The Doom Box
Doom piles are a common phenomenon in the Adhd community. If you’re wondering what a doom pile is, it’s simply a pile of stuff that needs to be dealt with, but later. If you have a deficit in executive functioning (the ability to prioritize tasks and take action, among other things) it’s easy for stuff to pile up, and pile up, and pile up. Does that sound stressful to look at everyday? Yeah, which is why I’m not a fan. They’re like a haystack of chaos, hiding a needle sized unpaid bill, but the Doom Box, the doom pile’s well-contained cousin, can be a magic tool for getting through a tough decluttering session.
When you’re decluttering, there are a lot of decisions to make. Most of my articles on decluttering are basically a list of questions you ask yourself about the purpose, the need, the value, the condition, the potential, the material, the recyclability, the saleability, and so on, for each individual item. It’s a lot. Hopefully, the answers are forthcoming, but you’ll definitely come across items that you just can’t deal with at that exact moment. Into the Doom Box it goes.
Things you should NOT put in the Doom Box:
Anything that will spoil, die, or rot
Tiny little screws, paper clips, coins, rubber bands, depleted batteries, and miscellaneous bits and bobs. Make a Doom Bowl for those.
Papers. Papers need to be sorted into Action Items, Filing, Shred, or Recycle. Your Action Items container might start to feel like a paper-only Doom Box, but hopefully you’re finding a little time each week to work on some of those Action Items. The Doom Box, on the other hand, can be ignored for months.
Here’s the key to this strategy. Only one Doom Box per person, and make sure it has a lid, so there is a physical boundary on how much can fit in there. What do you do when your doom box is full? Sort it. By the time you get around to sorting it, the context of the contents hopefully morphed into something easier to handle. Before I do a donation/charity drop off, I check the Doom Box for things that I’m ready to send to the thrift store. I also like to save myself an organizing project for when I need to procrastinate. Sorting through the Doom Box is great for procrastinating because you’re still doing something productive.
Decluttering is a cyclical, never-ending part of life. If you don’t get rid of that thing today, it’s ok, there will be opportunities to get rid of it later. Into the Doom Box it goes.
Happy Sorting!