I don’t know about your house, but I know that in my house it’s really easy for piles of paper to accumulate. Whether it’s mail that needs to be sorted, piles of my boys’ art work, receipts that need to be filed for tax purposes, or articles I want to read, they all seem to pile up.
I’m working to put a stop to that.… Continue reading
The other day I was talking with a friend who said decluttering sounded great, but she had no idea where to begin. She said that the task felt so daunting, she couldn’t seem to get started. She couldn’t even come up with a room or a drawer that didn’t feel overwhelming.
So I suggested that she remove the pressure from herself by making the task concrete, small, and almost too easy to fail.… Continue reading
We often have multiple errands to run throughout the week: a trip to the library to pick up and return books, a deposit to make at the bank, a stop at the post office to mail a package, picking up our milk from the dairy, grocery shopping, and so on.
Instead of making each of these a separate trip, I find it’s far more time efficient to group several errands together.… Continue reading
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” — Melody Beattie
At a first glance, adding another practice to your life may not seem like a way to simplify.… Continue reading
It’s no secret that I love to cook and to try new foods. Over the years I’ve read tons of cookbooks and collected a huge number of recipes.
A couple of months ago, I pared down my cookbooks (see HERE), getting rid of those that no longer felt useful or inspiring. Today, I pulled out a file folder full hundreds of loose recipes that I had collected from magazines or printed off of various websites over the years.… Continue reading
This last week we got a call from our credit card company asking us about some charges that didn’t seem consistent with our purchase history. It turns out, the charges were fraudulent.
While our credit card company was great about handling this (we won’t be responsible for any charges we didn’t make), it’s a bother to change the card number with all of the services we have bill that card on Auto-Pay.… Continue reading
I want to start by saying that I know this tip isn’t for everyone. If you place a high value on your media time, go ahead and skip this one. That said, if you’re looking for a way to free up some spare time, media consumption may be a good place to do it.
A report from the USC Marshall Business School estimates that the average American engages with media for over 14 hours a day (Short, 2013).… Continue reading
If you’re working on simplifying your life, chances are you’ll be doing some – if not a lot of – decluttering along the way (see HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE for some discussions about decluttering). Decluttering is a great way to get rid of things that you don’t find beautiful or useful, but somehow still manage to have around your house.… Continue reading
Do you find yourself spending a whole day doing laundry once a week? Or perhaps, especially if you have little ones, do you find yourself doing multiple loads of laundry each day? If so, I highly suggest finding a way to combine your laundry loads so that you can cut the amount of time and work it takes you to complete the laundry.… Continue reading
I decided to go through and clean out my two nearly full 4-drawer file cabinets. I had paper files that I’ve been carrying around with me for a long time. Some of them were old tax files, but most of them were old school files.
In those cabinets I had copies of papers I’d written, old syllabi, as well as files from research projects I worked on.… Continue reading