alt Hacker NewsBut wouldn't this help?
You have 10 containers, slap a marker on one every time you take something out of it.
12 months later you have 2 containers that haven't been touched (zero stickers). -> 80% reduction of the amount of stuff to comb through to find unused/useless cruft.
If your decision procedure is so simple that you always throw out any container with zero dots and always keep any container with non-zero dots, then perhaps it saves a small amount of time.
But that's a pretty coarse decision procedure, both because there might be an item that's very important but gets used less than once per year and because there might be a container that is 99% full of unused stuff but happens to have 1 item that gets used once a year.