Turtles-Paradise

Most of us have too much stuff. Whether it is a pile of junk mail on the kitchen table, or a closet stuffed full of old board games and broken toys, clutter is insidious. The worst part is – once you get used to it, you don’t even see it anymore.

Tip 1: Throw out 50 things

Grab a box and do a fast sweep of the house. Grab empty cans, junk mail, unused toiletries, bits of paper with scribbled notes on the back, out-of-date food, anything that’s broken or unused. Don’t give yourself time to think: just clear that clutter now!

Tip 2: Get everything out

To streamline your kitchen, your office, or your bedroom, pick a day when you don’t have much else planned and pull everything out of the cupboards, closet, wardrobe and drawers. I did this with my bedroom recently, and it was a little scary to see how many random t-shirts I had acquired, most of them advertising things.

Put the most essential items back – so put a good knife back into your kitchen, and put your clean underwear back into your bedroom. Put everything else in a box. If you need it, get it out and put it back into the kitchen (or kitchen). After six months, give the box to a charity shop – without opening it.

After all – how many of us use paperclips anymore? How many times have we actually used that juicer? How many socks do we actually wear in a week?

Tip 3: Do 15 minutes a day

The Flylady website recommends spending 15 minutes a day decluttering. You can also get rid of one item a day, or do one drawer a day, or whatever small decluttering action you feel happy with. The key to this decluttering technique is little and often.

Tip 4: Get rid of Storage

It’s a harsh measure, but it works. Get rid of your sideboard, your free-standing wardrobe, your second fridge. Move to a smaller house. By forcing clutter out from the dusty drawers and dark spaces you force yourself to confront it. You might be amazed at what you find. Old pez dispensers, expired medication, bits of lego?

Tip 5: Scan It

We live in the digital era, and whilst digital clutter can be a problem in itself, it had to be said I’d rather my paperwork was virtual. Don’t print off every email and file it – send your files to your email.

PDF scanners like the ubiquitous ScanSnapcan turn all your tax returns, receipts, utility bills and other documents into PDF files.

I have one of these at work, and it’s pretty awesome. But if you don’t have a lot of paperwork, then don’t get it.

Even better is to opt out of paper-statements, bills and so on. Most companies let you get your bills and statements via email now – and they will often give you a bit of a discount for saving them the cost of postage.

Save a tree. Ditch your filing cabinet. What could be better?

Tip 6: Swap It or Rent it

One way to avoid getting clutter in the first place, is to rent or swap for what you need. Bookhopper is like PaperbackSwap for those in the UK. It lets you exchange your books with other readers, thus ensuring that you have both a plentiful supply of reading material, and you don’t have a big pile of books cluttering up your house.

Renting is often easier than buying. Renting a car, for example, can be cheaper than owning one – especially if you only use your car occasionally. Renting a TV over the World Cup period would work out cheaper than buying one, if that’s the only thing you’ve watched in the last four years.

Tip 7: Organise your Food

Many of us buy ingredients for dishes we end up only cooking once. The expensive pantry ingredients often sit around afterwards, taking up space and otherwise turning themselves into clutter. If you hated it, or it’s faded into something unusable – get rid of it. I once bought a spice jar of saffron for a specific dish, and it was so eye-wateringly expensive I never used it again. The result was that the taste faded and it ended up going in the bin. A total waste!

For any ingredients you have left, find some meals you can use them in, and then use them! Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

Buy your food once a day and buy only what you need. Keep your fridge clean and mostly empty, and you’ll never end up looking into it and seeing a pile of junky salad dressings but nothing to eat.

For your dry staples, get only what you know you will eat. Porridge oats are awesome to have – unless you never eat porridge. We all have four or five meals we always end up cooking – and it’s usually beans on toast, not duck l’orange.

Tip 8: Replace Multiple Devices with a Multi-Purpose Device

If you own lots of equipment, and you use that equipment, it may be worth upgrading to a multi-purpose device. Instead of having an mp3 player, a digital camera, and a mobile phone, you combine the three and get a smart phone.

Instead of a scanner, a printer and a photocopier, you get a combination all-in-one device.

Be careful with this one – it’s easy to get sucked into ‘upgrade’ mode. I have a mobile phone and a digital camera, but I don’t want the monthly fees associated with a smart-phone, and I don’t use my phone often enough to make it worth replacing.

Tip 9: Share with Someone

If you read a lot, share your books with someone else who likes to read a lot. Not only do you combine your libraries, you also get someone to talk about your latest read with.

Share camping equipment with another outdoorsy couple, share fitness equipment with another fitness fanatic. Get a communal lawnmower for the neighbourhood.

Tip 10: Don’t Replace Things

When your jeans finally get just too many holes in to wear, or your washing machine leaks all over your floor, get rid of it. But don’t replace it. Learn to live without your jeans, and start using a laundromat or washing your clothes in the bathtub.

When you shampoo runs out, see if you can make-do with baking soda.

When your tent poles snap, go camping with a poncho instead.

When you spill beer all over your laptop, unplug. Internet cafes and libraries can fill the void, and you may find your life substantially better for not being able to check your emails every five minutes.

For every ‘time-saving’ device there is usually a cost. The cost of storing, cleaning, maintaining, replacing. If we went back to (some) of the labour intensive methods, we might find we don’t need to work 80 hours a week just to afford all of our time-saving toys.

What’s the hardest thing to get rid of for you? What have you decluttered today?

Living a balanced life is something that I feel is they key to happiness. The growth of minimalism, the surge of interest in working for yourself as an online entrepreneur, the desire to live simply and connect with the people around – it all seems to be a reaction to a materialistic, and unbalanced life that has come to be seen as normal.

We are encouraged to believe that working relentlessly until we are 65 is what life is about. School has become increasingly like the world of work – where endless exams, projects, paperwork and uniforms take the place of play and exploration. Work has taken over more and more of our lives, with salaried workers regularly putting in more hours than contracted for, and those with part-time, minimum wage jobs frequently having to take on two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened so that in 2006 the top 2% of the world population owned more than half of the worlds wealth. In order to afford the ‘standard of life’ that advertisers tell us is both normal and desirable, we are forced to take on debt, work overtime, and pay most of our income towards the upkeep of an unsustainable lifestyle. A few talented people make millions, a few lucky people inherit millions, and the rest are left to lurch from financial crisis to financial crisis.

The other day, I had to repot some of my plants. I went to the garden centre, and I paid for a few sacks of dirt. Yes, dirt – the very stuff this planet is covered with. Others pay for bottled water. It won’t be long before someone figures out how to sell us oxygen.

My very simple solution is:

• Spend less.
• Work less.
• Have more fun.

Spend Less

Downsize your house. Better still, get rid of your house. Live out of a van, or a tent, or a spare room. Learn to see the true cost of things – a £200 washing machine is nearly 30 hours of work at £7 an hour. A £400 iPad is nearly 60. A £200,000 house is 3.2 years of non-stop, 24 hour work.

The places to cut your costs are the places where you spend the most. Your rent. Your food. Your entertainment splurges. Eat more lentils. Is that chicken tikka take-away really worth spending an extra hour at work?

Work Less

Once you’ve cut your costs to the bone, you can afford to work less. Take a single part-time job. Start a minimalist business. Work from home. The less you spend, the less you need to worry about earning.

Have more fun

When you’re not working, what are you going to do instead? You’ll finally have the time to travel. To learn new skills. To cook properly. To have long, silly conversations on the telephone. To take long walks. All the things that you don’t have time for now.

I should make it clear that I’m not there yet. Unlike the many people out there that have succeeded in quitting their full-time jobs and spend their time doing what they love I still work 37 hours a week or so, and I still have a large rent payment and a lot of stuff.

But I’m determined. I’ve spent the last year reading amazing blogs. I now know that it is possible. In a year, we’ll be heading to a place we don’t have to pay rent. In that year, I’m going to work on getting rid of as much of our belongings as possible, so that we don’t have to pay to move it or store it, and so we can start with the wonderful possibility that empty space creates.

I’m working towards a balanced life. What are you working towards?

One of the things that often bothers me about ‘Eco-Living’ is the saturation of the market with products labelled as green, eco-friendly etc. and that as a result come at a premium price. It seems like a triumph of marketing more than anything else.

It also has the problem of penalising people on low incomes, who frequently cannot afford organic-cotton fairly-traded independent designer premium cardigans. Whilst I do believe that we need to put our money where our principles are, it should be recognised that a great many people struggle to make ends meet and often cannot even afford enough to eat. This is true both in the developed world, and in the developing world. The different access to resources between a large corporation and a small independent business needs to be recognised. The difference between someone on a professional income raised with a good understanding of ‘how money works’ and someone on a part-time minimum wage job who generally runs out of money before they run out of month also needs to be recognised.

‘Eco-friendly’ products frequently act as a way of assuaging guilt. They are a way of us continuing a pattern of consumption and convenience but paying a little more in order to feel like we’re still doing the right thing. Buying new clothes every season is not sustainable, regardless of how organic the cotton is.
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My kettle has broken. My guess is that the heating element has burned out, and it being the dirt-cheap value-brand kettle purchased for less than a fiver, it’s not worth trying to get it fixed.

In considering replacement options, I considered getting another dirt-cheap one (easy on my pocket), or doing some research and getting a good kettle that would last. On the one hand, I wanted to be able to get rid of it easily in the event of our eventual move – I didn’t want to sink a bunch of money into something that would only be used for a year or so. On the other hand, cheap disposable appliances use energy and materials in their creation and transport, and they frequently (not always) break down faster.

Then I realised there was a third option I hadn’t considered.

Not replacing it at all.

Here was a golden opportunity for clearing some counter-space, reducing the number of items in my kitchen, and solving both my ‘not spending a lot of money’ and ‘not buying cheap appliances’ problems in one swoop.

I don’t need a kettle. I have two other methods for boiling water – slowly, on the stove-top. And quickly, in the microwave. Do I really need a single-purpose item that does the same job?

The main thing I used the kettle for was making a cup of tea in the mornings. This morning I made it in the microwave. Easy!

The next time something of yours breaks down, ask yourself: do I really need to replace it? What else do I own that can do this job for me?

There are several ‘zones’ outlined in permaculture, which go from the house right out to the wilderness. The purpose of each zone is different, and our level of impact on it is also different. I want to talk a bit about each zone and how we can simplify the way we work and live within it, and discuss simple ways of bringing each zone in alignment with permaculture principles.

Zone 0

Zone 0 is the home, where we live. It is the area where we have the most impact, as we design the entire structure around our needs. It is also the area where we can end up with the most clutter!

The home usually needs to fulfil a couple of functions:

• A place to relax, sleep, rejuvenate.
• A place to cook and eat.
• A place to store items of importance.

We have different housing needs at different times in our lives. At some points all we need is a place to sleep and maybe a toaster oven. Everything we own could be can be carried on our backs. In these cases, ‘home’ may just be your rucksack!

Later, we might have a spouse, children, a garden, pets and so on. We start to require a surplus of food, and so on. Our housing needs change.

Generally speaking, we can always live in a smaller house that we think we ‘need’.

Simplifying our homes is a difficult and emotional task. We have a tendency to acquire objects of sentimental value. We also sink time and money into hobbies and items that might no longer fulfill us in the present, but represent so much ‘investment’ that we feel like we can’t throw them away. We may hang on to unwanted gifts out of a sense of obligation, or keep equipment on hand ‘just in case’.

There are several methods we can use.

• Start with a room at a time, and clear all non-essential items into a box and store it. If, after six months, we haven’t needed to find and use those items, they can probably be tossed. You may want to apply a caveat for emergency and annual items, such as first-aid kits and thick winter coats.
• Give yourself a minimum number of items to purge, and go through the house with a bag tossing in anything you don’t want until you hit your number. Do this frequently, every couple of days or once a week.
• Get rid of one or two items every day.

Remember that items should be re-purposed, re-used or recycled in preference to chucking them in landfill.

In addition to taking stuff out of our homes, we need to stop bringing new stuff in. For every purchase ask yourself:

• Do I need it?
• Can I afford it?
• Is there something I already own that can do this job for me?
• Am I prepared to spend the time and money in maintaining and looking after this item?
• Have I considered the true cost of manufacturing and transporting this item?

You can apply delay methods to see if you really need something, or if you just want it. Put it on a list for 30 days, and if you still want it, you can have it.

Hobbies can provide an amazing way of stocking up on expensive equipment that then gets abandoned later. It may be you were really into oil painting at one point, and you still own an easel, a large number of expensive paints, and so on. “But I’ll go back to it one day” is a hard pill to swallow. Even harder is knowing how much all that stuff cost in the first place!

We can mitigate the effects of this in two ways:

1. Rent or hire to start with. I think this is a good rule to apple to anything where the equipment needed is costly; photography, extreme sports, mountain climbing. Later, we can decide whether to keep renting or go ahead and buy the equipment because we have found one of our true passions.
2. Join (or create) a group in which everyone contributes a monthly fee towards the cost of materials and equipment. This is especially good for things like gourmet cooking, painting, gardening, music and so on. The members may change, but the group will endure and continue to use the equipment. Just be sure you have enough members to cover the costs of everything and the cost of hiring a neutral storage space/work place. Some of the best examples of this are things like communal allotments.

When it comes to getting rid of old equipment for hobbies you no longer enjoy, consider donating the equipment to a school or to a group that works with disadvantaged people.

Zone 0 is a unique space that we all relate to in different ways. Spend some time thinking about what you want your space to contain. I don’t mean design and build your ideal 3-story mansion, I mean think about what kind of feeling you want from your home. Do you want it to be a quiet sanctuary from the world? Do you want it to be a place full of life and joy and good friends? Do you want it to be a place where you can work-out and eat well? What do you need to sleep well?

Then go about getting rid of anything that doesn’t add to that vision.