Reading Time: 3 minutesWLC Mission is a weekly challenge, meant to improve your life by disrupting your day-to-day routine — taking you out of your comfort zone, asking you to try something new, and challenging you to become a more complete person. Never easy, you can consider the Mission an advanced experiment in personal wellness, with you as the star.
This Week’s Mission: Virtual Moving Day
The Idea
Borrowed from Gretchin Rubin and her wonderful Happiness Podcast.
This week, you’re going to move (except you won’t need friends, a truck, or bubble wrap). Instead, you’ll go through your home, viewing your possessions with one criteria in mind — if you wouldn’t pay someone to wrap up an item and move it to your “new house,” you’ll trash it, sell it, or give it away.
The Payoff
When you view your possessions as potential costs rather than assets, you’ll see them in a new light. The question “would you pay someone to move this?” forces us to assign an economic value to our stuff — creating a simple proposition that makes it easy to identify when something no longer has worth in our lives.
The next step — ridding our space of these items — can have tremendous mental benefits, creating room for creativity, reducing stress, and moving us toward a more minimal lifestyle in which our possessions are more carefully considered.
The Parameters
Grab a cardboard box, and start in whichever room your prefer. Identify a small item you wouldn’t pay to have moved, and chuck it in the box. Continue, adding as many items as you like.
The important thing is to develop some momentum, so feel free to start small and concentrate on items that don’t cause stress or deliberation.
Once the box is full or you’ve reached the end of your patience for the activity, you’ll want to actually get rid of the objects in the box. While the quickest way is to trash them, selling or giving them away may be better options for you, depending on the items. In any case, don’t delay — you wouldn’t have a random box of packed things that you’re not going to move sitting around when the movers arrive.
Here are some possibilities:
- “Move” a laundry room or garage first — a place where nostalgia is unlikely to interfere.
- Check your bookshelves for volumes you’ll likely never read again.
- Go through your desk, dresser, or junk drawer as an easy step.
- Once you’re more comfortable, start examining larger items like furniture, rugs, lamps, and the like. These tend to offer the biggest mental bang for the buck when you get rid of them.
- For extra fun, sell your unwanted items on Craigslist or have a garage sale. There’s nothing like getting paid for stuff you were already willing to throw away!
The Scoring
This WLC Mission isn’t scored. To complete it, just “move” at least one room this week. Consider it a huge step toward decluttering your life, and a method you can use any time you’re feeling overwhelmed by your stuff. If you’re feeling inspired, you’re always free to do the entire house!
Previously, he founded Again Faster Equipment, a functional fitness equipment company created to serve the CrossFit community. Established in 2006, Jon took the Company global in 2012, twice landing on the Inc. 500/5000 list of America’s fastest growing private companies.
From 2007 to 2013, he served as a Senior Lecturer for CrossFit, Inc., training aspiring CrossFit trainers at over 100 seminars, including engagements in Iceland, Afghanistan, Moscow, Holland, the United States, and Canada. Jon also served on the CrossFit L1 Advisory Board, helping establish policy for the organization’s training efforts from 2011 to 2013.
He’s also done stints in state government, gym management, and consulting — and currently teaches classes at CrossFit City Line.
Jon graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2003, summa cum laude, with a B.A. in Psychology. He also holds a Graduate Certificate in Finance and Control from the Harvard Extension School, 2006, and has completed coursework in data analytics.
