Picking up and moving your life to a new location represents a major challenge for everyone, whether a single person or a large family, creating a to-do list that promises to take up more time than the physical move itself.
When the opportunity for new work experience or unique adventure presents itself, you may just find yourself suddenly moving abroad. If so, check out these three tips to organize and store your stuff:
1. Minimize
Moving, as well as traveling, entails a whole lot of packing – not typically anyone’s favorite job. In order to save time and money, you’ll need to take the time to reduce the amount of stuff that will make the trip with you. So first step: unclutter.
While minimizing in the category of one’s own belongings can rightfully inspire nervousness, you may just find it to be quite fulfilling, also! Start with the items that you can clearly do without and work from there; not only will you do away with baggage, but you’re also likely to build a habit of relieving yourself of material belongings, an excellent trait to possess if you move often.
In the end, minimizing what you do have will help make the next steps of the organization and storage process that much easier.
2. Go Digital Wherever Possible
As technology progresses, more and more of the things that we own are being replaced by their digital counterparts, making it possible for us to store virtually what used to take up precious shelf space. If you’re a sucker for a great CD cover or have a huge collection of heavy, expensive-to-ship books, now is the time to consider making the jump to digital.
Here are some of the items you likely have lying around the house that can be quickly and easily digitized:
- CDs – easily stored as MP3 files.
- DVDs – can be copied and stored in many digital formats.
- Books – while purchasing all of the books you own in digital form will potentially be costly, it very well may prove less expensive than shipping them to your new home.
Photographs – if you’re still carrying around old photo albums, now is the time to get scanning.
While digitizing your entire library of media could take a while, depending on the size of your collection, the freedom that comes with relieving yourself of so many hard copies promises to make many aspects of your life easier, when you’re both mobile and stationary!
3. Embrace the Cloud
Now that you’ve reduced the amount that you own and digitized a lifetime worth of music, photos, movies and reading material, it’s time to be sure that all of that new, irreplaceable digital data will be kept absolutely safe and accessible from anywhere, any time you need it. To do this, you’ll need to head up into the cloud.
The term “cloud storage” refers to the idea of storing your digital data in a remote location on the servers of a given provider, allowing them to not only keep your data safe but to serve it to you on-demand from any web-connected device. With the world quickly embracing this idea – the upcoming Windows 8 will make cloud storage a daily reality of most of the computing world in only a few months – many reliable providers have come out of the wood work over the past few years. From standalone services like DropBox to the offerings of web giants like Google and Microsoft, free cloud storage accounts are available at every turn, giving you a place to safely secure the digital side of your life.
Conclusion
Picking up and moving for any reason entails all of the difficulties of transporting an entire life, but the tips above will help you to do it with as little hassle as possible.
Tom is the travel blogger for Storage.com, the LA Storage Units resource.