More vs. Less

Getting Organized Column
BackStage, December 2006
topic: more vs. less

The Quality of Quantity
By Kristine Oller

Staring at the cramped, tangled mass of clothing in your closet, you consider digging in for an outfit. However, with rehearsal starting in less than an hour, you resign yourself to slipping into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt from the pile of clean laundry. Then, to avoid un-stacking and re-stacking the dishes in your cabinet just to get out a plate, you grab a napkin and eat your breakfast standing over the sink. Finally, with no time left to rummage through your overflowing make-up bag, you rely on a quick application of the “emergency” lipstick in your purse and leave your house looking and feeling much like you did the day before.

Actors live in a constant mode of striving for success. Often, we measure our progress by the amount of things we accumulate: If you own more stuff at the end of the year than you did at the beginning, then it must have been a successful year. However, if the constant inflow of new possessions is not balanced by an occasional purging of old ones, you may find yourself spending more time wrestling with or ignoring your belongings than using and enjoying them.

Taking time to weed through your stuff is especially relevant during and after the “accumulation bonanza” of the December holidays. I promise that your efforts to pare-down will be rewarded because, you will have more once you have less.

More Versus Less

Let’s say your kitchen cabinet is jam-packed with cups. Forty mugs are wedged in there like a ceramic house of cards. Of the 40, you are probably using and re-using the same two cups that can be placed right at the front of the shelf without disturbing the delicate balance of the other 38. Now, what if you cut your cup collection in half, keeping only twenty mugs that can be stored in your cupboard with room to spare? Instead of using only two cups out of forty (5 percent) you would have easy access to 20 cups out of 20 (100 percent). Although you’ll own fewer cups altogether, you will have gained the use and enjoyment of 18 more cups. Some would still say you lost 20 cups. But is purging something you weren’t using a loss?

This concept of less being more is certainly applicable to an actor’s wardrobe. With street clothes, audition clothes, event clothes, ideal-weight clothes, and costume pieces, most actors have never met a closet they couldn’t fill. Yet when clothes are crushed together on a rod or awkwardly stacked on shelves, the natural tendency is to avoid them. Often people find themselves wearing and washing the same small selection of clothes – usually about 20 percent of their wardrobe. These clothes never return to the cramped closet or stuffed drawers; they remain in easy reach, usually draped over a chair or a treadmill in the bedroom. However, once a closet is thoroughly purged and organized so the clothing becomes accessible and visually appealing, the owner is able to take full advantage of 100 percent of the wardrobe he or she retains.

Keep or Release

Purging is the process of deciding what you need or want to keep and what you need or want to release – donate, recycle, or throw away. When evaluating your possessions, first look for items that are past their prime: broken, stained, missing parts, duplicates, outdated, never used. Once those types of items are eliminated, you will be left with the items that you deem “good.” This is the point at which you might get stuck. A common refrain I hear is: “I can’t get rid of any more of these, because they are all equally good.” When the group of things you are evaluating all seem equal – equally good or equally valuable – that just means it is time to change the criteria you are using to make your judgments. If a group of items are all “good” then you can no longer use “good” as the criteria for making the choice. You must change the criteria and ask yourself a new question: Which of these are most useful, or most comfortable, or most versatile, or make you happiest? If you have an over-abundance of books but room enough in your home for only two bookcases, the key to reaching your goal of paring down your collection to fit in the available space is to change your evaluation criteria every time you feel yourself getting stuck in the I-like-all-of-these-books-equally trap.

If the number of your cups or clothing or activities becomes overwhelming, if you start to loose track of what you own, then you know the “more” you are surrounded by is becoming less and less – less helpful, less enjoyable, less valuable. You will use more – a greater percentage – of what you have if you reduce the quantity to a satisfying yet manageable amount.

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© 2005-2007 Kristine Oller, all rights reserved. You are free to use material from these columns in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including live web site link. Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read:

“By Kristine Oller of Personalized Organization. Please visit Kristine’s web site at http://www.kristineoller.com for additional information and resources on organizing and career strategy for creative people.”

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