Quote Originally Posted by mklotz View Post
What's important is to decide a priori on a retention regimen that you can live with and then apply it unfailingly.
This retention regimen (essentially a separation of deciding and doing) is a hallmark of many organizational strategies. You see it in productivity regimens with yearly "dumpster days".

There's also a popular closet organizing trick by which you turn all of your hangars in one direction. As you wear an item, you turn the hangar back in the other direction. After one year, you can easily see all of the clothes that have not been worn for an entire year - these are your candidates for donation.

There are various related concepts in psychology and behavioral economics that address this behavior:

Mere ownership effect and Endowment effect - owning something compels you to assign a higher value to it.

Loss aversion - essentially, not losing $100 is considered much better than finding $100.

Sunk cost - you've already paid the cost of saving, cataloging, and storing an item. When you throw something away, you "lose" that investment.

And, the newer IKEA effect - we place a higher value on something if we created, built, or even just assembled it by ourselves.