There are many reasons why less stuff is better.

But there are also lots of reasons why we have our stuff. And those reasons don’t make us bad people.

I’ve always wanted to have less stuff, but I’ve always struggled to achieve this ideal. After having the “you should have less stuff” argument with myself once again, I finally just said, “Fuck it. I have these books. I have these things. I have these attachments. I am going to accept that I still want these things around me.”

And then, gradually…something shifted.

It’s like something inside me could now trust that I wasn’t going to take a shovel to my stuff (something my father used to threaten when my room was especially messy).

Without the edge of fear, the natural inspiration to have a clear, clean house emerged. I felt a relaxed ease about letting go of the items I was truly ready to release. And there was no more internal battle if I felt like I wanted to keep something: I was allowed to.

What changed? I accepted that I have attachments to stuff.

Before: Look at a shelf of books. Feel guilty that I haven’t read them all. Feel bad that I don’t want to give them away. Fight with myself: “You haven’t read it! But I want to keep it! You’re just attached to this item that you will never use, what’s wrong with you! What if I need it in the future?!”.  Stress and fret until I get so frustrated that I go do something else. All the books still on the shelf.

Or: get rid of books in a fit of determination. Buy some of them back a few years later, and feel EXTRA-guilty when I still haven’t read them.

Now: Look at a shelf of books. Pick out the ones I’m actually ready to let go of. Put them in a box to leave the house (Goodwill, Powells, etc). While I’m taking the box to the car, see a few I still want to keep and take them back out. And then the box goes. And I remind myself: It’s OK to still be attached to the books I kept. It’s OK to do this a little at a time. It’s OK to let go of what I’m really ready to let go of, and not try to force myself past any resistance.

Forget the rules.

The rules say, “Don’t take anything back out of the get-rid-of box after it’s in it.”

“Don’t keep anything you don’t love or aren’t using”.

“Toss any book you haven’t read in the last year.”

DUDE. I can’t follow those rules. I just shut down.

Our stuff is DEAR to us. We are ATTACHED to it. Being strict with yourself is not necessary.

Start with acceptance.

Look around at your stuff and appreciate how much vitality and creativity you have, and how your stuff is part of that.

I have a lot of books, and art supplies, and stuff leftover from projects. These are evidence of my path through life, and all the things I’ve been interested in and experimented with. They aren’t bad. They are good. I don’t need to be ruthless and rid myself of them. I need to be appreciative, and just prune what I no longer need.

Before, I would read about decluttering, set some resolution-like goals (i.e. unrealistic and motivated by comparison rather than inspiration), go crazy with it for awhile, and then abandon the project altogether as guilt and frustration took over.

Now I am slowly going through my stuff, organizing and letting go of things, and I’m not stressed or unrealistic about it. It feels good.

And I can now finally read blogs like mnmlist and feel inspired instead of feeling bad about my not-entirely-streamlined existence.

Decluttering is a practice of relaxing attachments; forcing is counter-productive.

Letting go of stuff = letting go of attachments. This is something best done slowly, gently, and with a lot of permission to hang on until you are truly ready to let go.

When we force ourselves, it creates resistance and an atmosphere of fear. This just makes it harder to let go.

Over time, as you let go of the easy stuff, you’ll create a positive feedback loop around letting go. You will naturally relax more and feel OK about letting go of more things. And you’ll develop a habit of understanding your internal sense of when it’s right to let something go. This will create an internal clarity and trust which makes the whole process go smoother.

So forget the ideals and the rules. Accept your attachments. Focus on letting go of what you are ready to, and organize the rest so it is easier to access.

Comment Magic

What has your experience been with decluttering?

Have you tried too hard to be a Zen Master or some other ideal of clean/clear/minimalist/perfect?

What helps you move from guilt and feeling bad to inspiration and forward motion?

And then yesterday I realized, I’m completely exhausted.

Here’s what GTD is missing: sometimes you need to re-evaluate your commitments. Not just come up with the next thing and do it. Sometimes you’ve got to ask yourself “What am I doing? Do I even want to do this?”

So. I made a chart. Listing all my current commitments – not just “projects”, but any ongoing thing. Especially the ongoing things, that don’t even make it to the “project” list, because they are in the background.

I included everything major – personal, business, family. Also commitments that I am considering adding, or will be coming up soon. I put in all regular practices and groups, so I can see how they are working for me now. And anything that I can sense is stressing me out in some way, even if it doesn’t meet the traditional meaning of “a commitment”.

It looks something like this:

The right-hand column is completely stream-of-consciousness.

Don’t decide what to do about anything, just write.

The idea is to uncover any hidden stuff – unconscious agreements that you have taken on without realizing it, feelings that you were kinda ignoring but they’ve been taking your energy.

Don’t think too much, just write what comes up for you when you think about the thing, as honestly as possible. Spew out all your snarky thoughts, grumpy resentments, or bubbly excitements. This is just to see what is there.

Even if you think you know what you will say, just write. You are interested in what you will write after what you “know” is on the page. When you get the surface thoughts down, then the next thought underneath it will come out. And the next one. And those are the thoughts that matter. An attitude of discovery helps: “I wonder what will come up writing about this?”.

Then what?

When can see everything in black and white, it’s a lot easier to see when you have gaping problems. Like that you are spending 10 hours a week doing something that you hate. Or that is getting your business nowhere. Or that some personal stuff is taking up a lot of your energy right now and you can give yourself a break about getting less done right now.

Look at the list as a whole, kinda from a third-person perspective, almost like it’s someone else. See what you notice. Are you making some bizarre compromises? What do you see that is obviously not working for you and could be tossed?

Remember, don’t do anything about it yet! Just notice.

If you don’t know where you are, it’s hard to find the route to get where you want to be.

Making the list is like taking a snapshot to really see what is going on in your life and your emotional body, below the surface of daily tasks. Then you know where you are starting from, which is important for any kind of change.

Then I advise taking a break and letting all that you noticed percolate around in your mind.

Let your unconscious get ahold of it – it’s good at doing the “heavy lifting” of making decisions.

Don’t make yourself toss things right away, or feel like you “should” be trimming down those things that are sucking your time. All you have to do is become aware of it. That lets your mind know that you care about – then, in the back of your mind, it will start going to work solving the problem of how to shift things around. Trust me, it works!  I try to never have my conscious mind do work that my unconscious can do better. (It’s kind of like learning to lift with your legs instead of your back).

The fact is that “what is important to you” isn’t something you can just analyze with your head. You want your heart and your body to weigh in too. If you’re like me, your heart and your body might need some time to think about it – ponder, percolate, sleep on it, etc – and get back to you.

So the point here isn’t to make a list and then do something about it. The point is to make the list and notice what is on the list. If you really notice things and become aware of them, the doing will often take care of itself.

Tim’s book The Four Hour Work Week has an entire section devoted to “Elimination”: getting rid of distractions that keep you from being effective. The biggest offenders are “work fidgets” – things we do that we don’t really need to do but they fill time. Like checking email 20 times a day.

Recognizing myself as an addict, I started with the suggestion of turning off those pop-up notifications and the envelope letting me know I have a new message. To see if I had new email I had to actually click on the “Inbox” window.

That was surprisingly easy. I didn’t even notice how lovely it was until I was on my other computer, on which I hadn’t turned off notifications yet, and realized how frickin annoying it is to have something pop up and interrupt you. So I turned it off there too.

So far so good.

But today I wanted to try something new: Tim’s imperative: don’t check email first thing in the morning.

I knew this was going to be more difficult. For years, email has been the first thing I check in the morning (sometimes even before peeing, and definitely before breakfast), and the last thing I check before bed.

So this morning, I’ve been up since 9:30 and it’s now 10:30 and I haven’t checked it (I turned off Outlook last night and set a goal to wait till noon today to open it again), and let me tell you I am jonesing for it. I feel physically stressed from not being able to check it and get my morning hit. Swear to God, my heart rate is elevated just thinking about those messages going unread, sitting there for hours, lonely and unanswered in their queue…

I didn’t realize just how much of an addict I am.

Sure, whenever I am on vacation, my friends all joke about how I can’t go more than a few hours. Whenever we would go do something, I check it before we left, and check it as soon as I got back. But hey, that’s just because I have Very Important Work to check on!

Oy.

Tim’s point, which I agree with, is that we think email is urgent but it really isn’t. It’s just this way we justify our addiction. But you have to try breaking the addiction to see that. Have faith! Reclaim your life!

And his second point is you never have any uninterrupted time to do what is actually important if you are constantly responding to email like a monkey in a cage.

So here are my steps to weaning myself. To be taken at my own pace and done conscientiously (I’m not a cold turkey kind of girl):

1. This wasn’t in the book, but a few months ago I set up an email solely for newsletters, list-servs, and other cruft and changed all my subscriptions to that email. For the ones that I couldn’t change without a hassle, I set up rules in Outlook to direct them to a different folder. Just to get them out of my Inbox. This was amazingly helpful in eliminating a huge # of emails in my inbox, and I realized I don’t really care to read most of those newsletters anyway. I check that email about once or twice a month now when I’m really bored.

2. Turn off all new message alerts. This was awesome.
3. Turn off auto-download so you have to deliberately press Send/Receive to get new messages. I haven’t done this, b/c I’m skipping to #4, but it could be a good intermediate step.

4. Turn off Outlook and only open it purposely to check messages. I’m working this step now.

5. Do not check messages first thing in the morning. Hint: find something to replace this activity. This morning I did stretches, read a bit, and oh, that thing called breakfast.

6. Do not check messages first thing in your workday either. (Whilst I was not checking my email this morning, I made a list of things I wanted to do today that didn’t involve email. Writing this post was one of them. The point is to use your bright morning brain juice on the most important things, of which email never is.)

This is about where I’m at right now. I am just starting on the above 3 steps, so the one below I haven’t tried yet. It’s from the The Four Hour Work Week.

7. Set up times to do email, starting with twice or three times per day, such as 12 noon, 4pm, and 8pm. Then eliminate time points, going down to twice per day, once per day, once every other day, etc till you are down to once a week (well, if you want to be like Tim. I think twice a day, and the ability to take days off, is fine with me).

Now it could be that I try this and don’t like it and find myself more effective with more ready access to email. But the point is I want to try it. I want to understand just how addicted I am because I don’t want anything ruling me like that. I don’t want a physiological craving for email for chrissake. I mean, if I’m going to be an addict I’d rather a more interesting addiction like opium or pop rocks (just kidding).