Decluttering and Minimalism : 99 Minimalism Ways and Strategies to Declutter your Home, Life and Mind

By Eugene Barry Gordon

This Book Includes :

Decluttering : 50 Minimalism Ways and Strategies to Declutter your Home and Life

Declutter Your Mind : Proven Strategies And Steps On How To Declutter Your Mind, Home And Life

 

Do you live in a constant state of chaos, either in your home or general life?

 

Would you like to find ways to have a more streamlined existence?

 

This book will help you find peace of mind and happiness!

 

Many of us fall into the trap of having too much. Whether it is a house that is crammed with material possessions, a life that is too hectic to keep up with or a mind that has too much going on. When that happens it's time to stop and reflect on where you are going and to do something that will deal with the disorder.

 

In this book, Decluttering and Minimalism: 99 Minimalism Ways and Strategies to Declutter your Home, Life and Mind, you will find tips and strategies to help you with this, including:

 

• Daily tasks that will make life easier
• How to deal with negative thoughts
• Dealing with distractions
• Ideas for freeing your mind
• And much more…

 

The importance of decluttering your mind, home and life cannot be overstated. By following the combination of decluttering and minimalism ideas you will find inside these pages, you will reap the benefits and find that life is a lot easier.

 

Get a copy of Decluttering and Minimalism Now and see why it could be the best book you will ever buy!

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eugene Barry Gordon
• Release date: Apr 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393562900

Book preview

Introduction

I WANT TO THANK YOU and congratulate you for purchasing the book, Decluttering: 50 Minimalism Ways and Strategies to Declutter Your Home and Life. This book contains proven steps and strategies on how to reduce the clutter, minimize the belongings that you may have and provides a way to organize thoughts to result in a more fulfilling and simplistic lifestyle. Several barriers may prove inhibitory to minimalism, key among them, resistance to change. Change may be hard as we have become attached to routines and things. We allow our homes and minds to become storage spaces for every passing fancy and in the process, we get so busy trying to attain these objects that we end up not having time to enjoy that which we have already accumulated. 

The corporations can be afforded some of the blame but truth be told they are just doing what they were created to do. That would be to make sure the products are out of their shelves and in our homes. It does not matter what trick they use to distract or misdirect as long as they achieve their objective and they do not care about your general wellbeing. Once the truth of the last statement is internalized you can start to think about how to regain your life back from the very things that have kept you prisoner within your space for a very long time. It sounds like the logical thing to do by living with less considering it will mean less to clean, less debt which means less stress. Overall that would mean more energy and money to go around. That would imply that many people are actually ready to minimalize but they usually get stumped by the next step which is where to begin. Then you end up with several individuals who are of the mindset that they can and should survive with less but they are literally trapped by everything that they have. This leads to being overwhelmed and defeated by the very idea. The journey of de-cluttering needn’t be as hard as most would make it out to be. 

Minimalism is the absolute opposite of consumerism whose philosophy is to entertain yourself with anything that you would desire at any time of the day and night provided you has the means to do so. That is the reason for 24-hour stores and online door to door service delivery. Societally speaking we have a glut of products and services. Anything can be attained at the click of a button and a few hours wait even if it leads to the debt of the buyer. Consumerism would have you overspend on the holidays because of the season theme and still overspend several times during the year because of sales promotions or just plain availability of the product. In your heart of hearts, you know that you do not need the latest iPhone or that antique that was allegedly availed at the curio shop because you bought three of those each year for the past three years. The voice in your head saying you need all of it has been carefully engineered to lead you to the cashier and not make you the wiser until you reach home. In order to combat consumerism, it would need a conscious effort to abstain from it and focus on how you have lived your life and how you would like to proceed going forward. 

Minimalism can be approached from a philosophical point of view and we can discuss how the new approach is going to make our lives better and result in a change in the community. De-cluttering can thus, be approached in the same way that dieting is done. That means we can go right in and account for everything that we own as a person and rate it on a scale then assign a value like the way food is assigned calories. Then we can hack things off from that list according to ranking so as to ‘starve’ ourselves. A lot of the time though, many people feel deprived and go on a binge thereafter so they wind up right where they started. So the thing would be to change a lot of things including the coping habits in times of lack.  The development of a de-cluttering mindset will mean changing the way that you make decisions concerning the valuables that you already have and the stuff that is included in everyday life. Instead of being a short-term solution, things become a long-term commitment or solution to a new way of life. 

Now this book will cover 50 minimalism ways to de-clutter not just your home but also your life. So these tenets can be used in every other area surrounding the home environment and to change the way that you live life in an effective manner. The first part of the book will consider the home and various aspects around it. Other aspects to be considered in the 5 process challenge include expecting change, indulging less, cleaning out social media and managing holiday excess. Of course, the home is the primary area of concern when it comes to de-cluttering but it is not the only place that requires this school of thought. It can, however, be used as a starting point that can germinate to other areas of life. Now each area of the house presents a unique challenge. You can opt to go room by room and explore more dynamic ways to tackle each of them. You can start with the family room and debate the merits of each piece of furniture or go into the bedroom where you can purge the excess to come up with a peaceful setting. The kitchen and the garage would follow after the bedroom and closets. Each room would follow a thorough dress down to see what is needed and what is not. All of this can be jotted down in the ranking system that was previously claimed and used as a means for justifying the materials that you don’t really need. Then you will be able to explore how being a minimalist would make you a better citizen on earth and help with such things as conservation. You can also look at the main impact of your consumer choices and examine the human and environmental toll on the things which you buy.

Chapter 1

Changing your mindset

Changing perspectives

THE FIRST THING TO do is to reset the way you think before reducing the number of things within your environment. You have to believe that simplicity has to have some merit. You should adopt the philosophy that less is more and so the more things that you have the less value you attain or the less effective you actually are. This style of thinking makes less appear attractive regardless of the value that is assigned to the materials. It is not a good way of ranking materials you may have considering the purpose if just to reduce the overall number of things that you may have to a lesser number. This method does not assign the value to particular things so there is no way to know what you actually need and what you do not. As a rudimental way to start, it is great because it keeps purchases to a minimum and maintains things can always get accomplished with the minimum amount of resources. That is a great way to reduce the amount of clutter especially after seasons that warrant it such as Christmas and Thanksgiving. It is not going to be easy to use this mindset, it is worth it in the long run if you are successful.

Let go of things

IF YOU HAVE THINGS that are in your residence that you rarely use or have as keepsakes then it would be time to let them go. You can give them away for goodwill or better yet sell them so that you do not feel they went at a complete loss. Of course, the majority of these items are from an earlier event or period of your life that emotional significance but the reality is you do not need them to keep living. They represent nostalgia of a time that may have meant a lot to you but the reality is they are holders of memories which are not always visited except occasionally. Even if they are valuable they still end up clogging physical and emotional space. The trouble is when you start having a lot of keepsakes, there is rarely a metric to know what is worth keeping and what is not. You end up keeping every last thing to remind you of specific events and soon you end up with a section of the house looking like a museum. They eventually end up holding you back as a person as they get in the way. This is not one of the popular perspectives on the matter since keepsakes are intrinsically connected to the psyche of many but the reality is letting go of things does more good over the long term.

Purchase mindfully

A LOT OF THE TIME, people make purchases out of boredom or faint want rather than need. Retail therapy as it is known is an oxymoron. There is little to be gained by going on a shopping spree of things that felt good at their purchase but present a burden once they are brought back to the house.

That is what the retailers never tell you. Apparently, you need everything that they have and they are very good at convincing you that you do up to the point the transaction has been done. Before getting out your wallet or clicking on the checkout page, you should ask yourself if you are going to use that item years from now. You can use this as a strict measure, empirically if possible. If the answer happens to be no then you know what you have to do. This question should not even be considered for items that are out of your budget. Debt should not be in the same conversation. Again, that is not very popular with most of the credit card wielding population though you would be shocked at the number of people who are in debt due to things that did not give satisfaction past the first few days or even hours.

Create personal boundaries

IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE one of those people often referred to as yes-people or people pleasers, then you regularly allow others to cross your personal boundaries. Your friends may gift you things a lot of place things in your care regularly for safekeeping while they are traveling for work or leisure. A lot of the time, they may be unable to reclaim their items or not want to in the first place. In this case, you become left with these items that you did not want in the first place and no idea on how to get rid of them. The other scenario is buying things with your friends or family especially during the holiday seasons for its sake. You still end up with all these on the spot purchases and gifts that if you soul searched, were absolutely unnecessary especially on your wallet. You may sound like a killjoy when you refuse to go through the entire process or worse yet cheap, but it will pay out in the end when you don’t have to go through your receipts, in the end, to see what caused such a dent in your account and can actually walk around the house.

Take a second opinion

THERE ARE A NUMBER of strategies on offer to assist you to change your viewpoint and begin to notice some of the clutter that you may have missed. This approach involves taking photos of the house and asking someone else to critically consider what they may do with space or what they would have in their home. It may be a close friend or work colleague depending on how brave you are with your personal space. Not many people would be comfortable with letting others critically assess the way they have arranged their personal space because it makes them quite vulnerable and the majority of people they would entrust with such a task would not provide an objective assessment. So this is not something that everyone can do, though you would be surprised with how effective the results can be. Better yet a neighbor’s child can be invited for a play date with your child and you can ask them on their opinion. They are usually brutal and surprisingly efficient sometimes. The objective remains to see the house thereafter in a new light in terms of what can be discarded and what can be retained or rearranged. 

Utilize your imagination

IT SOUNDS CLICHÉ, BUT you can actually use it to de-clutter objects which seem hard to remove. This is all within the theme of reorienting the way that you view your personal space. Try and ask yourself questions such as, ‘If I was just buying this now,