Traditionally the day after Thanksgiving is when my family pulls down the Christmas decorations from the attic and puts up the tree. My kids have fun placing their favorite ornaments on and the holiday spirit flows through the house. While I’m up in the attic, I look around and wonder what all this stuff is. The attic isn’t really very crowded but there are boxes of things that I have no idea what is stored in them. So this year I created a new tradition. Each time I go into the attic, I pull down a box and see if it really needs to be stored for another year.

So I grabbed two boxes from the attic and opened them up. Inside were lots of bagged computer games. I remember that my wife suggested I ditch the boxes of my computer games and just put them in large ziplock bags. That way, I could keep all the manuals together and it wouldn’t take up much space. That right there should tell you how old these games were, they all had manuals. So I dug through the boxes and looked at what I had. The vast majority of these were games I had no desire to play again. There were a few that held happy memories so I kept them, but many were just in the “why did I keep this” category.

So my plan is to copy all of the floppy discs to CD while I still have a computer that has a floppy drive. That way if I want to play them again, I can. I’ll also take a good long look at the manuals and decide if they are needed. Chances are they aren’t so I can pitch them as well. The end result is two less paper boxes in the attic and a few new CDs on the spindle.

So the next time you are up in the attic or down in the basement, grab a box and go through it. Decide if you truly need to keep this and if not, purge away.