It's the beginning of a new year, which means that new resolutions will be made and in only a few short weeks these resolutions will be forgotten. This year, don't become one of the many that will take on an obscene challenge only to forget what and why you started this nonsense in the first place. So, start small and take this challenge that I set for myself last year.

Get rid of 100 items that you have in your room, apartment, or house right now.

Last year, I decided that my New Year's resolution would be to declutter my life in all aspects, starting with my room. I don’t consider myself to be extremely materialistic, but I am overly sentimental, which means that getting rid of anything becomes the biggest chore. Last year when rearranging my room, I had a friend helping me and decided that I should change the way that the pictures on my wall were arranged. So I began to create a new design with each photograph, but discovered that the new template did not allow for as many pictures to be on the wall. I stared at the photographs on the wall and the pictures in my hands, and I had to decide which pictures would have to be put away. I don’t know how long I stood there, not moving, but it was long enough for my friend to say, “It’s just a picture, not a memory.”

We laughed it off, but then I started thinking that in my mind it was both. I have so much stuff in my room that honestly has no purpose anymore except to remind me of my past. I am the girl that has a box in her closet filled with old movie ticket stubs, receipts from vacations, friendship bracelets, old clothes just in case I'll need them, and a thousand other items that I will never use again. Thus led to the challenge of getting rid of 100 items.

I didn't just go into my room and start throwing things away left and right; of course I set a few ground rules. First, I decided that an item didn't have to be clothes or something large but it could be something small like a picture frame, notebook, or a couple of pens. Then, I gathered a box for the items I wished to donate and give away. This box was the only box that counted in my 100 items. On the opposite side of my room, I had a trashcan to discard of things that were too old or to useless to go anywhere else and this did not count towards my 100 items. It was junk... that would be cheating. So long story short: if I used it regularly it stayed, if it was useless to anyone it was trash, and if it could benefit someone else it became an item.

Once I had placed the 100th item in the box, it was hard to make myself stop. Clearing out my room of all of these things that I no longer needed or had use for was amazing and I decided that this would be a challenge I do every year. In fact, since the beginning of 2015, I have done my 100 item challenge two more times and am currently sorting through a pile of my things for the beginning of 2016 as we speak. So, get to it and declutter your new year!