Hasta La Ideas

Last week, Lifehacker jumped on the spring cleaning bandwagon and published a series of posts dedicated to uncluttering in “Lifehacker’s Ultimate Clutter Cleanout“:

All week at Lifehacker we’re putting extra focus on uncluttering your world, ranging from your home, your personal finances, your workspace, your digital world, and more. So sit back, relax, and let the clutter rinse right off.

I particularly enjoyed Kevin Purdy’s roundup of home design tools in “The Best Design Tools for Improving Your Home” and his “Top 10 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life, 2010 Edition.” Implementing his tips on creating Gmail filters has already improved the way I process my e-mail.

I was honored to be included in the uncluttering series, and my post “Why You Hold On to Clutter” explores the science of irrationally buying (and keeping) unnecessary objects:

In “The power of touch: An examination of the effect of duration of physical contact on the valuation of objects“, researcher James Wolf reported that the longer a person touches an object, the greater the value assigned to that item. These conclusions were derived from two studies where people attended an auction and were told that they would be bidding on coffee cups. Before bidding on the items, subjects went around a room inspecting the average, nothing-special-about-them, coffee cups that were going to be put up for sale. Observers found that “examining an item for longer periods of time resulted in greater attachment to the item and thus higher valuations.” Meaning that the longer a subject touched and observed a coffee cup during the inspection period, the more likely he was to buy the cup and pay even more for it than its sticker price.

Be sure to check out “Lifehacker’s Ultimate Clutter Cleanout” for more great spring cleaning advice.

Also on the topic of spring cleaning, the May issue of Real Simple is also dedicated to the topic. It is already on newsstands, and some of the articles are online. ‘Tis the season to unclutter!