Minimizing Monday: Mountains of Magazines

I know you have one too… a big pile of magazines hiding somewhere in your home. Mine is in a cute woven basket, overflowing with useless pages. Most of them I’ve never even flipped through, it simply went from mailbox to basket. But I just let them accumulate, thinking It might have something useful to me that I might read one day. Bitten by the clutterbug! But no more of this. It’s time to lose the useless. So, I’m encouraging you to go through your collection of magazines, yes, every single one of them, and toss what you don’t need! No more stacks of junk taking up space in your home. I do realize that this may take a while. Depending on the size of your mountain, it may take days to conquer it. But, won’t it feel good to have all of that junk cleared out?! Now’s the time, so let’s get to work.

If you don’t have several hours to dedicate to going through all of your magazines in one sitting, break it up into little pieces of time here and there. When you go to the bathroom, take a magazine with you. When the kids are napping, sit down for a few minutes and go through a couple of magazines at a time. It may take a while (it’s taken me a couple of weeks, and I really didn’t have that many to go through!), but set your mind to finishing the job. Flip through each page and tear out only the things that you want to keep for future reference. What’s left of the magazines can be recycled or given away… just don’t keep them!

As I’ve been going through my mag’s I’ve quickly realized that most of the magazines had like one tiny little article or idea in it that I was interested in. I had been keeping the entire magazine for one little note out of it. Silly. So, I tore out all of the pages of interest, and am giving away what remains of the magazines. I like to keep little tips that I find: craft ideas, recipes, decorating ideas, stuff like that. But what do you do with all of those loose pages that you’ve saved? I have a couple ideas…

1. Create a binder with tabs dividing sections by category: Food (recipes and ideas), Crafts, Decorating, Kids/Baby, Gardening, Birthday Party Ideas, etc… Place each page into it’s particular category so it is easy to find when you are looking for a tip. You can use page protectors or hole punch each page to keep them in the binder. For the smaller sections I’ve cut out, I tape them to a notebook paper before putting it into the binder. This is a great way to keep everything organized in a way that makes the information easy to find.
2. Digitize it. For even less clutter, create a folder on your computer with the categories of interest, and scan and save your clippings to file away electronically. This way you can toss the actual page. It’s like creating the same binder as mentioned above, but without physically having one to take up more space. Just be sure to back up your documents onto a disk so that you don’t chance losing them. This is a great idea for people looking for ways to get rid of more “things” from their home. (Personally though, I think I like having the actual pages to reference.)

Magazines are so easy to accumulate, and so quickly take over your home, especially when they are FREE and just keep coming! The best way to deal with them is to go through them as soon as they come, and only keep what you want from it. If we can stay on top of the pile, then it won’t have a chance to get out of hand.

A couple more ideas before you toss your mag’s:

• Crystal has a really cute idea mentioned on her site about using magazine clippings to make cards. Hers are Valentine’s Day cards, but really this could be done for any kind of greeting card. So before you completely purge the mag’s, consider keeping some craft materials!
• Tipnut has the great idea of shredding your magazines to use for packaging material.
• This site has the coolest idea for making paper beads out of old magazines. This is really worth checking out!

Do you have another way to organize your magazines and clippings? I’d love to hear your ideas!!

Here are my “before” and “after” piles:

I know it doesn’t look like a lot, but that’s 54 more things gone from my home! Now I’m ready to reclaim my basket for another, more useful purpose!

If you have already done some purging, or if you are ready to join in, I’d love to hear from you! Just post about your efforts on your site, and link back here to share with the rest of us! I can’t wait to hear how you’ve done! And of course, if you have minimized your home in some other way we’d love to hear about that too. Let’s continue to encourage each other to simplify our homes, and our lives, one area at a time!