Top 3 habits to simplify your life
What would it be like for you to have more time to achieve all the things in life that you wanted, to have more family time or to spend extra time doing those activities that you feel are more in line with your life purpose?
By streamlining activities that must be done regularly you can automate a portion of your life and allow more time for activities which bring you greater joy and purpose. If you do not contain the time allowed to perform ‘life maintenance tasks’ then it is all too easy to have those tasks take up a large portion of your day.
Parkinson’s Law:
work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
So it does and if you do not set boundaries to accomplish these maintenance tasks then it is all too easy to look back on the day or week and think that nothing other than these have been accomplished.
Here are just a few simple actions that can be put into practice straight away to help you minimise the time spent on menial (although sometimes necessary) tasks
Top 3 ways to simplify your life
1. Don’t possess anything that doesn’t enhance your life now or help accomplish your goals.
a. What is important to you in your life? (your core values)
b. What do you want to achieve in the next 5 years?
c. What gives you joy?
Anything that does not help you achieve the above is unnecessary in your life and especially in your household
- get rid of it. Why?
i. You are spending time cleaning/storing something that offers you no benefit
ii. It is taking up space in your life where that space could be filled with something more beneficial. All spaces in your life don’t have to be filled with material objects.
iii. Just because you spent money on it in the past and it was of benefit then does not mean it is of benefit now. If you no longer use an item it turns from being useful to being a dead weight slowing you down from the life you want.
2. Tidy as you go – always.
Even if you only did this one thing it will make life so much easier and less stressful. By spending that extra few minutes or even seconds sometimes putting away an item makes life run a lot smoother. Why?
a. the item is always where it should be
b. your environment looks neater
c. you don’t spend extra time looking for it next time around because someone else has moved it again!
d. you don’t have to put it away later when cleaning (which makes the time spent on cleaning even longer)
3. Sort mail the first time you handle it
a. action items that need it (replying to a call or answering a letter)
b. put any old envelopes and useless paper items from the mail into the recycle bin (shredding anything with your details on it first).
When you look at the mail make sure you have the time spare to attend to it, often it only takes a minute or so.
August 18th, 2009 at 4:04 am
These are such a great habits!
The third one could be implemented to other things than mail as well. For example, your computers desktop. It’s so usual that it gets filled with files that you just put there cause you “didn’t have the time to figure out where they belong”. It could be summed up as: “Complete everything right the first time”.
Thanks for sharing!
August 19th, 2009 at 4:30 am
Thanks for your comments Lauri.
That is a great habit to form about the desktop. It sort of has become the ‘junk room’ of modern life, just putting files there as a quick solution to store them and before we know it is full and cluttered looking. I shall sort mine out post haste! Thanks for the tip
August 26th, 2009 at 10:50 am
I like that point about not possessing anything that does not “enhance your life now or help accomplish your goals”.
Really makes you look at your possessions differently.
One issue for parents is the amount of art and memorabilia generated by children, particularly these days. I read somewhere that you should have a single memory box for each child and that once art from a child overflows her box decisions have to be made (discreetly of course!)
August 26th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
In these days when it is relatively easy to collect a vast array of possessions, it is important to sort them out on a regular basis to actually decide which ones are of use. Presents, others cast offs, car boot ‘bargains’, magazines, things that will one day be mended or come in handy – they all add up over a period of time to clutter up a home and create a feeling of being overwhelmed by stuff. The more you have the more you have to put away. So if a portion of your day is spent putting away or looking at things which will not bring you closer to the life you want to lead then that is time that could be spent on things which are alot more important to you.
It is a different situation when it comes to memorabilia that seems to accumulate around children. I have heard that suggestion before about the memory box for their drawings, it is a good one; it also works for all the keepsakes children (and adults) like to collect. By teaching children to be selective about what they keep and what means something to them you are also teaching them to value quality over quantity and not to keep something just for the sake of keeping it. Of course this is a terrific rule for the adults as well
Don’t think of it as limiting memories or possessions but honouring what is best in your life. If everything is important then nothing is important.
November 16th, 2009 at 1:39 am
[...] Top 3 habits to simplify your life [...]