You want to simplify your life, but you think it’s too hard? Well guess what, it’s not! Simplifying your life is easier than you think. It’s all about reducing the amount of things that come in that you need to spend energy on and increasing the amount of time you have to give back, be productive and be free.
When I talk about reducing the amount of things that come in that you need to spend energy on, think about the amount of junk mail that shows up in your inbox and the amount of crap that ends up in your physical mail box. I bet it’s a lot. How often do you subscribe to someone’s newsletter just to get the discount on [fill in the blank]? I did this just last night! I wanted that 15% off so I subscribed. But after that purchase, how often do you actually read that company’s newsletter? Probably not as much as it’s worth. The same goes for the snail mail. We get tons of things in our mailboxes – catalogs, sale ads, etc. – that are meant to entice us to go make a purchase. Most times, though, we don’t. Those mailers just get thrown in the trash.
When you make the time to decrease the unwanted stuff, you have more time to increase your focus, productivity and give back more to your community. You have the freedom you want! You have a clean environment that doesn’t have clutter (or much of it) and you have less distractions around you. Simplifying your life is all about living in the here, now and being present for what’s going to happen. It’s not about having to clean up every second of every single day. The problem is, many don’t know where to start simplifying. Do they choose a space in their house or do they start with external sources? I’m going to give you three tips to help you start to simplify and take charge of your life.
TIP # 1 – RECLAIM YOUR MAILBOX
How do you do that? Simple. Unsubscribe from unwanted emails and unwanted mailers. As I mentioned before, we tend to subscribe to an email newsletter just to get a discount or a freebie but once we’ve received that, the newsletter might not serve us anymore. Yet we keep it coming into our Inbox and just delete it. Yes, that’s easy to do, but it takes energy and time to do that every single day. Unsubscribing and getting yourself off the distribution list is one of the best things you can do for things that no longer serve you. If you want to stop unsolicited mail, check out this article I found that has all the links you need.
TIP # 2 – PURGE & DECLUTTER
This is one of my favorite things to do! Purging takes unwanted items from your home (or office) and decluttering helps you simplify your environment. You can take time each and every day to throw away trash or recyclables and put things back where they belong (yes, everything has a home) but why do that when you can do it just once a week?! Pick one day each week to walk around your home and toss items that don’t belong anymore and put things back where they belong.
Grab a trash bag or two and a laundry basket. You’ll do two sweeps of your home and on the first pass, you’ll pick up all the trash and recyclables and all the items that have been misplaced. Use the trash bags for the trash and recyclables and the laundry basket for the items that need to another place in the house. On the first pass, just do the pick up. Don’t try to do anything else because you’ll lose focus, get distracted and find you are actually wasting time. On the second pass, you’ll put the trash and recyclables near the door you leave the house and put away the items that you have in the laundry basket. During this whole process, you may even find things that you don’t want anymore that you want to donate. This is the magic of the purge and declutter process.
TIP # 3 – HAVE A DO NOTHING DAY
Even if you think I’ve lost my marbles, stay with me here. Having a Do Nothing Day once a week allows you to have a little freedom where you choose to not have plans and just let the day take you wherever it needs to go. Having this scheduled forces you to make the other days be work days where you hit the ground running from the moment your feet hit the floor. This action of scheduling a day where you intend to do nothing, but will do something if the feeling arises, gives you the ability to focus on the other days and give yourself some grace one day a week.
Simplifying isn’t hard. You just need to choose what’s important in your life and what your priorities are and then remove the other stuff that doesn’t really matter all that much.