Hi peeps!

Mar might look a bit unhappy in the above pic, but she actually feels pretty darned accomplished. Yesterday her inventory weighed in at about 70,000. Today it’s just shy of 62,000, after a multi-hour archiving spree of old system avatar items.

You see, Mar is one of SL’s packrats who has an eye for history. She turned 10 last week, and she still has stuff in her inventory from way back in 2008. Being something of a sentimentalist as well as someone who baulks at throwing away something that’s an intrinsic part of Mar’s history, I knew this would be a ‘pack it all up in boxes’ job, rather than a ‘delete all the things!’ job. But I knew that boxing everything up into individual outfits and whatnot would be a daunting task: something that – with no end in sight – would stop me from even starting!

So I decided to work by store, in the cases where I had tons of things from certain stores. And where it was just a bundle of random old clothing from lots of stores, I gave myself a little shake, got realistic about the question “C’mon, will you ever actually wear that again?!” (answer: hell no!), and started up a series of ‘old clothing’ boxes. Once I had 10 of them (never putting more than 200-ish items in a single box) I took them into inventory and put all 10 into another box (‘old clothing 1-10’) and started on box 11. (Yes, I know that I will never unpack or look inside those boxes again, but this is my way of dealing with the emotional attachment I have to those items!)

Over the years Mar has picked up thousands of things, some better than others. On odd occasions I kept a random pair of earrings that still looked good, but in the main it all went into boxes. I’ve still got a long way to go yet, but my goal is to reduce Mar’s inventory to just recent items – mesh and appliers – since she no longer wears her system body. I now have an alt account that will be dedicated to picking up system-only stuff for blogging, and I’m carefully curating all of that alt’s stuff already: keeping one colour of something to wear and archiving the rest, etc.

So here is your challenge, if you’re looking at your inventory and thinking “I really need to get that sorted” –

• If you’ve moved to a mesh body and head consider when you last wore system stuff. Not for months? Then archive or throw away all of that old system stuff!
• If you’re still a system (or part-system) kinda person, start digging through your inventory for that old stuff, for the unworn sizes (if you don’t have a mesh body or head and the unworn stuff contains appliers or mesh body fits, box those up; you might ‘go mesh’ yet, and you can then unpack those things!), for the duplicates, for the hunt prizes from five years ago that you never unpacked (I mean really; are they going to be that good?!).

Don’t forget the other good inventory habits, such as:

• Dealing with it NOW!
• The Pre-Logout Routine
• Ditching the Extra Sizes and Other Body-Fits