Living a simple lifestyle with only the things you want, need, and love is a lofty goal. However, most everyone has a lot of belongings in their house that are neither wanted, needed, nor loved, and as a result, the process of decluttering your house is way more complicated than it should be. So, a few months ago, I came up with this idea for

Here’s how it works.

Walk through your house, and pick up 50 things that don’t belong there, for one reason or another. Maybe it’s a sweater with a moth hole, or a pair of pants that haven’t fit since you’ve taken up Pilates. Or, maybe you still have a jacket you borrowed from your friend last February, and you never gave it back to him. An old toaster that you don’t use, because you got a newer, more high-tech one, but that still works. Library books. Broken ceramics. Old school notebooks. Unreturned Netflix envelopes. All of it gets picked up.

Then, once you’ve gathered fifty things, put each where it belongs. Things that need to be returned to where they came from go in a bag by the door, to be taken with you as soon as possible. Things that are old, broken, or not in working order get thrown out or recycled. Things that don’t belong to you are returned to their owners. And things that are no longer relevant to your lifestyle get taken to Goodwill, given away via FreeCycle, or sold on CraigsList or eBay.

When I decided to declutter, I found it overwhelming to say to myself, “I have too much! I need to get rid of some!” without quantifying what I actually needed to do, or giving myself a place to start. But by doing a 50-Thing Throwaway, you have a very short-term, quantifiable goal to meet in uncluttering your home. And once you get in the swing of decluttering, you might find yourself going further–after you’ve found fifty things, you might take the effort to reorganize your closet, dump out some old food from your fridge, or start developing a new workspace layout.

So…what do you guys need to get rid of?

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