My husband and I are moving this summer and we have been systematically sorting through all our things and weeding what we don’t need anymore/don’t want to carry up three flights of stairs into the new apartment.

My husband has many, many books.  (Books are heavy!)  He’s also a librarian, so he sorted through his books and picked out the ones he could easily get where he works.  He weeded out over 100 books.

These books sat in piles in our already cramped home for a couple weeks.  I could tell that my husband had lost steam on the project and was not…enthusiastic…about actually getting the books out of the house.  So here’s what we did:

Tip #1 – Conquer the Task Together
Sometimes, you just don’t want to do it alone.  Once I came along side of him, my husband was much more motivated to finish what he had started.

Tip #2 – Divide Jobs and Conquer
He knew that some books would be worth selling on Amazon and that some books should just be donated.  But they were all mixed together.  So we first sorted the books into categories: Donate, Sell, and Check Prices (to see if they would be worth selling).  Then as he started entering the “Sell” books into Amazon, I researched the “Check” books on Amazon.  If a “Check” book was worth a certain amount, I put in the “Sell” pile.  If it wasn’t, it went into the “Donate” box.

Tip #3 – Divide the Pile and Conquer
One hundred books takes a lot of time to go through.  So we divided this project up over two evenings.  We could have done it in one evening but it felt less draining to divide it up.  After the first evening, we felt really good about what we had done.  The stack was half gone.  We had listed a couple dozen books on Amazon.  And we had the Donate books in boxes already to take to the donation center.  It gave us momentum to finish the job the second night.  Because we had a system in place, it seemed to go fairly quickly.

Whether you have a stack of books or clothes or toys to go through, these tips will make your project more manageable.