So, today’s project was a bust.

It wasn’t a huge declutter or anything, but given that I dusted my bedroom Friday before my sinuses had enough (still have the bathroom to do and the dusing is done) there wasn’t much I was up to doing on Saturday. There were also a bunch of Zoids and of course the Bumblebee Shelf to dust off, though at least Gunblaster is the latest edition to my Zoid army and didn’t have much dust. Zoids were the hardest thanks to all the little nooks that even the most complex of Bumblebees don’t have. (For you new people, that’s Bumblebee as in the Autobot. I have a tribute shelf to my favorite Autobot.)

So it’s time for another one of those filler videos while I try to figure out how to get my intended project working. We’ve taken a look at numerous forms of decluttering recently. Everybody has a method that works best for them. The one I most recently heard of was “onion layer”, and I was curious what that was. Thanks to not succeeding at my intended project, which I haven’t given up on or I’d do an article, I went to YouTube and looked up this method. Turns out the idea is rather easy, but is it a good method?

To “teach” us this method I’m going to a video by The Minimal Mom. I’m not much of a minimalist myself. I have a whole shelf just for versions of one Transformer and a bunch of Zoids, plus I’m a proud supporter of physical media. I can still reduce my clutter without having very little. I like my displays. I like my books. I like my home videos. I like my music. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn something from this video, and maybe you’ll learn a method that’s better for you than you’ve been doing. Let’s check it out.

Is that really a method?

There were so few videos on this method that YouTube brought up under “Onion layer decluttering method”, and that’s what I needed to get past other videos on cleaning or cutting regular onions. It feels like a method and more “this is how we declutter”. It’s just going through an item, deciding if it’s something you want or need to keep, and figuring out what to do with it. If there is no use, it goes. That’s basically just a step in most decluttering methods, including my own piecemeal approach.

That said, there are some good thoughts to take away from this. Are you going to use that stuff. Is that project really going to get done? That led me to finish the Gunblaster Zoid and I do want to get that last model kit done not only because I want Mega Man done but because I bought it for a reason. Models are fun to build, but they take up space, so I won’t buy more. I have tossed out stuff or put it for sale knowing that I’m not interested in it anymore, or someone else can find better use for it. This is something I can take away from the video but it still just feels like a logical step rather than its own method.

I’ve looked a bunch of these methods: “Swedish Death Cleaning”, “Konmari” Cleaning, the ever popular “Feng Shui”, and the “Boundary” Method. None of them really work for me. Thanks to other projects and keeping thing open for medical stuff for so long, I only have one day a week to really declutter. Maybe some of you can see something I don’t but this really doesn’t feel like a method on its own. I also need to accept that some projects, like the dusting and even the project I failed to complete today, are not going to be good articles. I started The Clutter Reports to get myself to declutter because I needed an article. Most of the time this is a good idea, but I need to accept not every article is going to be a fascinating post and get back to just reporting on my declutter and occasionally the reviews to make something interesting.