Simplify Your Life

Easy to read, fun little how-to book on simplifying your life. Some parts are outdated (“Drop call waiting,” “Stop the Junk Mail,” and “Get rid of your car phone”) and there is no mention of social media, e-mail, internet, etc., because they weren’t around yet in 1994. But our lives have only become more complicated because of technology, and much of the advice can still be applied in 2018. The chapters are only one to two pages long and cover how to simplify “Your Household,” “Your Lifestyle,” “Your Finances,” “Your Job,” “Your Health,” “Your Personal Life,” “Special Issues for Women,” and “Hard-Core Simplicity.” If you only had time to read the chapter titles in each section, you’d come away with ideas to simplify your life. Here are some examples:

• Reduce the clutter in your life
• Work less and enjoy it more
• Beware of exercise equipment, fire your personal trainer, and go take a walk
• Throw out everything but the aspirin
• Leave your shoes at the front door
• Don’t answer your phone just because it’s ringing

I was able to read the entire book, 238 short pages, in one evening. The following are some of my favorite simplifying tips from the book:

“Reduce the Clutter in Your Life”

A giant step on the road to simplicity is to eliminate the odds and ends that clutter up your home, your car, your office, and your life…As you start your program to reduce the clutter, the guideline is easy: If you haven’t used it in a year or more, get rid of it...Start with your clothes closets and branch out from there. Clean out every closet, every drawer, every shelf, in every room of your house, including the kitchen. Do you really need a full-sized Cuisinart and a mini-Cuisinart and a hand-held chopper and a mixer?…Don’t forget the front hall closet, the linen closet, tool chests, and the medicine cabinets…Remember the laundry room, the garage, the attic, the basement, your office, your car, and any storage space you may be renting or borrowing…You can complete the initial stage of an unclutter program in a couple of Saturday afternoons…Remember, the idea is not to deny yourself the things you want, but to free yourself from the things you don’t want.

“Use Dave’s Uncluttering System”

Our friend Dave swears by this method for getting rid of things he no longer needs, but can’t bear to throw out: Put them in a box with a label indicating a date two or three years from now–but don’t list the contents on the label. Store the box in the attic or the basement, or wherever is convenient. Once a year, examine the labels. When you come across a box whose date has passed, throw it out without opening it. Since you don’t know what’s inside, you’ll never miss it.

“Use Speed Cleaning to Clean Your House”

…read Speed Cleaning by Jeff Campbell and the Clean Team…it will cut your housecleaning time and expense by more than half…It’s actually possible to thoroughly clean a 1,200-square-foot house in little more than an hour. Once you have set up your home for speed cleaning, you don’t have to do the cleaning every week: these methods are so thorough that cleaning every other week or even once a month–depending on your circumstances–will suffice…

Other tips:

• Make a computerized grocery shopping check-off list with all the items you buy arranged in the order they appear in the store. Run off a couple dozen copies of the list and keep it handy in one of the kitchen cabinets.
• Keep your plants outdoors…”visit your local botanical garden or neighborhood park when you need a plant fix. At the very least, don’t replace your creeping Charlie next time it dies. You’ll be amazed at how simple your life can become when you keep nature outdoors where God intended it to be.”
• “A well-trained dog, while not simple, can be a true joy to have in your life. Because of Piper, we make absolutely certain that we take our brisk walk every day. And taking her out a first light in the morning and the last thing at night has brought us in closer touch with nature. We now regularly see many phases of the moon and stars that we hadn’t seen before, and the quiet sights and sounds and smells of dawn and night are special gifts that we’ve come to enjoy every day of the year.” Her tips include having a short-haired pet to keep the dirt and hair down, and keeping them inside in order to keep injuries down.
• If we ever move, read chapter 17, “Moving Simplified.” She lists 11 steps to making a move go smoothly, the order in which to pack things up, what things to take in your car, etc.
• There’s a chapter called, “Sell the Damn Boat.” “If you’ve reached the point where you’re beginning to doubt the bumper sticker that said, “He who dies with the most toys, wins,” maybe it’s time to think about unloading some of them.”
• “Rethink Your Meals with Friends:” meet friends at a local restaurant for a dutch-treat evening (we already do that), or meet for breakfast or lunch, or have potluck meals in your home instead.
• “Turn Off the TV”
• “Stop the Newspaper Delivery:” “…cutting back on the negative input you’re subjected to every day is a positive step toward simplifying your life.”
• “If You Don’t Like the Holidays, Bow Out:” “…announce well ahead of time to all your family and friends that you no longer want to do Christmas (or Thanksgiving, or Easter, or birthdays, or any one or all of these), or that you want to do it differently from now on and explain why…”
• “Stop Sending Christmas Cards”
• “Gift-Giving Simplified:”

In trying to simplify the perennial problem of gift-giving, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Hobbits, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy, were right: Mathoms are the answer. A mathom was an object of any value for which a use could not be found, but which the owner was not prepared to discard completely…When we started the uncluttering process of our simplification program, I set up a section in our linen closet for items that would make good mathoms. It included things like vases, trays, decanters, little decorative bowls and boxes, toasters, a mini-Cuisinart, games we no longer used, and any extras I was getting rid of that might be appropriate. I also announced to family and friends that from this day forward I’d be giving mathoms rather than buying presents…Now, when special occasions arise at which a gift would be appropriate, I search in our closet for a suitable mathom. I’ve also let my friends know that they are free to pass on (or possibly fob off) these “treasures” to someone else whenever appropriate.

• “Get Out of Debt”
• “Live on Half of What You Earn, and Save the Other Half”
• “Rethink Your Buying Habits: …We designated one day a week for shopping, this includes groceries and anything else we think we might need…before we buy something, we think it through…”Do we really need this…?” “Will this be just one more thing to end up in the back of a closet?” “We delay all major purchases–and many of the minor ones–for at least two weeks, or even a month…Or, alternatively, we see how long we can live without whatever it is we currently think we can’t live without…”
• “Stop the Busy Work:  Busy work is the nonproductive time we spend sharpening pencils, cleaning out our desks, making unnecessary phone calls, getting another cup of coffee, organizing our schedule, drawing up reports, doing research, making more unnecessary phone calls–things we convince ourselves have to be done before we can get down to our real work.”
• “Include Your Family in Your Work Life”
• “Simplify Your Eating Habits:” Breakfast is fruit, home-made muffins or granola; lunch is fruit, vegetables, whole-grain bread sandwiches (sliced roasted turkey or avocado, tomato and sprouts); dinner is huge salads and cold soup in summer and hearty veggie soup and salad or steamed veggies and rice dishes in winter.
• “Always Split a Restaurant Meal”
• “Have a Fruit or Juice Fast One Day a Week”
• “Gibb’s Oat Bran Muffins: 2 1/4 cups of oat bran, 1 tbsp baking powder, 1/4 cup sugar or maple syrup, 2 tbsp chopped almonds, handful of raisins or blueberries, 1/4 cup shredded coconut (optional), 1 1/4 cup nonfat milk, whites of two eggs, 2 large overripe bananas..”…combine dry ingredients, blend all other ingredients and mix thoroughly with dry, fill muffin tins, bake at 450 degrees until tops are brown (about 15 minutes), makes about a dozen…
• “Make Water Your Drink of Choice:” “I switched to drinking water almost exclusively years ago when I realized that the alternatives were highly caloric. It was a personal choice; I decided I’d rather save my calories for something like chocolate mousse.”
• “Get Up an Hour Earlier:” “Studies have shown that we need less sleep as we advance in years…If you’ve never had an opportunity to enjoy that quiet hour before dawn, I urge you to start doing so tomorrow. You’ll be amazed at the richness, peace, and simplicity it can add to your life.”
• “Be in Bed by Nine One Night a Week”
• “Throw Out Everything But the Aspirin:” Once when she got a cold, all she had was aspirin and her cold went away in 3 days rather than the 10 days it usually took when she took all the different types of cold medicine. “Perhaps it’s time to approach your medicine cabinet with a heavy hand. Think seriously about getting rid of everything but the aspirin. That means throwing out the eye drops, ear salves, heartburn relievers, stomach coatings, hemorrhoidal preparations, and all the other products, including prescription drugs like sleeping pills and tranquilizers, that we Americans spend billions of dollars a year on.” “If your eyes are bloodshot, instead of using Vising, which only masks the symptoms, figure out what is causing your eyes to be bloodshot; then stop doing it. If you’ve got heartburn, lay off the pepperoni pizza, or get out of that stressful job.”
• “Create Your Own Rituals: The type of ritual I’m referring to here is any special thing you can do on a regular basis that you look forward to, and that you think about with a happy heart. I have a friend who has developed a special ritual for getting up in the morning. She wakes up a few minutes before daybreak and makes herself a special cup of tea, just the way she likes it with milk and honey. Then, winter or summer, rain or shine, she takes her tea and the huge comforter from her bed out to her screened porch. There, wrapped in her toastie blanket, she sips her tea and watches the sights and listens to the sounds of dawn. She never lets anything interfere with this quiet, sacred time.”
• “Just Be Yourself:” “Have you ever stopped to think about how much energy you spend–and how much you complicate your life–by pretending to be someone other than who you are?…A good exercise is to sit down and go through all the major areas of your life and decide how each would be different if the only person you had to impress was you. Would you have a different career? What kind of house would you live in? Would you drive a different car? How would you dress? How would you spend your spare tie? Would you be married to the person you’re married to? Would you have the same friends?”
• “Stop Trying to Change People”
• “Spend One Day a Month in Solitude”
• “Do a Retreat Once a Year”
• “Do One Thing at a Time”
• “Do Nothing:” This is the one I don’t think I can do:  “If you start with your lunch hour, go to a quiet place and just sit. This is not the reading a book, or the talking with friends, or the working on your knitting kind of doing nothing. This is not about meditation. The idea is to just be with whatever is going on in your head without having to do anything about it. Another good way to learn to do nothing is to stay in your office or your home, surrounded by all the things you should be doing, and do nothing…Gradually, you can start increasing the time you do nothing, until you build up to at least a half day or a full day once a month, or more if possible. Once you’ve learned to do nothing, you’ll be amazed at the clarity it will bring to your life, or to whatever project you’re working on. It’s unbelievably refreshing.”
• “Take Time to Watch the Sunset” (or a sunrise)
• “Just Say No: …I’ve finally reached a point where, if someone asks me to do something I don’t want to do or spend an evening with people I don’t have any interest in being with, I simply say no. Thank you, but no.”
• “If You Can’t Say No, Prevaricate:…She drew up a list of all-purpose excuses which she keeps by her home and office phones. Now, when people call with invitations to gatherings she has no interest in, she’s prepared…She has also developed the habit of keeping a couple of excuses on the tip of her tongue to ward off acquaintances she might run into on the street or in the grocery checkout line…She’s learned that a simple excuse is the best: “Thanks, Martha, but I’ve got plans for Saturday night.” And she’s also learned not to add, “Maybe next time,”…Needless to say, her social life is dwindling rapidly, but she has more free time than she’s ever had to do the things that really matter to her.”
• “Learn to Reinterpret the Past: Do you ever find yourself reliving some upsetting event or circumstance of your life, feeling you just can’t seem to get over it?…I’ve come to realize that, when you get right down to it, there are no mistakes; there are no wrong decisions…Constantly reliving past events only complicates your life. Reinterpreting them as positive steps forward, and then moving on, will keep things simple.”
• “Review Your Life Regularly to Keep It Simple:” “It is not realistic to go through the steps to simplify your life and then think it will automatically stay simple. First of all, many of us have been in the habit of consuming and expanding for some years now, and old habits die hard…We have friends who decided to simplify their eating habits. They were both dedicated gourmet chefs and owned practically every piece of cooking equipment known to man. When they went through the uncluttering routine in their kitchen, they got rid of, among other things, the wine-making apparatus, the electric tortilla press, the combination capuccino/espresso brewer/milk steamer, the pasta maker, and the institution-sized mixer with 42 attachments…Then, before they knew what had happened, they woke up one day to realize that they had replaced the wine gear with a juicer, the pasta maker and tortilla press with an electric breadmaker, and the 42-attachment mixer with a seed-sprouting contraption that took up half their deck space…”
• In the chapters under Special Issues for Women, she says two things that really stand out for me in her first chapter, “Ten Minutes to Drop-Dead Gorgeous:” First is “Years ago a hairdresser told me that every women has at least one flattering low-maintenance easy-care hair style that is natural for her hair type and facial structure. It took some experimentation, but I found an easy-care hair style that works for me. Now, rather than the twenty to thirty minutes it used to take, my hair is clean and ready-to-go in five or six minutes.” The second is “Another thing you can do is rethink your use of makeup. Have you ever seen a face that was improved by the tons of makeup cosmetic manufacturers would have us wear–all with the purpose of making us look like we’re not wearing makeup? Ask the men in your life. Most will tell you they prefer women with a natural look and a smile.” Also, there is a chapter, “Kick Off Your High Heels–and Keep Them Off.”
• Six chapters on Hard-Core Simplicity: Rent Rather Than Own, Get Rid of Your Cars, Get Rid of Your Phone, Stop Making the Bed, Get Rid of All the Extras (she went from having one special nail file that she took everywhere to having a half-dozen or more stashed in various places and then she could never find one when she needed one), and Build a Very Simple Wardrobe. Here is an excerpt from the chapter Get Rid of All the Extras:

In no time at all, having extra sets of things can get very complicated. I long ago got rid of the extra nail files, and more recently I’ve gotten rid of the extra eyeglasses, sunglasses, fountain pens, umbrellas, pocket knives, hammers, and all kinds of specialized tools, even the extra computers. It’s made my life so much simpler.

Great little book from the Little Free Library on Smith Street in the neighborhood – full of tips on simplifying your life – published in 1994!