Turtles-Paradise

There are two approaches to everything. The first approach is the ‘super-project’. That’s when you commit to something and run at it full-tilt. It’s when you go on an extreme weight-loss diet, a clutter purge, a radical shift in your career, or a total life-style overhaul.

The second approach is the ‘little and often’. That’s when you commit to slowly replacing unhealthy food with healthy alternatives, de-clutter slowly by giving away one item a day, or gradually educate and transition yourself over time into a new way of being.

Both methods have plus points and minus points. The ‘super-project’ can be high-risk. It can be overwhelming, it can cause us to burn our bridges, and it can be difficult to sustain. It can also be a fast and effective means of forcing yourself to follow through, a kind of Phoenix like rebirth of yourself.

The ‘little and often’ method is often more sustainable, less dramatic and safer. It can be an effective means of gradually transforming your life and making sure you have really thought it through and built the necessary foundations. You slowly reduce your spending in one area. You slowly tidy and de-clutter your house, drawer by drawer, cupboard by cupboard. You commit to a ten year plan, instead of a ten day plan. You can also spend a lot of time spinning your wheels, getting rid of something just to buy two other things, reduce your spending in one area just to have it creep up somewhere else.

The Art of Routines

A routine is a habitual set of actions that is performed regularly. A routine is often done on auto-pilot. We come home, we turn the TV on, and we stick dinner in the microwave while watching Family Guy. A routine can also be a small thing that leads us to the goal we want. We could come home, switch into our trainers, and go for a twenty minute run.

The key is to make sure our routines are in line with what we want to achieve. How do we make sure that happens?

Decide on what you want

The first step is to know what it is you actually want. Do you want to start a side business? Cook more meals at home? Save 50% of your income? Be able to run a marathon? You can’t work towards a goal, until you know where you’re going. Otherwise you just go around in circles.

Figure out the little steps that get you there

Start a side-business? You need a client. Where do you get a client? Figure out a small list of actionable things you can do, and then pick a time of day to them. For example, you could send out three leaflets a day to local businesses. You could do this every morning before breakfast, or last thing at night before sleeping.

If it’s the ability to run a marathon, you need to go running frequently. If you want to lose weight, you need to eat a salad a day. And so on. You’re a smart person, you don’t need me to tell you what you need to do.

Keep it Simple

This is a blog about simplicity after all. Just pick one daily routine. Don’t start a side-business, go on a diet, commit to run a marathon, and take something to the charity shop every day. You want one habit that you do daily. Not ten habits that you forget and run out of time for.

Once it becomes habitual, you can start a new one. Around thirty days is probably good. And try giving up habits too, for every new one you bring in.

Remember you have a lifetime

You don’t have forever. If you keep putting it off, you’ll wake up when you’re seventy and realise you never did anything. But also – realise you have an entire lifetime. You don’t need to do everything urgently. Learning a new language can wait until you have your health sorted. Ten years is a long long time. You can spend a year messing around with one thing, and then move on to something else.

It’s about the journey – not the destination.

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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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.

Over on miss minimalist, there is a recent post about the 100 things that most people own that she and her partner do not. It includes common items like a sofa, a TV, a dining table, and what I would consider more esoteric items like an air conditioner, a coffee maker, and a fondue set (I really don’t know anyone who owns a fondue set!)

There are also lots of posts knocking around about the 100 (or 50) things challenge, in which you try and keep your personal possessions below an arbitrary amount. I don’t think the amount actually matters too much, or how you categorise them (individual books or ‘the library’) so much as simply restricting yourself and thereby forcing yourself to really consider which items make the cut and which ones don’t.

At Unclutterer, they talk about the Red Velvet Rope technique, in which only the most valuable possessions are allowed into your home. Over at Early Retirement Extreme, he notes that depending on what your hobbies and passions are will dictate the amount of stuff you want to own.

The idea is to get your list down to just what you need to survive, be happy and be productive. There’s a number of things I don’t own that are relatively common (a car, a smartphone, a laptop, a bedframe – I just sleep on a mattress on the floor) but I also own a lot of quite frivolous items (two digital cameras, a Nintendo DS, a garlic mincer, a television, and a snow-globe).

What do you need to survive?

Food. Shelter. Clean water. That’s basically it. If you’ve ever done any long-distance hiking/camping, you’ll know that these needs can be met with a minimum of lightweight equipment.

What do you need to be happy?

I think everyone has a few key things they need to be happy. Significant relationships with other people – be they family or friends. A sense of safety and security. Well-being and good health, which is usually achieved by eating well, enjoying exercise and getting lots of sunlight.

What do you need to be productive?

By productive I don’t mean engaging in mindless busy-work, I mean producing something of benefit. I think we all co-exist by volunteering our time and efforts towards activities that benefit each other (growing a surplus of food and sharing it, teaching skills and ideas, entertaining the group, protecting the vulnerable, and looking after the sick).

Everybody needs the same basic things for survival, but once you move on to happiness and productivity, the material items required are extremely varied. A farmer, for example, will definitely need more land, equipment and storage space than that of a yoga teacher. Both are producing benefits to the group, but they do so in different ways. The items they need to be productive are completely unrelated.

Being a minimalist is not about owning less than fifty things – being a minimalist is about not owning, or consuming, more than you need to survive, be happy, and be productive.