th ... 31 on the 31st, then go back to 1 object on the 1st of the new month, and go through until the 18th of the following month. OR I could have just assigned it the 1st day of my challenge and ignored the calendar numbers, just adding an extra item to each daily tally the next day.

So that's not any big deal then to start any day at all.

I also decided not to wait to convince a friend, which was another core rule of the challenge. Friends are fickle. I know this because I am a friend and am often fickle. True story. So instead, the world is my friend. I challenge you all to a duel! I can take you.

Also, there are some subjective issues to consider when it comes to counting. Right away my lazy brain wanted to count every marble in the donate pile, every broken pencil, every old bent pushpin. I decided to not check out of the challenge so soon though and opt to categorize those things as one (per day. If I get rid of another handful of busted pencils today that will not count with yesterday's batch) or score a few points if there were really a lot of them taking a significant amount of space. But at the same time I decided that things with a lid still counted for one. So far. We'll see how desperate I get in the last couple days. I have already made a couple exceptions and counted all the things in certain groups, but if I explain them in later posts I think you may agree.

If I was a student and only had my car and room to clean, I might count every gum wrapper and each sticky Canadian nickel. But I'm a home maker, so my purview is bigger. I'm not counting up all the trashiest trash. I did however count the ceramic bowl my daughter broke. Serendipity, I thought as I added it to the tally. I decided that cleaning the trash out of certain subject areas would have a score. Cleaning my purse out was one item for instance. I also gave myself a small head start by including a few significant specific things I recalled donating or trashing in the past couple of days. I was after all, giving myself only 10 days out of the 30 to do for the entire month of January. It seemed reasonable. Since last night, I am writing down a general list of what was gotten rid of and today I'm taking a few photos for the next blog post.

I'm going to allow things to count ahead towards the following days' tallies. It doesn't make sense for me to stop when I'm on a roll just because of a number, and I'm likely to have a couple days when the kids aren't going to let me play my game. Anticipating that will keep me from failure.

The rules on the website also say that it has to be out of your house. I'm not going to want to make daily trips to the donation centers, so I'm going to be satisfied with them being in the donation boxes and bags by the door or in my car's trunk. I am pretty good about not going back in the bags to rescue things now.

Instead of quitting by midnight, I will consider nights where I'm up late decluttering to be the same day. Midnight seems arbitrary.

I'm not selling anything. Selling makes me get hung up on the price of the stuff and keeps me from being free of it. My options are trash, give, or donate.

Lastly, I'm not getting rid of other-people's-stuff. Not without their permission at least. Unless they are preschoolers, deceased, or forgot their stuff at my house and have not come to claim it.

I am playing the game, I am getting rid of the same number of things, but I'm not getting hamstrung by the rules. The rules were meant to be modified! You decide how much of a challenge you want it to be. How much of your living space and sanity do you really want back? If you don't want to feel the burn, leave the junk drawer the way it is, throw out a box of 500 count paper clips and tell me you won.

Since I'm doing the 30 Day Game in just 10 days, you get to watch and prepare yourself for a more well paced month. I'll see you in February unless you get creative with the rules like me and start sooner.