Another List of Stuff I Own (December 2018)

Back in May I posted a list of stuff that I own in reflection of what I found the most useful. I’ve just changed my living situation, shed a lot of clutter, and am also in a major period of reflection. I’ve since acquired a few new things as well here and there. As such I thought I’d do another list.

This one will be slightly different. In the previous list I didn’t take into account clothes, and grouped some items together which compacted the numbers slightly. This time I’ve expanded them out, just to see what duplicates I have and take an absolute total overview of all of my things. In contrast where I’ve conceptually or physically reduced things into the same space I’ve collapsed these in this list too. A good example of that would be my list of video games; I’ve gotten rid of all of the boxes and collapsed the discs into a single disc holder; so they’re physically and conceptually reduced to a single item of my collection of video games. Last time I also took an overview of where the items were stored in attempt to see what clusters of things I could reduce. This time I am presenting them in a table along with a high-level frequency of use and some high-level descriptors of how I use them.

This list doesn’t acknowledge items in the kitchen that I technically own since, now that I’ve changed my living situation, I am sharing them with my flatmate R. These will likely come with me if/when I move out, and technically could count as my possessions; I’ve ommitted them because they’ve taken on a much more communal character since the last list.

The Stuff

Last time I counted 282 items, without clothes but including some kitchen equipment, and some items collapsed. This time with the clothes expanded but a few items collapsed here and there and including things like hard cases used to store other items, we’re at 218 items. This is quite a marked improvement considering I counted each pair of socks and underwear individually!

Summary

I’ll be reflecting on this properly over the coming weeks when I have some down time. Initially, my thoughts are that there were a lot more items marked as “Occasional” than I would have liked. I’ve also noted some surplus in some areas, such as the re-usable bags. Having a few is good, but I think I’ve got a bit many to just consider as “back-up”. I think I can bin several of my USB pens as well, especially the ones used for “media transfer” which basically just means “watching movies on the PS4”.

There are a few things I want to repurpose for general use as well; my grey hoodie is nice as a bit of training uniform to get me in the mindset but rotating it into use as a daily driver when my black hoodie is being washed would be useful as well. I’ve thought about this with my towels as well, having a rotation of three where one is in use, one is being used for training after it’s been used for washing, and one is in the wash ready for the next cycle.

For now I’ll be keeping track of my stuff in a spreadsheet, and I’m sure I’ll find some way of accurately tracking how often I use it or where it fits into my life.