Quote Originally Posted by DYWORKSHOP View Post
Thanks for the information. Yes, my problem is the throwing out part.
Get in the habit of marking the month/year on "susceptible to discard" items when you acquire them. This is fairly obvious with anything that has a shelf-life, e.g., glue, paint, but is also useful for making discard decisions on other stuff.

Now decide on a "discard interval". Mine is two years. If I pick up something that has a date that indicates it hasn't been used in two years, it goes in the trash. If you only use part of an item, e.g., cut a piece from a sheet of flashing, scribe the current date under the old one and throw it back in storage. The discard interval may be variable and depend on the volume of shop space occupied by the object.

What "susceptible to discard" means is a personal thing that everyone must decide for himself. Some items are easy. Antique tools inherited from ancestors never are even if unused for decades. Exotic materials that are hard to find usually aren't nor are items that have become terribly expensive to replace.

What's important is to decide a priori on a retention regimen that you can live with and then apply it unfailingly.