Start with your closet. Identify all the T-shirts you haven’t worn in three years. Then throw away all your clothes, including the ones you’re wearing.
Use a duster to clean off the top shelves above your bed. After that, tear down the shelves and blow them to smithereens.
Do a blanket purge. A purge of all the blankets. You don’t need them.
Flush all your prescription meds down the toilet. If you want them later, it’s not a big deal—you can just wade into the sewers to find them again. They’ll be waiting for you. It’s not like they’ll have found a new job.
Toss 90 percent of the canned beans in your pantry. You only have 10 percent left, which corresponds to half a can of beans. That should be fine; you don’t even like beans.
Remove your plates from the kitchen cabinet and smash them on the floor. Shards are the most efficient way to dispose of them anyway, because there’s a risk of injury, so you’ll act faster.
Pay someone $5 million to come and take away your most expensive furniture.
Bring in a toddler with a history of racist tweets to help you dismantle your fire alarm.
Create a computer program to efficiently filter your books. Or at least try to—your apartment runs on a programming language you never bothered to learn.
Send a mass email to all your roommates asking them to immediately respond with how much rent they’ve paid in the last week or risk eviction. It’s the middle of the month, so the answer is none. Get rid of them. Frees up a lot of space.
Remove all the doors from their hinges and start a fire with the wood. Since you’re now using your savings to heat the house, you can stop paying your electricity bill. Take a photo of this to show your followers what incredible work you’re doing.
Realize you actually do need the plates you smashed. Chase down the garbage truck. Gather the shards. The painstaking process of piecing them back together should take only a few months. And if it takes longer than four years, it’s someone else’s problem.
Once back at your house, realize the door fire has spread. Thankfully, all is not lost; this is just another opportunity for efficiency. To make the most of it, torch everything: your tax returns, your passport, your driver’s license, your roommate’s driver’s license. This is what spring cleaning is all about.
Go ahead and let the rest of the house burn. You won’t have to clean your home when you don’t have one.
When the fire spreads to the rest of the homes on your block, reassure the neighbors that everything is fine. An efficiency expert is in charge, and you’re reducing property taxes… by reducing property values.
If your neighbors prove hard to convince, stay calm. The HOA isn’t going to vote you out. They never voted you in to begin with.