by admin | Feb 26, 2023 | Declutter
"One task at a time" might be considered a mantra of the declutter movement. Through simple steps and managing just one item, space or room at a time in your direction towards living with less clutter, you will get great results.
Acknowledge that things have their place in your space
Plates don't belong in the living room or bedroom. They live in the kitchen. Paperwork belongs in a file cabinet or household paperwork box in a specific area of the home, near to where you sit down to deal with bills, taxes and invoices or expenses.
Post goes in one place in the house, maybe just off the hallway or on a table in that same location once it has come into the house. When post has been opened the envelopes go into a recycling box, not tomorrow or the day after, but as soon as the post has been opened.
Clothes belong in the wardrobes and drawers that are designed to hold them. Once clothes have been washed and dried they go back into the storage drawers. If you live in a two level house, then things that are to go upstairs but which have found their way downstairs, get placed into a basket or bin at the foot of the stairs for moving upstairs by whoever goes upstairs next. This is a simple way of ensuring that things get back to their place in the house. Keep the Waste Bin to hand and use this for a regular scan of your surface areas at home. This can be the easiest way to ensure that things don't get misplaced, that clutter finds it difficult to accumulate because you are looking out for it.
Use your Diary and Calendar to keep Letting Go
Here I suggest you track and monitor your own time commitment to the process of watching what is accumulating and to ensuring things are moved-on to their new home, which is away from yours! You can set aside regular planned time to continue the forward progress. Start with once a week allocating a time slot where you can walk around your home and identify things which are not needed. This will not be about simply moving the toys which have ended up in the corridor back to the children's bedroom, or taking plates from the lounge back into the kitchen. These are normal every day activities as parting of everyone enjoying the home.
No, this new tracking activity is much more about watching what might be coming into the house as new and which is not as good as you thought it was when you bought it last month. Now you are catching it before it gets dumped in a cupboard and ignored or forgotten for years. This time you are spotting the problem early on, and ensuring the wasted item is gone for good to a place where it may be more appreciated or more relevant.
Notice your shopping habits
Another area where you will have massive impact on reducing the clutter is by becoming more aware of what makes the journey into your house. If it doesn't come in then it can't take up space in the first place! On your regular shopping trips into supermarkets, local independent and artisan stores, book shops and departments stores be mindful of what you see that you feel you want for the house. Of course, I am including food shopping here, but more than this I am thinking about the non-food objects such as lamps, cushions, books, fabrics, ornaments, pictures, electrical items and gadgets.
Any one of these can be appealing because they are attractive, or hi-tech, or we feel they are 'must have' items for the living room or bedroom, they are better than what you already have or they represent a prestige element or status symbol for you. Be careful. Ask yourself "How does this new item make a real difference to the quality of my life?" or "Can I have the benefits this item might bring to my home, but for less than the ticket price showing here?"
Consider your involvement with the goodwill and charity shops
Have you regularly donated your good quality items to a local store where they can resell or repurpose your donation? If not, then can you make this a more regular action for your family or household? This might mean that you now allocate a space in your home to where you store those things which you have already had good value from and which you are considering replacing. Whether this is in a cupboard or on a shelf in the garage doesn't matter. What is important is that each time you have enough things to fill a box then you get this down to the charity shop so they can sell it and collect the funds for their own good projects. Everyone at home can get involved with this for clean unwanted clothes, kids toys, books, household furniture and kitchen items.
Giving such things a second life can mean an enormous emotional benefit to the person who buys it from the store to make their own living pace better for them. Recycling things this way allows each item to have a second life and is better for you, your neighbourhood and for the planet we all live on.
by admin | Feb 12, 2023 | Declutter
In looking at how we approach decluttering our homes and lives of too many possessions - especially those which get in the way of us being as free as possible to live the life which gives us greatest satisfaction - I have been looking at how our homes can become places that are not just about switching off and unwinding after work.
In a YouTube video about a young Australian writer, Michael Green, I was fascinated to see how he had worked together with his friends and housemates to create a place for him to write, away from the bustle of the house, but still so close to home that it overlooked their shared vegetable garden.
A point he made was that he wanted to look at how we often live in and occupy our homes as a place of relief from work, rather than something which is integrated deeply into our values and hopes and which serves as a reflection of who we are. By taking a badly used storage space which had been used as a dumping ground for broken furniture, old suitcases and abandoned junk and placing dedicated effort into it's simple transformation, he has created a room for calm and order. Utility and function has been reborn from recycled materials and given new purpose. He lived in a shared house and wanted to convert an old room in the yard cum garden to be of use as a writing space for himself. His commentary on the video made a strong impression and I watched it several times and then forgot about it.
Since wanting to look more closely at the theme of downsizing or making better use of our own space, I have reconnected with Michael and his inspiring video. He has reclaimed a small space, perhaps 9 feet long by 5 feet deep. At the back and sides it has brick walls that have been covered with a double layer of wood lath strips glued at right angles to each other. These have then been been lifted into place to cover the brick work and create an attractive and atmospheric soft brown wall.
The front of the shed space has been constructed of an old wood door with multiple glass panes, and a skirt to about four feet high. The remainder of the structure has two large multi-paned windows which can be opened up to let the air in and pegged on wood stilts, creating a real sense of openness to the writing space. By building this creative space as a part of his shared home environment and yet removed from his immediate living space, he has given himself permission to have it as a sanctuary where he can think, work, reflect and focus on his writing.
I have been deeply struck by the desire of indie thinkers to make more of their home space, to create something which mirrors their being driven by what matters to them. Whether it is people in the tiny-homes movement choosing to live with so much less than is conventionally accumulated within a house space, or by the minimalists who seek to only have with them those items which receive regular functional use, the whole approach to living with less has triggered something in me and which I can feel is altering how I look at the things which I keep close around me.
Should our homes be serving as an anaesthetic to the varied stress, boredom or pressure of different job roles which we take on?
We exchange money for our time and in order to show the purpose of our work we buy things to show that the trade-off has been worth the time spent. This leads to an amassing of belongings in our home spaces and means we spend more on possessions than we place into savings for our future years, when we will not be earning from work and yet expect to have long years in retirement.
Building some element of work function into your home with a space that allows you to operate a small business, a digital venture, a creative endeavour or a means of generating revenue with less stress than an employed income, this can only be a good thing.
Tiny homes and smaller spaces are a part of this drive toward finding form and function in a home and allowing you to look at living better with less. Using #tinyhomes will take you to YouTube videos, documentaries, blogs and online posts all about how you might combine your existing home with a side venture place within the home, or to looking at adapting the life you have now to a transition toward the space - both physical in a home place as well as emotional in a mental or productive work space.
Container homes, treehouse living and multi-occupied houses might seem extreme and not represent the place you want to move toward. Yet the ideas and the innovation that can come from looking at such communities and thoughts are indeed both helpful and inspirational.
We have reduced by a half the actual square foot area of our living accommodation with the move to our new home, and yet because we have let go of so much that was clutter, we feel better. Financially we are better off to the tune of more than half of what we previously spent on accommodation, utility bills and local authority taxes. We feel richer though from the process of combining more thoughtful living with better use of the space that we do occupy.
by admin | Feb 3, 2023 | Simple Self Help
Time to be honest with yourself. What do you know that you don't do well, do badly, or can't even do at all?
You can carry on the way you have been until now, getting stuck on your own failings, inadequacies and weaknesses, or you can choose to focus on the things you know you do well and either let go of or give away so many of the areas that are clearly not your strengths.
In your own journey there are so many things that you do with ease, with brilliance and with total energy and sometimes even with sophistication. But you have to draw the line somewhere and acknowledge that there are some things where you hold yourself back, derail yourself at crucial moments or even sabotage what could otherwise have been an enjoyable event or experience by choosing to think you can do better or know better.
Consider the possibility that you could simply stop doing some of the "stuff" that others could do better and in less time. Let go of the desire to think you have to be right all of the time or even most of the time, and allow yourself instead to be involved with the things and activities where you can make a valid and a useful contribution.
For me it was letting go of trying to be in morning meetings and recognizing that my body clock just could not do it. The freedom and exhilaration I experienced when I stopped booking morning appointments was great, not just because it took the pressure off me, but because it also allowed me to stop disappointing clients by turning up late or not even turning up at all!
For a colleague who lives locally, it was letting someone else deal with their post and email management, giving up the struggle with believing adamantly that he had to do it all himself.
For a neighbour with a retail store it was the issue of constantly comparing herself against another similar business in the next town, and wasting time unproductively in worrying about whether her own customers might go over to the other business. Instead she developed a focus on what was great about her own offerings and why clients should spend their time, energy and money in her business. The happier she was in her work environment the more obvious this was to her clients and they did more business with her.
What is it that you are trying to do, and what can you let go of?
