My Life – Boxed

I’ve been a traveling consultant most of my life. And the last couple of years I thought my life was pretty uncluttered in terms of stuff accrued.
Starting a one year journey certainly sets ones mind straight at some things.

Clutter at Home vs. Minimalism on the Go

On the left side you can actually see “The life of Michael Mahlberg – Boxed” whereas on the righthand side you see the “100 things or less” I’ll own for the next twelve month – kind of.
For me the important point is not to own less than a hundred things – I didn’t count yet, but most probably I still carry way more than a hundred things – but to minimize the amount of stuff I’m tending on day-to-day basis.

Take away for aspiring world journeyers:

Don’t plan to pack and leave – plan to pack and stay.
Live your old life for a week or two with partial constraints from the future life. This way you might have more that 10 minutes between the moment you close the lid on the last box and the moment you have to leave for the train station.
[Even more important if your first leg happens to be by plane!]

So, how long did it take me to box my Life? That should be fairly easy to calculate. The average time to fill a box of the size these boxes are is about 15 Minutes. There are 32 Boxes on the left that had to be filtered for the mere 1.35 cubic feet (roughly 38 liters) on the right. A simple calculation gives us 8 hours or one working day to sort the stuff out. Easy enough. In reality the journey was quite a bit longer. It took me two weeks
The same is true for my computer – and for yours probably as well. The stuff that accrued over the years in my download folder, in my client work directories and in the various picture stores that are available to me nowadays also takes more time to sort that one should think.

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