The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Ziploc bag. You avoid having a big tangle of mystery cords, plus when you get rid of the device, you can get rid of the ancillary parts, too.”
    “Try a ‘virtual move,’” another friend added. “I just did it myself. Walk around your apartment and ask yourself—if I were moving, would I pack this or get rid of it?”
    “I never keep anything for sentimental reasons alone,” someone else claimed. “Only if I’m still using it.”
    These suggestions were helpful, but that last rule was too draconian for me. I’d never get rid of the “Justice Never Rests” T-shirt from the aerobics class I took with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when I clerked for her, even though it never did fit, or the doll-sized outfit that our preemie Eliza wore when she came home from the hospital. (At least these items didn’t take up much room. I have a friend who keeps twelve tennis racquets, left over from her days playing college tennis.)
    When one of my college roommates visited New York, we waxed lyrical over coffee about the glories of clutter clearing.
    “What in life,” I demanded, “gives immediate gratification equal to cleaning out a medicine cabinet? Nothing!”
    “No, nothing,” she agreed with equal fervor. But she took it even further. “You know, I keep an empty shelf.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I keep one shelf, somewhere in my house, completely empty. I’ll pack every other shelf to the top, but I keep one shelf bare.”
    I was struck by the poetry of this resolution. An empty shelf! And shehad three children. An empty shelf meant possibility; space to expand; a luxurious waste of something useful for the sheer elegance of it. I had to have one. I went home, went straight to my hall closet, and emptied a shelf. It wasn’t a big shelf, but it was empty. Thrilling.
    I hunted through the apartment, and no object, no matter how small, escaped my scrutiny. I’d long been annoyed by the maddening accumulation of gimcracks that children attract. Glittery superballs, miniature flashlights, small plastic zoo animals…this stuff was everywhere. It was fun to have and the girls wanted to keep it, but it was hard to put it away, because where did it go?
    My Eighth Commandment is “Identify the problem.” I’d realized that often I put up with a problem for years because I never examined the nature of the problem and how it might be solved. It turns out that stating a problem clearly often suggests its solution. For instance, I hated hanging up my coat, so I usually left it slung on the back of a chair.
    Identify the problem: “Why don’t I ever hang up my coat?”
    Answer: “I don’t like fussing with hangers.”
    Solution: “So use the hook on the inside of the door!”
    When I asked myself, “What’s the problem with all these little toys?” I answered, “Eliza and Eleanor want to keep this stuff, but we don’t have a place to put it away.” Bingo. I immediately saw the solution to my problem. The next day, I stopped by the Container Store and bought five large glass canisters. I combed the apartment to collect toy flotsam and stuffed it in. Clutter cured! I filled all five jars. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the jars looked great on the shelf—colorful, festive, and inviting. My solution was ornamental as well as practical.
    A pleasant, unintended consequence of my clutter clearing was that it solved the “four-thermometer syndrome”: I could never find our thermometer, so I kept buying new ones, and when my clutter clearing flushed them all out, we had four thermometers. (Which I never used, by the way; I felt the back of the girls’ necks to see if they had a fever.) It’s a Secret of Adulthood: if you can’t find something, clean up. I discovered that although it seemed easier to put things away in general areas—the coat closet, any kitchen drawer—it was more satisfying when each item went in a highly specific location. One of life’s small pleasures is to return something to its proper place; putting the shoe polish on the second shelf in the linen closet gave me the archer’s satisfaction of hitting a mark.
    I also hit on a few daily rules to help keep the apartment from constantly falling into disorder. First, following my Fourth Commandment, “Do it now,” I started to apply the “one-minute rule” I didn’t postpone any task that could be done in less than one minute. I put away my umbrella; I filed a document; I put the newspapers in the recycling bin; I