I am excited to share with you the fourth post in the month-long series on ABRE with the super inspiring sisters, Laura Forbes Carlin and Alison Forbes, of Inspired Everyday Living. Inspired Everyday Living is about using your home as a vehicle for self-transformation—as you change your home, you can transform your life. Each week, during the month of August, Laura and Alison have shared a new post focused on ways to transform your home and life. This week the focus is on Changing Habits that Create Clutter!
Changing Habits that Create Clutter
Learning how to get rid of and organize our clutter is useful, but clutter is really just a symptom, rather than the root, of the problem. The real issue is how to stop the pattern of accumulating clutter in the first place! As long as we have too many things in our lives we will always be caught up in an endless cycle of organizing our “stuff.”
Dealing with our stuff takes a tremendous amount of time and energy – whether we’re cleaning, repairing, or organizing – taking care of our stuff takes time. Oftentimes, the stuff in our lives keep us from focusing on what really matters, prevents us from enjoying the present moment, and robs us of enough time for the essential, fulfilling things in life like our relationships and experiences.
While I was clutter clearing and organizing the other day, it occurred to me that no matter how streamlined my systems and how perfectly labeled and neat my storage containers are, as long as I have all this stuff, I would be spending time dealing with it again and again and again. The only way to end the cycle, was not to have the stuff in the first place. I needed to simplify and stay simplified. I began with creating habits and developing a mindset that does not create clutter in the first place.
The first step in developing this mindset is awareness. We need to figure out, and take a good, honest look at how much of our valuable energy and time is spent being a consumer. Take a moment to think about how much time you take out of your day that involves your material life. An easy way to do this is to look at your to-do list and see how many of those tasks involve being a consumer. How much time and energy do you spend thinking about what you want to buy, researching products and prices, buying, returning, or exchanging, learning how to use, organizing, cleaning, maintaining, fixing, storing, dry cleaning, or altering…. your stuff?
The next step is to ask yourself- is it worth it? Once we understand that every thing we bring into our homes and lives is a commitment of our time and energy, then we can begin to be selective about what we choose to bring in. Like it or not, we are in a relationship with all the things in our home and relationships take time and attention. So each time you go to buy something really ask yourself, is this something I want to start a relationship with?
The solution is simple, live with less stuff. Less stuff equals more time and energy. And make sure the stuff you do choose to buy, is worthy of your precious time and energy.
Below are fourteen steps that will help you maintain this new awareness by outlining new habits to keep you from creating clutter in your life. (more…)
