Packing
I’ve only completed one box. This sucks. And I’m hungry.this is my advice to people that are packing for a move:
taxonomy has no place here. dump shit into boxes and give it only as much attention as you would a piece in a game of tetris, do NOT use this packing time to reminisce or take stock of or wind through your past. this should be the “fuck it, i just wanna get the hell out of here” phase and wine should be used to speed up and enable your tipsy and ramshackled clusterfuck boxes o’ whatever.
then, when everything has arrived at your new location, you can drink wine and be thoughtful anew about that which has currency within your new surroundings. for this is the time to look back and smile wistfully or with gentle mirth as you pull the haphazard treasures from their cardboard chariots.
also: throw out/donate/upcycle 1/3 of your shit. seriously, make a “well, i never used this fuckin’ thing” pile and pare it the fuck down already.
hope that helps!
My box-packing MO, after enduring four moves in the past six years, is to avoid overfilling. I’ve methodically packed my boxes with a carefully derived combination of books and winter clothing. This came after I realized that more than half of the stuff I’m moving are books and notes from college that I’m still too attached to even after it all sat in a closet for the past two to six years. Still, I only managed to toss about 10% of that crap and here I am still schlepping the rest of it to yet another apartment.
I should have looked at this earlier in the process, but I just remembered Merlin Mann did a bunch of posts on clutter and moving a few years ago. This Ask MeFi thread on literary clutter might also be particularly salient.