Hasta La Ideas

One of the downsides of owning a lot of things is you have to care for a lot of things. Caring for copious possessions is simple if you have a team of people to do it for you — cleaning, maintenance, security — but not so simple when you’re the one with all the responsibilities.

I’m not an ascetic. I have stuff. My son has toys, and our family has a car. I’m not an advocate for a possession-free lifestyle. Rather, I adhere to smart consumer practices (spending less than you earn, researching products before your buy them, buying the best quality you can afford, only buying products you need or help you pursue the remarkable life you desire, and trying your best to refrain from acquiring clutter).

Another thing smart consumers acknowledge is that stuff is more than physical objects. Stuff is storage space in your home. Stuff is protecting your things from theft, pests, mold, mildew, and the elements. Stuff is taking time for dusting, cleaning, and returning things after you use them. Stuff is shipping costs, taxes, upgrades, accessories, and energy to power. Stuff is the tradeoff of time, energy, money, and space that you could have used for something else — something you might want more in your life.

Before making a purchase or acquiring a new object, pause and ask yourself if you are willing to accept all the responsibilities that accompany the object. When sorting through the things in your home, ask yourself the same questions. Recognize how the things in your life will impact your future. Don’t get caught off guard by the responsibilities of ownership.

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Scott Adams, the artist behind the Dilbert cartoon, wrote on his blog back in August about his desire to live in a more simple world — a world without so many options that he can stop wasting time and energy trying to make a decision. He rants about too many choices when booking travel reservations, too many features on his digital watch, and movie theaters with special seats and meals. From his post “The Less Feature,” discussing his travel preparations:

Over the next several hours [trying to find an airline ticket on Orbitz] I tried sorting by flight time, shortest route, and price. Then I tried JetBlue’s site because it’s not included in Orbitz. Then I tried United Airlines’ site because I didn’t know if they would have extra options, and I needed to check my miles. The flight I picked had all sorts of seating options and levels of travel that I needed to research. Then I needed to arrange the rental car, the hotel, and the airport pickup. Then I took all of the information and reformatted it in a way I could read. At some point in the process I crossed a line: The time to plan and book the trip took longer than it will take to fly across the entire country.

Adams continues on to talk about Apple, and how he believes they’re one company that is more in-line with his “Less Feature” desire:

Apple often gets the less features thing right. The iPad didn’t add a fast boot-up speed, it subtracted a hard disk. It didn’t add a touch screen, it subtracted a keyboard. You want to print? Forget it. The iPad is awesome precisely because it has fewer options. If I want more complexity I can purchase apps.

With an endless supply of applications you can download from their app store and the numerous models of computers, I’m not so certain Apple has the “Less Feature” perfected. However, I agree that they’re better at uncluttering their product lines than many other companies.

Where do you stand? Do you believe that too many options clutters up your daily experience? Would you prefer fewer options, or do more options mean you are able to find exactly what you need for your clutter-free life?

Thanks to MinimalMac for leading us to this interesting Scott Adams blog post.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Interesting articles and services relating to uncluttering, organizing, and simple living:

• Patrick at Minimal Mac asks “A Most Important Question.” If you don’t know where something belongs, it may “… not have a place in your home, in your relationships, in your job, or or in your life,” and, “perhaps it should not be there.”
• Alton Brown, the celebrity chef who is the inspiration behind our Unitasker Wednesday posts, wrote a diary about his (bizarre?) minimalist eating practices when he travels in last week’s New York magazine: “Alton Brown Makes His Own Avocado Ice Cream, Does Shots With John Hodgman.”
• Learning Express Library is an online resource for practice tests on hundreds of topics. The free and digital tests range from the U.S. Citizenship exam to college entrance tests. Save your money and some trees with these helpful resources.
• Lose the equipment and your gym membership, and get an uncluttered workout using only your body weight. From Nerd Fitness, “Beginner Body Weight Workout.”
• The Art of Manliness has a tribute to all things minimalist in “Go Small Or Go Home: In Praise of Minimalism.”
• Clean up your iTunes digital music collection with Tagalicious — a simple and easy to use application that gets rid of all of those “Track 01″ files you have in your directory.
• Are you on Twitter? Does it bother you when someone attends a conference and floods your stream with messages that don’t interest you in the least? Use DeClutter to remove specific keywords from your timeline. (via Swiss-Miss)

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

No one is perfect, and eventually your organizing system will fall apart. How you respond when this happens, however, will determine how much anxiety, stress, and clutter paralysis you will feel.

Keep Things in Perspective:

• Failure only happens if you never recover. If your system falls to pieces but you eventually get things back in order, you simply learned a lesson. You only fail when you give up entirely and abandon all uncluttering and organizing efforts for the rest of your life. You’re not failing; you’re learning.
• Being organized takes practice. You wouldn’t play a musical instrument or a sport like a professional if you hadn’t put in hundreds of thousands of hours practicing, so don’t expect professional organizing results without years of practice.
• Who cares?! Unless your health or welfare are at risk, being disorganized is not the worst thing in the world. Watch 30 minutes of the national news to help put things in perspective.
• Embrace the mess. Since you will eventually get off your bum and get back to an organized existence, take a day (or seven) and enjoy the chaos. At least temporarily, let go of the stress.

Find Motivation:

• Determine why you want to be organized. As I’ve written in the past, if you don’t know why you want to be organized and clutter free, you’re going to struggle with every attempt you make to be an unclutterer.
• Ask for help. Call a friend and ask him/her to help you get your project started again. If you don’t want your friends to see your place a mess, call in a professional organizer.
• Plan a party. Nothing gets me moving faster than knowing there will be people coming into my house. Plus, the reward is that when your space is orderly, you get to celebrate with a party!
• Acknowledge that you’re procrastinating. I don’t know why this works, but simply admitting to yourself that you’re avoiding a task can help get you motivated to change. Check out “Eight strategies to stop procrastinating” for tips on what to do next.
• Plan your project. As you would a project at work, plan your entire uncluttering and organizing project to help you get back on track. Pull out your calendar, determine the scope of your project, create action items, and block off time each day to reach your goal. Being specific (and realistic) about what you will want to accomplish helps to alleviate the overwhelming Cloud of Doom and realize you can get things back to normal.

Get Started:

• No excuses. Follow your project plan and just do it. There isn’t an easy way. You will have to do the work. However, the end result is definitely worth it.

Maintain:

• Create household routines. In my home, we have “Doland Duties.” If you don’t have a chart of daily routines and responsibilities, now is the time to establish one or evaluate your old one.
• Use a meal plan. The easiest way to eat healthy and keep from stressing out about what is for dinner is to create a weekly meal plan.
• Declutter. The less you own, the less you have to clean, organize, store, and maintain.
• Enjoy the calm. Take some time to reflect on how different you feel when things are uncluttered and organized instead of chaotic and disorganized. Remembering this feeling, and enjoying the remarkable life you desire, are great motivators to keeping you on course in the future.

After watching the YouTube video of Gary Chang’s 344-square-foot apartment, writing about Japan’s hotel “capsule” housing and reading WSJ.com’s blog post “The Optimal Amount of Living Space,” I’ve been wondering: “How much dwelling space do humans require to be happy and safe?”

Since safety and happiness are major concerns in U.S. prisons (“happiness” in the sense of keeping rioting, violence, and suicide rates at a minimum), I expected minimum square footage per inmate mandates to exist. Turns out, the federal government does not define how many square feet a prisoner is required to have for conditions to be considered something better than “cruel or unusual.” As a result, inmates are given anywhere between 35 square feet (common when two prisoners share a 70 square foot cell) to 100 square feet (quite uncommon, but more likely to be found in solitary-confinement situations where prisoners never leave their cells). And, research about the penal system shows that rates of riots, violence, and suicide don’t appear to be directly correlated to cell size (much like job satisfaction isn’t based on office size).

The amount of space humans need to be happy and safe, therefore, is quite minimal (based on how it’s configured, it could be difficult for most people to even lie down in 35 square feet). So the question isn’t really one of need, but one of want.

Many factors go into answering the question: “How much space do I want to be happy and safe?” Location of property, floor plan, cultural norms, rent/mortgage, amenities, storage, air quality, and aesthetics are all considerations that weigh into an individual’s want response.

Have you ever stopped to consider how much space you want? What factors are guiding your answer? Are you letting your stuff dictate your response? I’m eager to read your thoughts on this issue in the comments.