Hasta La Ideas

Reader Miriam submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

I’m overwhelmed by everything at work and at home. Have you ever gone swimming in the ocean and you look back at the shore and realize you went farther than you meant to go? The shore is sanity and I’m no where near it. There is clutter everywhere and my kids, my husband, and my colleagues at work don’t appear to see it. Help me, Unclutterer!

Miriam, my heart goes out to you and your situation. I’ve never swam in the ocean, but I know the feelings of anxiety you’re experiencing. I’ve been there, and I know that many of our readers have too — and some may also feel exactly like you.

The first thing to do is to take a moment for yourself and relax. Go on a walk around your neighborhood or find a quiet space and sit in silence for a few minutes. Take deep breaths and reflect on the positive aspects of your work and home. What are the things that make you happy? Underneath all the clutter and stuff, what in your life is most important to you?

After the rush of anxiety has subsided, you should make a plan. This plan will help you to feel less stress about your environment in the future. Make a list of specific areas of your life you would like to be less cluttered. Be detailed with the items on your list: “Sort through the towels and sheets in the linen closet; take to the animal shelter any that are damaged or unwanted.” “Spend 15 minutes a day filing or processing papers from inbox on desk.”

Once you’ve made a list, pull out your calendar and schedule every item. When you schedule the items, I recommend your first project be something small (nothing larger than a closet) and an area that you encounter every day. This way, your early success will help to motivate you to continue to get clutter removed from more difficult areas.

The harsh reality in all of this is that you cannot force another adult to be an unclutterer. You can guide children and give them chores, but you can’t do this for spouses and work colleagues. Take care of the clutter that directly affects you and that you can address, and stop worrying about the other stuff. You have no control of the other stuff and you’ll become a permanent anxious mess if you continue to let it get to you. On the positive side, though, your uncluttering will hopefully be inspiring to those around you and motivate them to join you in your endeavors. Feel comfortable calmly talking about your uncluttering efforts with others and sharing with them your successes. Also, seek out the assistance of a tidy friend or professional organizer if working with someone else will help you to achieve your goals.

As you’re working, focus on the reasons you’re going through the uncluttering process. When you’re finished, you’ll have more time, energy, and space to pursue the remarkable life you desire. You deserve to be free from the anxiety that is currently ruling your life. Good luck, and know that this type of change is possible. All of us are cheering for you!

Thank you, Miriam, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column.

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

Voluntarily living in less than 175 square feet is a skill. It is not a skill I possess or wish to possess, but I have respect for the people who do and am inspired by their way of life. They find a way to do without traditional conveniences of a home. They sacrifice a great deal of comfort to pursue whatever it is that matters to them more.

This week, I’ve been mesmerized by two articles on extreme minimalist living I want to bring to your attention. The first article from Salon is about a graduate student named Ken Ilgunas who attends Duke University and has chosen to live in his van instead of an apartment:

Living in a van was my grand social experiment. I wanted to see if I could — in an age of rampant consumerism and fiscal irresponsibility — afford the unaffordable: an education.

I pledged that I wouldn’t take out loans. Nor would I accept money from anybody, especially my mother, who, appalled by my experiment, offered to rent me an apartment each time I called home. My heat would be a sleeping bag; my air conditioning, an open window. I’d shower at the gym, eat the bare minimum and find a job to pay tuition. And — for fear of being caught — I wouldn’t tell anybody.

Living on the cheap wasn’t merely a way to save money and stave off debt; I wanted to live adventurously. I wanted to test my limits. I wanted to find the line between my wants and my needs. I wanted, as Thoreau put it, “to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

Ilgunas continues in his article to describe how he cooks meals over a propane stove, doesn’t clean his dishes, and has no friends at school so that his way of life won’t be discovered.

The second article from the New York Post goes inside the $150,000 175-square-foot condo owned by Zaarath and Christopher Prokop:

The couple wakes up every morning in their queen-size bed, which takes up one-third of the living space.

They then walk five feet toward the tiny kitchen, where they pull out their workout clothes, which are folded neatly in two cabinets above the sink. A third cabinet holds several containers of espresso for their only kitchen appliance, a cappuccino maker.

They turn off their hotplate, and use the space on the counter as a feeding area for their cats, Esmeralda and Beauregard.

“We don’t cook,” Zaarath said, adding that their fridge never has any food in it. “So when you don’t cook, you don’t need plates or pots or pans. So we use that space for our clothes.”

Once in their running attire, the two change the cat litter box (stored under the sink) and start their small Rumba vacuum — which operates automatically while they’re out, picking up cat hair.

They then jog to their jobs in Midtown, picking up along the way their work clothes, which are “strategically stashed at various dry cleaners.”

Be sure to check out the amazing photo gallery that accompanies the second article.

My immediate reaction to both articles was that I wanted to purge everything I own and give extreme minimalism a try. Then I remembered that cooking is a passion of mine and I would be unhappy if instead of pots and pans I had workout clothes lining my cabinets. I am incredibly impressed by all three of the people in the articles, however. I have more than a few things I can learn from them.

(Image by Angel Chevrestt at the New York Post.)

Italian author Umberto Eco was interviewed last week by the German publication Spiegel. The interview ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’ discusses Eco’s recent involvement with curating an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. The exhibition, as the title of the interview suggests, is all about lists.

I think that many unclutterers rely on lists — to-do lists, home inventories, calendars, project management timelines — to stay organized. Personally, lists keep me from worrying about forgetting things. I’d rather think about things I’m passionate about instead of having a constant stream of to-dos bouncing around in my brain.

Eco’s thoughts about lists are much more esoteric than mine. I found his interview on the subject matter to be thought-provoking and worth reading. From the interview:

Umberto Eco: The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

From later in the interview:

Eco: … We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

What do you think of Eco’s thoughts on lists? Anyone else surprised by his statements or conclusions? Share your reactions in the comments.

(Thanks go to David Allen and Marginal Revolution for bringing this article to our attention. Image of Umberto Eco from the article.)

In George Lucas’ first film THX 1138, the future of the world is an ascetic’s paradise of monochromatic environments, clean lines, barren surfaces, and shaved heads. A similar future is portrayed in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In both movies, the future is sanitized, impersonal, and sterile.

These films highlight what life is like when uncluttering embraces the extreme and stops focusing on achieving a remarkable life and instead focuses on getting rid of clutter for no other reason that getting rid of clutter.

Over on the website Pop Matters, Bill Reagan talks today about these clutter-free, personality-free, generic futures in the article “Table Space: The Final Frontier“:

Realizing that no one else is making an effort to bring the junkless future to life, I reexamined Kubrick’s film, looking for clues for how our species was to conquer the ever-growing piles, drawers, and shelves of stuff. As I studied, I realized that the barren desktops and uncluttered counters resembled the austere interior landscapes featured in Dwell magazine, whose photo spreads show family living rooms with improbably bare coffee tables, the shelves in the children’s bedroom displaying one or two pristine toys like museum pieces.

What that magazine removes isn’t clutter – it’s life: the hoodie tossed lazily over the back of the chair, empty juice glasses accumulating on the kitchen counter, retired coffee cups stuffed with ball point pens, dog-eared catalogs accumulating in the corner. In the effort to portray simple, they err on the side of antiseptic.

The science fiction of my youth removed the same evidence of daily living, but went one step further: also gone are the photographs on mantles, preschooler paintings posted on refrigerator doors, handmade trinkets and cheap tchotchke mementos. It seems that as seen from 40 years ago, the world was to become increasingly efficient but decreasingly sentimental. Is that what we’ll be required to do to control our interior sprawl? Do we simply need to value the empty space more highly than the items currently occupying it?

If so, perhaps it’s better that the great minds of our generation remain focused on the jetpack.

Check out the article and then come back here and weigh in with your opinion in the comments. I certainly don’t agree with all of Reagan’s conclusions — dirty cups on a counter are an invitation for pests, not a reflection of someone’s personality. However, if you clear clutter to make way for what matter’s most to you, then photographs of loved ones are exactly what an unclutterer would likely want on his or her mantle. I’m interested in knowing if you wish the extreme-minimalist future would have become a reality, or if you think these depictions went too far.

We all make exceptions to the uncluttered standards we have in place. In my closet are one or two pieces of clothing that don’t fit me right, but for some reason I haven’t been able to give them away to charity. There is a chipped mug in my kitchen cupboards that we got as a wedding gift and the sentimentality of the object pulls at my heartstrings. Also, there is an enormous Jumperoo in my office that makes me wince every time I walk past it, but all the jump, jump, jumping makes my son so blissfully happy that it stays.

Making exceptions to uncluttered standards, though, can become a slippery slope. If we don’t keep a watchful eye on our stuff, eventually our entire homes and offices are filled with clutter again. This is especially true in places where clutter can easily hide — closets, cupboards, and toy bins.

As a result, I have created a new uncluttered standard for my exceptions. It states:

If getting rid of the object causes more distraction than having the object, I keep it.

If I got rid of the chipped mug in my cupboard, I probably wouldn’t think twice about it once it was gone. So, the mug should go.

However, if I got rid of the Jumperoo, I’d feel extreme guilt. I’d know that I had gotten rid of one of my son’s favorite things and it would continue to distract me for weeks to come. Since there isn’t any other reason he shouldn’t have it except for the fact that I hate how much room it takes up in my office, I’m keeping it. (The minute he gets too big for it, though, that thing is gone.)

Do you make exceptions to your uncluttered standards? If so, how do you keep these exceptions from cluttering up your space?