New Year's Resolution: Declutter the Study

I have made New Year's resolutions for years... (Though I really can't remember if I've ever kept any...!)

But here I go again!

I remember working with a woman who always spent New Year's Eve tidying her house and getting caught up with the laundry. She believed that the state of her house on New Year's Eve reflected how it would remain the year to come! (I don't share her belief - but I do think of her every New Year's Eve!)

But January 1st is a good time to assess what I might like to change - and strategize about how I might do it...

I recently read an article about a woman whose book on decluttering is very popular these days... One of her strategies, according to the article, is to imagine what you would like a room to look like, and go from there.

These days the room I'd most like to re-organize is the little study that proved so useful when I taught part-time in different schools and had to do all my class preparation and marking here.

Now that I no longer teach, it has become a storage room of sorts... Whenever we expect guests, we toss our clutter into it and shut the door. A while back, I started going through my mother's papers there... and totally lost control of my desk! I also have storage containers of files I need to go through.

Most recently I added Christmas wrapping supplies to the mix.

What would I like this room to be used for? How would I like it to look?

I have an idea - but I don't know how to realistically achieve it... (Maybe I need to read not just this article but the whole decluttering book - which I can borrow from the public library! They have dozens of copies. I guess I'm not the only one who has too much clutter!