Living With 100 Things Challenge
I’ve been doing an adopted version of the “Living with 100 Things” challenge for a couple of years now.
The best thing about this challenge is that you can make up your own rules and goals; and I shamelessly made up mine. I don’t think I could ever do the whole challenge, nor I would want to; but there are people out there who can do it and that’s very inspiring. I bow to them!
One problem with my challenge was my tracking. I didn’t have a good base and I changed my rules along the way a little bit. Hey! I’m doing this for fun (and to raise awareness and to help Mother Earth) and I’m the queen of my rules. Yet, I wish I had a more accurate measuring system at the beginning. When I first started, I knew I wanted to limit this challenge to my clothing items only and even within that, I had some rules: No outerwear, no underwear, no socks, no shoes, no scarfs (I have a serious problem there!) and gift items don’t count. It was simply an effort to reduce my everyday clothing, and I stick to this rule to this day. It’s just that I missed to count some items at the beginning, oooops. With that, I know I still had well over 300 items when I started. Well, that shocked me, but don’t judge me until you take a count of your inventory.
Over the years, I made a twist to my goals but I didn’t change the overall goal of coming down to 100 clothing items. The twist I made was to have an additional goal that min 50% of my total clothing inventory will be previously owned items.
Drum roll please….. As of Friday May 13th 2016, I have a total of 163 clothing items vs over 300 items when I first started (that’s 54% reduction) and 47% of this (77 items) are previously-owned . That means even though I’m still 60% over my ultimate goal (163 items vs. 100 items), I’m about to reach to my 2nd goal of having 50% previously owned items.
That’s enough math, let me talk little bit about why I still have this inventory.
The root cause, of course, is the attachments. Attachments to clothes that I didn’t even wear for 10 years; clothes I got from India (that I wore not more than couple times), sentimental clothes (I still have old Cincinnati Yoga School t-shirts, the school closed 10 years ago), some well-kept, classical, night/holiday wear (that I don’t wear more than once a year). Also I notice more than 70% of my inventory is summer clothes, just too many t-shirts and tank tops. May be I need to do a detachment ceremony to part from my beloved items. This gives me enough thought until next year!
If you ever inclined to do this, my advice would be:
– Define your rules and decide what you want to include and exclude early on
– Decide your tracking/measurement base
– Just have fun!
In the meantime, thanks to the pioneers of this movement!
This is the blog of the original father of this concept: http://davidmichaelbruno.com/
I like Miss Minimalist’ blog : http://www.missminimalist.com/
Here are the 6 people who did this: http://www.ticoandtina.com/6-people-who-own-100-things-less-voluntarily-counting
