Summary: Our Edit & Forget It Challenge and The Power of Saying No<br> Happy New Year!<br> Be sure to subscribe in iTunes and leave a review in the iTunes store! It helps others find the show! Thank you!<br> <br> Special Announcement: Especially for listeners in and around San Antonio/Austin, TX<br> Our friend and colleague Karen Meade of Let’s Get Organizing will be hosting her annual Organize and Energize workshop. It’s on Saturday, January 19th, 2013 from 9:30 Am to 12:30 PM at TriPoint on North St Mary’s, in San Antonio, Texas. There’s a great lineup of speakers talking about organization, meal planning, health and fitness and Dan will be there talking about tech. For more information check out LetsGetOrganizing.com or Facebook.com/LetsGetOrganizing. Hope to see you there!<br> Main Topics <br> Dan's Topic: Introducing the Edit & Forget It Challenge! 2013 Fewer Things in 2013 <br> We're kicking things up a notch right off the bat this year and really stretch our commitment to simplifying our lives. We're challenging ourselves with what we call Edit & Forget It, 2013 Fewer Things in 2013. We'd love it if you'd consider joining us!<br> <br> <br> We know this is a lofty goal and certainly won't be for everyone<br> Our true focus is eliminating many things we truly don't need any longer and reach a point where we have what we need, appreciate it, and be able to enjoy some margin in our lives<br> We don't really have "clutter" in our home since Vanessa is a Professional Organizer, so eliminating 2013 things will be a real challenge!<br> <br> It's good to have an accountability buddy when challenging yourself…and all of you that listen to the show will be our accountability buddies to keep us on track! <br> <br> We'd like to be your accountability buddies, too!<br> If you'd like to join us for the challenge, just sign up on our Edit & Forget It List. Here's a direct link to that list on SimpleLifeTogether.com.<br> Those who sign up will will get emails from us from time to time as a little bit of encouragement along the way<br> No, you won’t get a trophy at the end of the Challenge, but in the end you'll probably have a place to put one if you did!<br> <br> Some Background:<br> <br> We were amazed when we heard it quoted in a presentation that the average American home has around 300K things in it!<br> In raw numbers, 2013 things is just under 1% of that! That doesn't sound like much of a challenge does it?<br> Truth be told, we think that figure counts each and every item<br> <br> So if you had a 250 piece Lego set it counts as 250 pieces<br> That doesn’t seem too realistic to us and kinda makes getting rid of 2013 things no challenge whatsoever<br> So we established some simple guidelines for ourselves<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> To eliminate 2013 things from our home in 2013 the numbers work out, rounded up, anyways, like this:<br> <br> About 6 things per day<br> About 40 things per week<br> About 170 per month<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> We're also including going paperless because that is a great way to eliminate paper clutter from your home.<br> <br> So, you may want to re-listen to Episode 6 and our interview with Brooks Duncan of DocumentSnap.<br> We'll put some links in the show notes for the scanner we use and the one Brooks recommends.<br> <br> <br> <br> Edit & Forget It Guidelines: Note: We may have to come up with some additional guidelines for ourselves along the way based on any new discoveries or unanswered questions we run into. But we're starting with these:<br> <br> Things that normally go together or that you originally purchased together count as one, e.g. a pair of shoes counts as one (not 2), a deck of cards counts as one (not 52) a puzzle counts as one (not 150).<br> Donated packaged food counts, thrown out food does not.<br>
