The Donate Pile

Reflection on closets, capacity, and the habits worth keeping.

One of the perks of being a student is having a few random weeks between semesters to take on the projects you’ve been putting off. My project this break was to reorganize my entire room — particularly my closet.

Now, yes, this project entails a lot. And unfortunately for that exact reason, I kept putting it off. I feared that halfway through, something for school or work would pop up and I wouldn’t be able to finish it in a reasonable timeframe. But with no class on the calendar, I finally found the time to start this week.

And honestly, it made me laugh.

As I started assessing what I had collected — school merch I got for free, assignments in different folders, more notebooks than you could count, high school chemistry notes I have absolutely no business still owning — I laughed at myself. And then I went to make the decision: Keep or Go?

I recognized pretty quickly that this was a decision coming up in a lot of places lately. As the semester ends, my classmates move onto their internships, and I mentally prepare for law school in the fall, there’s a strong sense of urgency to collect new habits and get rid of the ones that no longer serve me. Which raises a genuinely interesting psychological question: why do we prioritize the habits we do, and why does it always seem like there are a few we can never fully commit to long-term?

I’ve always heard it takes two weeks to form a habit. I think I agree — but less with the specific timeframe and more with the underlying logic. If I can get myself to do one thing every single day for 14 days, I can probably keep doing it from there. The streak matters more than the clock.

My closet issue, though, stems from something different: an inability to let things go. I’m not joking when I say there are mildly sentimental hoodies from high school that I still cannot part with. But as I kept asking myself Keep or Go, a pattern emerged. The honest answer was this: during the school year, two weeks is enough time for two presentations, a ten page report, and a midterm. There is no mental bandwidth left for habit formation. So instead of making decisions, I kept things loosely. I lost all sense of organization but told myself I’d fix it when I had more capacity.

The trouble with waiting for capacity is that the perfect combination of capacity and project will never actually arrive. It requires someone who works well despite the elements…or maybe just a really good project manager.

This program is unlike anything I’ve done before, and because of that, my time management had a real learning curve when transferring over. But rather than making myself feel bad about it, I focused on figuring out what a realistic version of sustainable actually looked like — one where smaller reorgs could happen during busy periods without derailing everything or forcing an all-nighter.

Read about the benefits of donating to your local thrift stores here.

So the donate pile is filling up, and I’m thinking hard about what makes something worth keeping.

For the clothes, my solution is simple: genuinely assess the last time I wore it. Anything I can’t let go of but won’t wear gets vacuum sealed and stored. Sentimental attachment gets honored, but it doesn’t get prime real estate in the closet.

For the habits, the same logic applies. What am I actually using?

The habits staying: I was always getting to campus an hour early because of a longer commute and early classes. I want to keep that rhythm. What I struggled to keep up with were personal goals, reading & writing, things that are just for me. Those are what I’m rebuilding now, strategically baked into my schedule so the mental load of a new habit doesn’t feel so heavy when the other habits are already solid underneath it.

That’s the thing nobody really says about habit formation. It’s not about pushing yourself harder in the short-term or white-knuckling through until the semester ends. It’s about making the habit feel less overwhelming by building comfort around it first. Organized environment, clearer mind. The new habit has somewhere stable to land.

The only way out is through.