I made a Project in Claude to help me with this. I'd identified a pattern of not starting (wasn't hard to locate or name), and offloaded it. Claude knows my landscape and goal now, and gives me assignments, which I can do or not do, no penalty. The first was to inventory everything on my dresser, no touching, no deciding. Then the next day, I was asked to identify the items I'd actually used recently, which was about five things. The rest can go in a bag for later processing (they're still on my dresser, though). Current task is to inventory the things in my three mystery memorabilia boxes. I'm seeing everything differently; it's no longer an undifferentiated mass of avoidance.
This is exactly the move. You took one task that decluttering advice treats as a single step and split it into three: notice, judge, discard. Most people stall out on step two before they even reach the bag.
The dresser was the easy version since everything was already visible. The mystery boxes are going to test it for real. Things will come out of those boxes that ask to be judged on the spot, and your brain might want to skip straight to deciding before you've even finished looking. If that happens, just go back to inventory only. No verdict needed yet.
You're not clearing clutter here. You're proving a system works on hard mode. Keep going!
I made a Project in Claude to help me with this. I'd identified a pattern of not starting (wasn't hard to locate or name), and offloaded it. Claude knows my landscape and goal now, and gives me assignments, which I can do or not do, no penalty. The first was to inventory everything on my dresser, no touching, no deciding. Then the next day, I was asked to identify the items I'd actually used recently, which was about five things. The rest can go in a bag for later processing (they're still on my dresser, though). Current task is to inventory the things in my three mystery memorabilia boxes. I'm seeing everything differently; it's no longer an undifferentiated mass of avoidance.
This is exactly the move. You took one task that decluttering advice treats as a single step and split it into three: notice, judge, discard. Most people stall out on step two before they even reach the bag.
The dresser was the easy version since everything was already visible. The mystery boxes are going to test it for real. Things will come out of those boxes that ask to be judged on the spot, and your brain might want to skip straight to deciding before you've even finished looking. If that happens, just go back to inventory only. No verdict needed yet.
You're not clearing clutter here. You're proving a system works on hard mode. Keep going!