My husband and I have played multiple rounds of minsgame. This past July was our fourth time.

How the game works is like this: you remove an item from your home (by selling, donating, giving or throwing away) on the first day, two items on the second day and so forth. Each item can be as big as an appliance or as small as a button. It all depends on you. With both of us playing in a month with 31 days, that equates to nearly a thousand items (992) gone from our home.

It’s been challenging this fourth time around. Frankly, I wasn’t able to find 496 physical items. I only found about 78, a much lower number than I needed. That certainly wasn’t the case when we first started down the minimalism path.

Playing minsgame multiple times has significantly reduced the number of items in our home.

The pressure from the fourth time around has been beneficial. I finally let go of some items I’ve been holding onto unnecessarily. These included some past favorite clothing that no longer felt right, jewelry pieces unworn for years, and high heels that I rarely wear anymore. Just several months ago, I wasn’t ready to let go of these pieces. Having to reassess my closet during this round of minsgame helped in moving past the point of resistance.

It’s remarkable how much of an emotional process decluttering really is.

When you’re finally ready to let go, it no longer has any emotional pull over you. Letting go of something is a battle between freedom and loss in your mind. Until you’re ready, it will feel like loss. But when you’re ready, you will feel the freedom.

I’ve found the more you declutter, the more the feeling of loss turns into freedom.

Still left with the challenge of finding more than 400 items, I turned to digital clutter. It was the perfect time to streamline the digital excess that’s collected on on my laptop. My email accounts and downloads folder were the main areas of focus. Emails alone yielded more than 250 deleted messages. In my downloads folder, I probably deleted more than 100 files. Add in some miscellaneous files here and there, and I met the hefty goal for July’s round of minsgame.

While I made a dent in the never-ending and immense decluttering process in the digital realm, there’s still more work to be done. I’m still in the process of streamlining and organizing my photos—current and past. This will be a project that will likely span many years as I work on it when I have the energy and time (rare resources these days).

If we do play minsgame again, it’ll likely skew towards the digital space.

While there will certainly be more physical items to declutter in the future, the multiple rounds of minsgame have thinned out our possessions to the point where we don’t have hundreds of things to get rid of anymore. It feels good to have reached this point, and I’m looking forward to continuing to minimize all aspects of our lives to reflect how we want to live.