My wife and I decided to try an interesting experiment. We are looking to live simpler lives. Step 1 is to greatly reduce the clutter. We decided to be a bit creative. Could we get rid of 10% of our stuff every weekend we were home for the rest of the year? That is a total of 6 weekends for us (we are traveling a lot).

Weekend 1 is over and we got rid of about 6% of our stuff. It wasn't difficult to get to 5%, but it takes a bit of time and we don't want to consume our weekend with one activity.

So what stuff were we liberated from in week 1?

- Clothes - Everything that was considered 'summer' clothes but hadn't been worn that season was tossed. Same went for any items that were considered 'nostalgic' but were never worn. It wasn't hard to cut the wardrobe down by 30-40%.

- Extra glassware - glassware is so easy to accumulate. We almost never threw away glassware out of possible future usage in some fabricated scenario. "Well we might have 4 people over that would want whiskey in a rock glass...". Easy to accumulate stuff when you throw in all those what ifs.

We instead kept everything that we identified as being used in the last 6 months. Even with that simple requirement we reduced our glassware by about 50%.

That is it for week 1! We donated everything to charity and took pictures of things we deemed worthy of tax deduction.

Boy it felt good. Give it a try.