House Talk: Resolved: Less Stuff, Less Me - WSJ.com

By JUNE FLETCHER

As the New Year begins, I always make the same two resolutions: I am going to exercise more and better edit and organize my home.

But inevitably, I never do.

This year, the reasons why my resolve usually dissipates before the fruitcake is finished finally hit me: Both tasks are major time thieves, requiring single-minded focus. And both are boring.

So this year, I'm making three new resolutions that will merge these activities. I invite you to suggest your own.

1) I am moving to the cloud. Yes, scanners and digital gadgets were supposed to banish paper, CDs, DVDs, and various forms of recording tape from our lives. But those of us of a certain age have amassed large libraries of content over the years at great expense, and have seen so much technology come and go that we hesitate to unload the original sources.

Nevertheless, all this stuff is a burden to curate. So this year, I plan to put on some Lady Gaga and do downward dogs while I digitize our various tapes and disks and scan old records. And while I have no intention of re-buying my all my books on Kindle, that doesn't mean that they have to live with me. Hauling boxes of them to the library, where I can visit them any time, should tighten my abs nicely, as long as I remember to lift with my knees.

2) I am firing the help. The lawn guy, the pool guy, the gutter guy, the tree-trimming guy, the window-cleaning guy and the cleaning lady all buy us time, but to do what? Too often, it's to grab another beer and play Angry Birds.

Yet as Tom Sawyer knew, home maintenance can be entertaining as well as a good workout if we trick ourselves into thinking it's fun. Freshening up a fence isn't quite the high it used to be before they took the volatile organic compounds out of paint. But chores can still be enjoyable if they are mentally reframed as competition. So this year I plan to make a spreadsheet so I can record and try to beat my "personal bests" for such tasks as mulching, pansy-planting and pantry-reorganizing.

3) I am firing the furniture. Well, at least those pieces which exist primarily to store things we don't need anymore (entertainment armoires, bookcases, filing cabinets) or promote laziness. So, so long comfy recliner couch—I'll get something straight-backed that makes me restless enough to label the laundry room shelves instead of watching another "30 Rock" rerun. And good-bye ergonomic home office chair—I'll replace it with one of those new treadmill-laptop desks so I can log a half-marathon while deleting e-mail come-ons to buy more and more stuff to sort and store.

Soon the ball will drop on 2012; I am not going to take it sitting down.

Write to June Fletcher at fletcher.june@gmail.com.