Many of us will have shelves full of books and DVDs. Even more people will have desks covered in gadgets and paperwork.

While all of this may seem harmless enough, to me every item lying around is one more thing that I shouldn’t have to deal with and this adds stress to my life.

I have shelves and shelves full of books – some I have loved to read, others may be interesting reference books one day. None of them are read repeatedly or often enough to justify taking up so much space in my life. I want to reduce my book collection to almost zero. I am slowly but surely donating them all to charity shops and will replace them with digital versions or borrow them from a library when required. With so much information available through blogs, wikipedia and general websites, there is less need for an extensive book collection.

CDs and DVDs have a similar fate in store. I have already donated all my music and will make do with services like Jamendo.com, Spotify.com and Last.fm. I am unsure about what I am going to do about my stand up comedy DVD collections but think a permanent loan to my friends will be the solution.

To reduce the amount of paperwork I have to store I will scan and shred all the non essential documents and simply keep a folder for the originals of the few things I need – birth certificate, passport, etc.

Other items I still have to decide on how to simplify are my wardrobe and my digital life – phones, computers, hard drives, etc. I will post about these at a later date.

Overall I believe that by reducing the visual and pysical clutter and time consuming nature of our possesions that we can have more time and energy to complete the tasks we want to focus on and will have positive impact on our lives.