How Much Junk do you Keep?

[Accolay]

A question for non-hoarders please :)

I've been sorting through stuff and reevaluating my relationship to things this year. I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff. Right now I'm going through a lot of old nursing training handouts, powerpoints and stuff from the last decade, some old stuff from school, other training I've had or continuing education. Some of it is obviously recycling, some is still good information.

I think I'm going to slowly read through the stuff that I've forgotten as a refresher for the next month or so, then probably ditch most of it. Perhaps certain information will point me towards things I absolutely should know and am rusty with now.

So it made me wonder about how much stuff other people keep.

-What do you keep?

-How do you keep yourselves current on information you don't use very often in your practice?

-Do you even bother?

-Are there other areas of nursing you're interested with and don't practice, but maybe like to keep more current?

[remotefuse]

if it's a powerpoint from 10 years ago, I would bet it has outdated information.

If your serious about decluttering, I would recommend this book, The life Changing Art of Tidying Up. It really helped to change my relationship with objects in general ( and theres a section on old papers)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KK0PICK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

[TigraRN]

Remotefuse, I love this book! In my library it was available as "The life-changing manga of tidying up" which is a comic book. I literally had to stop myself from reading it further so that I could tidy up by category in real life. It's been at least 8 months since I read it and my house is still keeping up.

[CocoBug20]

'But do you just throw text books away, who wants old ones? And then I find books from the 1800's, a family bible from the late 1700's, coins from the 1870's, I can see my kids tossing these, but there comes a point where I just want to toss too!'

You should definitely try to put them up online for sale (or not) if you don't think anyone in your family wants them. I feel like some people would pay a lot for stuff that old and you'd know it was taken by someone who wanted it.

[Oldmahubbard]

The family Bible is highly valuable. You might be surprised how many cousins there are that you don't even know about.

[jnemartin, BSN, RN]

I have a "professional portfolio" binder where I store CEU, certifications (even from long ago), letters of reference, offer letters, and other employment-related info. I also have/had a professional development file where I do keep some documents like you've described - pamphlets or booklets from conferences etc.

I recently cleaned out this PD file and trashed everything except one document that I was named as an author... and I moved that to my professional portfolio binder.

All I could think while I was going through the papers was, "What was I thinking!?" because it was all junk that I could have easily googled if I ever wanted to refresh my memory - haha! The info can be sourced online, or you can scan it in and save it to your hard-drive if it's really a document you think you'll come back to.

[Lunah, MSN, RN]

I was super excited to get $115 at a local consignment for stuff I would have just otherwise donated. Yay! I am down to my goal amount of shoes now. :) I think my clothing still needs another harsh weeding out.