How I Decluttered Years of Unopened Boxes in My Attic Without Guilt 

When my family moved into our home four years ago, the renovation we planned on having finished before move-in day was far from complete. Our entire first floor lacked flooring and the kitchen had no cabinets — so, many of our carefully packed and labeled boxes got jumbled around the house and landed in the attic. Most of them are still there, many of them having never been opened since. 

When I came across the “Didn’t Know” rule right here on Apartment Therapy, I knew it may very well be the trick to finally getting some momentum on cleaning out the boxes from the attic. I couldn’t wait to try it on so many boxes that contained, well, I didn’t know what! 

The “Didn’t Know” rule is a decluttering strategy from Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of The Minimalists that simply states the following: If you didn’t know or forgot that you had something, give yourself permission to let it go. 

Millburn, one of the inventors, says that not knowing you had something is the same as functionally not owning it, so you can get rid of it and nothing really changes. I knew it’d be a perfect way to address the boxes that had been untouched and out of sight for years, so I got to work to see what I could get done.

Applying the decluttering rule to the attic started working before I even opened the first box. My mentality shifted from unpacking to quickly sifting through things I had already predetermined I’d get rid of. As I looked through each box and bin, I encountered so many things I had forgotten I even owned, from puzzles my children had outgrown to a box of face masks from peak COVID-19 pandemic days. These were easy to put in the donation pile right away. 

Things got trickier when I came across still-useful items I had forgotten about, like extra dishwasher utensil baskets or reusable tote bags. Could I use them? Sure. But I got along perfectly fine not even knowing we had them. And here’s where the “Didn’t Know” rule made decluttering so much easier: I reminded myself that I functionally didn’t own the items anyway, and I was able to quickly put them into the donate pile without the usual hemming and hawing. The third category of items was things I did remember owning. I was still able to let go of some of them, but almost everything I kept came out of this small category of things that I had actually thought about over the last few years. When I approached the boxes as being full of things I had to find a home for, it made decluttering go by so much faster.

The “Didn’t Know” rule works so well for decluttering because it shifts the default action from deciding what to get rid of to knowing exactly what you’ll keep, which wasn’t much for me. It doesn’t preclude you from going through everything, but it makes the entire process so much faster and smoother than other decluttering tricks I’ve tried.

Another reason The Minimalists’ rule is such an effective decluttering strategy is that it provides a framework for making the item-by-item decisions that often make the process so exhausting. Giving myself permission to let go of everything I didn’t know I had helped immediately alleviate the guilt I typically feel when deciding to get rid of items that are perfectly good, cost money, or were gifts. This process makes decluttering less arduous, helping you get rid of stuff more quickly, which builds momentum so that, ultimately, you get much more decluttering done. I whipped through several boxes in the time it used to take me to deal with one. And this means you get back to living — in the peace of a clutter-free space — so much sooner.