In the past I used to say that I never had enough time to do everything I wanted to do. Now, after having said it enough times through the years I realize how true that statement is. I will never have enough time to do everything I want to do, because it’s easy to scale desires. It’s impossible, however, to increase the finite amount of time I will have on this planet.

Yes, I can always increase my chances of living longer by living better. But it doesn’t take away the fact that my life – my life, your life, everyone else’s life – is limited. You have x number of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and that’s it.

I’m reminded of something Paul Bowles wrote in The Sheltering Sky:

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

To have enough time for the things that matter, I have to define what it is that matters to me. What do I want to contribute to the world, what do I want to add, what do I want to take away? How should I spend my time, what should I devote it to, how do I want to treat the people around me? What is most important, what are the top three things I always want to be doing, which investment of my time and energy will give me the most bang for my buck?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to all of these questions, but I am willing to ask. I am willing to curate my life, I am willing to simplify, I am willing to focus, I am willing to say no, I am willing to let the good fall by the wayside in service of the best, I am willing to let the casual slide to serve the important, I am willing to let anger, impatience and fear dissolve so I can love.

One more quote from Steve Jobs (replace the word ‘products’ with ‘moments’ and see how that reads for you):

Focus is about saying no. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.

The longer I live, the more I feel that aging well means a simplification of being, that a growing familiarity with this character called ‘I’ helps to bring greater clarity, and a falling away of layers to express the essential self. If you simply watch closely and listen attentively, you will unearth what matters to you. What really matters.

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Continuing with the thought that not all clutter is bad, and not all decluttering is good, comes the natural thought that some things are worth taking up space in your life.

I love books. But I want more books than I have space to keep them, so I have to consciously curate the books I let into my life. eBooks are a growing option; volumes which used to take up an entire shelf can now easily fit into the space of an iPhone. But there are books I read for their content, and there are books I want to keep for their beingness. A book as not only content, but a book as an experience within itself, from the design of its cover to the smell of its pages, from the ability to read printed ink to the pleasure of flipping through paper leaves.

There are things that take up space and simply take the space, and there are things which take up space and add to the space around them. Not all clutter is bad, not all decluttering is good, and some things are worth taking up space in your life.

The beauty of minimalism is that by consciously having less in your life, you thereby give more space to the things you have, and they gain more consequence as a result. A yellow flower hung amongst a wall of flowers becomes a thing lost, but the same flower displayed against an empty wall becomes all the more striking.

1. A New Room
2. Minimalism as a Lifestyle

Talking with a friend about her decluttering efforts got me thinking.

Decluttering is more difficult when it’s a one-off event rather than a lifestyle. Minimalism – a clutter-free life – is a a mindset as much as it is an aesthetic choice, and a lifestyle inasmuch the mindset informs your day to day choices.

But minimalism is a personal choice; do it because you want to and because it makes you feel better, not because you think you should. I love minimalist design, I’m particular about neatness and cleanliness, and I’m comfortable with the essential less, so minimalism suits me fine. My minimalism is also dictated by constraints; I live in a house with four other people, one of them sharing the same room with me, so I just have less room for stuff.

I’ve bought maybe two to three books since my girlfriend moved in with me, and not for want of desire. If I had a large house, I’d definitely have a huge library. But I’m constrained by the small apartment I live in, and because there are only so many books that can fit, I have to consciously curate the books that I buy.

What’s also important is that I recognize the limitations to this lifestyle. Where I have no problem throwing things out, I sometimes throw too much away and regret it afterward (I deeply regret throwing out my first manual Nikon SLR camera). I also recognize that sometimes there is great pleasure to be had in keeping things of sentimental value which you can enjoy years down the road.

So not all clutter is bad, and not all decluttering is good. It’s a matter of finding where your fine line is between too much and too little, guided by a conscious awareness of how you want your environment to be. Someone will find my empty work-desk sterile, whereas I find that the clean empty space helps me focus. I may find someone else’s work-desk too full of stuff, but the little knick-knacks and souvenirs help them feel at home. Which is better? I keep coming back to Peter Walsh’s quote as a guiding principle, he who wrote It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff:

It’s not about the stuff – it’s about the life you wish to live…It’s important to remember that what you own and where and how you live is a reflection of the person you are. A clutter-free, organized life is about living in a way that helps create your best possible life – happy, stress-free, creative, motivated and enriching. Happiness can’t be found in the quantity of stuff we own, it’s in the quality of relationships that we form. What we own should foster that life, not be a hurdle to it.

For advice on how to de-clutter a room, I don’t think I can describe it any better than I did in The 3 Decluttering Boxes. The guiding principle is knowing why you want to de-clutter and organize your efforts around that. Simply put, if you’re decluttering, it’s because you have an idea of the way you want your life to be like and how you want your environment to support that. Anything not essential to helping you achieve that vision then goes out the door.

1. Things Which Take Up Space
2. The 3 Decluttering Boxes
3. The Digital Clutter

My girlfriend was looking for a new place to stay, but instead of having her rent a room, I convinced her to come stay with me (yeah I know, big life change right?). It meant I had to completely re-design my room, which was really set up for just one to stay and work, not two.

I had two main goals for the re-design, which informed everything:

1. It had to comfortably accommodate the living and working spaces for two.

2. It had to be as simple as possible, in form and function.

The Old Room

This is what my room looked like prior to the re-design.

The wardrobe and single bed were really set up for only one.

The main anchor of the room was this bookshelf which took up the most space and attention. Unfortunately, I realized from the beginning that it had to go, it was taking up way too much room and I couldn’t maneuver anything new around it.

I also realized that no matter how much I tried, the new room wasn’t going to fit everything I already had and still have space left for hers. That meant I had to go through a heavy, nuclear-level de-clutter.

De-cluttering my books took the longest time. I pared down my collection to the ones I absolutely wanted to keep, and these were transferred to a temporary shelf in the living room (it was interesting how few books were really essential and how obvious which ones they were).

The books I chose to let go totaled up to four large bags, which brought me to a dilemma: for a book-lover like me, throwing books away is a heart-breaking waste. Luckily for me I read about a book swap going on in the papers. My girlfriend gamely helped me truck down the heavy bags to the swap, and since the goal was to de-clutter not re-clutter, I didn’t bother getting any new books in return.

The New Room

This is what the new room looks like now.

It’s a pretty big change, isn’t it?

My girlfriend and I looked into doing minor tweaks to the room at first, like simply adding a new single mattress, but we realized early on that approach wasn’t going to work. To make the room work for the both of us was going to require a major overhaul.

Our favorite bit of the new room is this open space in front of the desk where nothing exists but a carpet and a bean bag. I was hesitant to leave this space empty when planning out the new look, but when the furniture came and I actually experienced it, I fell in love with it instantly.

The entrance to the room is a little cramp, and there’s something refreshing about going through a tight space into a wide, empty opening. It makes me feel free, light and relaxed – I didn’t know it at the time, but my girlfriend and I had created a physical pause, a space for us to sit, relax, do nothing, do something, wait, be still, reflect. She’s done some handicraft there, we’ve both read there, and have already enjoyed some movies on the iMac while lounging on the bean bag. The empty space invites us to fill whatever it is we need to fill into it, or to fill nothing into it. And that’s as Zen as I’m going to get now.

Lessons Learned

Setting out the design goals right from the start proved invaluable when making decisions, as was focusing on the essential big pieces first and weaving other choices around them.

I knew that the wardrobe and bed were the two most important pieces for the both of us to live comfortably together, and so we fit them in first. That meant much less space for my books and the work table, but those were compromises that just had to be made.

Even though I de-clutter at least once a year, it was still quite surprising how much stuff I kept that I didn’t need anymore, and how much I could actually live without when forced to make a choice. The 3 De-Cluttering Boxes strategy still proved useful, and Peter Walsh’s quote was a big help whenever I had to decide between keeping something or not (and I had to not keep a lot of things during this re-design):

It’s not about the stuff – it’s about the life you wish to live…It’s important to remember that what you own and where and how you live is a reflection of the person you are. A clutter-free, organized life is about living in a way that helps create your best possible life – happy, stress-free, creative, motivated and enriching. Happiness can’t be found in the quantity of stuff we own, it’s in the quality of relationships that we form. What we own should foster that life, not be a hurdle to it.

1. Minimalism as a Lifestyle
2. Things Which Take Up Space
3. It’s Harder to Be Kind Than to Be Clever

Whenever I come back from overseas, I like how much clarity I gain about what’s important and what’s not. I pack light, so sometimes all I have is a book to entertain me – sometimes not even that, so I’m forced to watch and listen to what’s around me, be present and to think.

I also make it a point to check and respond to email minimally if it’s a work trip, and to not use the internet at all if it’s a holiday. It’s refreshing how all the information that clamors for my attention, which seems so essential back home, just fades away into the background without consequence.

It makes me wonder again, how much of my digital clutter is really essential. I’ve become more keenly aware that there’s a real line between consuming and creating, and while I’m doing one I can’t be doing the other.

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I’ve always thought of myself as a devout declutterer; I regularly prune away old books and clothes, I throw junk away the moment I get it and I like to keep my desks empty and clean. I even tend to err too much on the side of decluttering by throwing away stuff that I regret later.

But I realized something about myself today. While I may be a physical declutter bug, I’m a hoarder in another realm, the one with ones and zeroes. Just a quick glance at my iTunes library tells me that I have a grand total of 2765 songs, most of which have not been listened to, and which iTunes helpfully tells me will take 9.3 days of non-stop 24-hour listening to finish.

That doesn’t include the other media I have, like podcasts (306 unwatched TED talks), ebooks (that I bought even!) and the articles (Instapaper Pro rocks!) I saved on my iPhone.

And you know what the best part is? The collection keeps growing.

Good God.

Why this incessant need to keep collecting media? There’s no way that I could ever consume all of it. And while the illusion is that digital media is free (yea right, tell that to the $300 external HDD I just bought), it consumes the only nonrefundable resource of all: time.

We’re smart animals right? We’ve solved the Information Age. Now we need to get to the Information Management Age and make sense of all this info-junk. I’d declutter it all but then I’d get really recursive; spending extra time managing stuff that consumes my time so I’d spend less time on it.

I could delete it all, but strangely enough, while throwing away old clothes is easy for me, throwing away old media is not. What the frak is up with this double-standard?

1. The 3 Decluttering Boxes

We’re drawing closer to Chinese New Year, and I’ve been doing some early spring cleaning with some hardcore decluttering this year.

Now, I love me some decluttering, but how to go about doing it? After years of making both leanness and regret, I’ve found a quick and easy way is to divide your stuff into 3 boxes, and then decide how hardcore you want to get.

(These don’t have to be actual physical boxes, but boxes you categorize your stuff into in your mind.)

The 3 Boxes of Decluttering

The Keep Box

This is easy. The stuff that you absolutely know you want to keep goes into the Keep Box. This includes things like the clothes you always wear, the books you love and the stuff you use everyday that keeps you happy and healthy.

The Throw Box

Stuff that is definitely going out goes into the Throw Box. This includes stuff that don’t fit your present life anymore and have no place in the vision of your future. If you haven’t used or seen it in a while, chances are that it’s good to go.

The Maybe Box

The Maybe Box is where stuff you’re not sure whether you want to keep goes into. When you’re sorting out your stuff, don’t stop your momentum with indecision. If you don’t know whether to keep or throw something, put it in the Maybe Box and decide later.

Deciding Threshold – How Hardcore are You?

The way to sort the Maybe Box is to decide how hardcore you want to go.

Nuclear Declutter

Everything in the Maybe Box goes. If you had to wonder about keeping something, you don’t really need it.

Tactical Declutter

Sort it out. Some of the stuff you’ll keep, and some of the stuff you’ll throw. Make the best decision you can.

Delay Declutter

Not sure? Seal the stuff you’re not sure about, stow it away somewhere and set a deadline for yourself. If say, after six months you don’t miss the things inside, they’re clear to go.

Wimp-Out Declutter

You throw everything in the Maybe Box into the Keep Box and rationalize to yourself that yes, you do need those old floppy disks after all.

Keep it Clean, Encourage the Vision

In your decluttering adventures, take care not to throw the baby out with the dishwater. It’s not throwing things out for the sake of throwing things out, it’s about keeping your environment true to the direction you want your life to be going. Quote Peter Walsh, author of It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, from an interview with Unclutterer;

It’s not about the stuff – it’s about the life you wish to live…It’s important to remember that what you own and where and how you live is a reflection of the person you are. A clutter-free, organized life is about living in a way that helps create your best possible life – happy, stress-free, creative, motivated and enriching. Happiness can’t be found in the quantity of stuff we own, it’s in the quality of relationships that we form. What we own should foster that life, not be a hurdle to it.

1. The Digital Clutter
2. Minimalism as a Lifestyle