The Barter Project

The Rule of 30.

I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning and de-cluttering this week, most of it in the “stage 2” realm. Stage 2 Purging would be the smaller stuff, like junk drawers and under the bed. For me, it’s cleaning out the room I grew up in, as I’m still visiting home because it’s so beautiful down here. I’ve done 3 Goodwill trips and 2 dump runs, and my room is down to one footlocker of stuff. Nothing else is left except a few books and the clothing I brought with me. 

So I’ve come up with a solid and simple rule which has helped me clean and get rid of a ton of stuff that I just didn’t know what to do with:

If you can solve a problem in 30 minutes with $30 or less, and this problem happens less than once every 30 days, outsource the solution. 

Pretty simple. What this does is prevent the “what if’s” from sneaking up. Things like stamps, envelopes, and glue, if used as infrequently as I use them (never), don’t have to have a drawer “just in case”. That drawer can be emptied, and either left empty, filled with useful things that didn’t have a home, or even thrown away (I cleaned out my entire L shaped desk and got rid of it). 

The goal of this rule is to get rid of the things that take more time to manage than the time they save in being there “just in case”. I got rid of my printer, for example, because I’ve used it once in the last year. If I ever need to print something, I’ll go to a Kinko’s with my flash drive. The print center is 10 minutes away from my apartment, and a print is something like $.10 a page. This saves me time, because now I have a place to put my negative scanner and I don’t have to spend 45 minutes moving the printer, setting up the scanner, and calibrating before I scan negatives every few days. 

You don’t have to follow the rule perfectly, as I understand replacing a $30 item might not be in everybody’s budget. However, some might want to up it to $100 or more, depending on the amount of freedom they want and how much value they put on not having any clutter. Either way, this rule is a great thought to have in the back of your mind while cleaning, as it makes the task much more cut and dry, and less stressful.