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Comment by ljlolel | Hacker News Reader

Why would you do that?

Just open your closet and throw out each thing unless you used it in the last week. Just throw it out now. Tomorrow is a euphemism for never. You can always buy or borrow if you need it later.

http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/stuff-minimization-framework

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Again, I'm a college student. Re-buying stuff I threw out based on a naive criterion like that would be terrible with my limited resources.

An inventory would help me better decide what to throw out and keep me organized. If someone built an inventory app that could keep track of purchases via bank reports and OCR'd receipts, I would probably pay for it.

You might start kicking yourself when winter rolls around all you have are cargo shorts and a few ironic t-shirts.

Luckily I have a "I threw out all my winter clothes and all I kept was this ironic t-shirt" t-shirt.

But seriously, it is not that hard to figure out? Do you really need a computer program to determine how much stuff you need?

How did pre-computer generations ever manage, I guess they didn't?

No offense - if a computer program would help some people, it would actually me happy. However, so far I have a hard time to believe that there could be a market for such a program. Exception: books and other media.

My friend uses a less wasteful, but slower technique. Here's what she does every spring and fall: 1. In the fall, she boxes up or separates everything she hasn't used in the past week. For clothing, she just turns the hangers in the closet around (so the open part of the hook is facing you.) 2. She lives her life for six months. Every time she uses something, she puts it back in the normal cupboard rather than back in the box. 3. In the spring, she simply gives away all the boxes and all the clothing that is hanging backwards. She allows herself a couple of "passes" for special clothing (e.g. she might know that she has a few weddings coming up so she'll keep an extra dress.)

What I did (http://www.thintz.com/essays/less-stuff) is to take stuff that I didn't think I needed and move it to the basement. If it stayed down there for awhile and I didn't miss it, then I knew there was a good chance that I didn't need it anymore.

I'm not saying that many people have too much stuff -- I certainly do, and I'm not entirely happy about it -- but throwing out stuff you haven't used within the last week is easily one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Which is really saying something.

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