I’m a horrible packrat. I’m not holding onto things for their earlier value, like this article suggests, but because they might be useful someday — in my youth, I had one too many instances of throwing something away after a couple years of disuse, only to discover that I needed it the next week.

Nevertheless, the article does provide a useful decluttering point: concentrate on how useful a particular thing is now, to decide whether to keep it or not. As an example, I had a large stack of 5.25″ floppy disks until a couple years ago, when GoddessJ (exasperated with my packrat ways) pointed out that they were not only obsolete, but that I’d be hard pressed to find a machine that even had a 3.5″ drive these days. I was keeping them in case someone wanted me to fix an old computer that only had a 5.25″ floppy drive, something that had happened to me more than once in the past, but she was right… they could be described as museum pieces at this point, but only if you’re talking about the dusty storage rooms of museums.