packratfullness

[avacon]

I've been doing some house-cleaning yesterday and today. I'm torn between wanting to keep everything and wanting to decrease the level of clutter and disorganization in my house

Comments

[marphod]

For me, it totally depends on the Magazine. I keep my copies of Food and Wine and other cooking magazines; I like the physical presence of a receipie and its as easy to keep them than to print them out every time.

I ditch Communications of the ACM and IEEE Communications within a year or two, usually.

Magazines I don't want go right into recycling.

Anything that is easier online, I keep online. I see no point in a subscription to the magazine Consumer Reports, when everything I want is online and in a more convient format online.

[chenoameg]

I'm this close to converting my lifetime subscription to Consumer Reports into an online version, but I haven't done it yet. I'm a little disconcerted by how short the online archives are available online, though. I'm really waffling about this, although I have finally convinced myself that we only need to keep ten years of Consumer Reports.

[marphod]

What do you mean about how short the archives are available online?

I've seen arhives go back at least 7 years. And any rating that is older than rarely is relevant. The technology has moved on, the quality of any given manufacturer has changed, there have been mergers acquisitions, divisions, losses or new players in the given field, and/or there are new concerns that weren't taken into consideration at the point in time.

And if you REALLY REALLY need something not online, local libraries carry enough copies.

Consumer Reports

[chenoameg]

And any rating that is older than rarely is relevant.

I use my paper archives several times a year for me, and several more times for other people.

I have definitely used articles and ratings older than available on-line, either because I was looking at something used, or because they hadn't evaluated that sort of product more recently. In the older items I know that the ratings won't be exact, but the description of why to consider which feature is still helpful. I cannot remember what product this happened for, but I distinctly remember it happening to me in the last year.

But I'm a freak, so no one else should keep Consumer Reports just because of me (besides, you can always use my copies!)

Too much stuff

[chenoameg]

I'm trying to move from the lots of stuff to reasonable amount of stuff category

[jadia]

my opinion is that anything i need, is easier either online, or a single printout of the journal article. Or I can rip out the specifically interesting page. I don't save journals/magazines because I never really go back & read through them again, so it seems pointless.

[fyfer]

I have a strict system for magazines: most of them, I keep the most recent on the coffee table, the four previous weeks' in magazine boxes on the side table, and then I recycle the older ones. We hold onto Cook's Illustrated permanently, though (they live in a bookcase in our library).

Current subscriptions:
Science (free, keep 4 weeks)
New Yorker (keep 4 weeks)
Tech Review (free, recycle as soon as we've flipped through)
Money (gift, recycle as soon as we've flipped through or before.)
NY Review of Books (Nick's. I don't know how long he keeps them.)
Cook's Illustrated (keep)
McSweeney's Quarterly (actually a book, not a magazine, and keep forever)

On packrating in general

[chenoameg]

I have learned several things over the last several years. Perhaps some of them will be useful to you.

• There is a cost to not keeping something, but there is also a cost to keeping it. At some point I will regret getting rid of something. That's ok as long as the cost of not storing it in my house was worth it over all, for all of the things I get rid of.
  
• It is almost never worth buying something that I might need some day just because it is on sale for cheap. It is better for me to "pay" the store for storing it for me until I do need it. Similarly buying something will rarely increase the speed at which I get around to a particular project. And I can make the internet ship me almost anything in 72 hours.
  
• I will be most environmentally conscious by not getting things in the first place, not by keeping things that might someday be useful to me.
  
• When I'm cleaning up a space, look at what I want the space to do, not how much stuff I can store there.
  
• The less stuff I buy the less I have to worry about getting rid of in an