I found them after five days. My husband’s keys. First he was convinced he left them in our apartment, and I couldn’t go anywhere until he got home so I didn’t lock him out. Then, after I searched everywhere, he figured he must have left them on his desk at work. On Monday he went back to work, and his keys weren’t there after all. I helped him work out a plan of which Lost and Found numbers to call.
Then I checked his coat pocket in the bedroom closet, where they had been, of course, since Thursday morning. This is one of the many benefits of marriage: you have someone to look after you and help you in your weak areas. I sympathize because I also used to have a similar problem with lost objects. I once locked my keys inside my apartment twice in the same day, once with a burner on the stove left on High. Another time I had a candle burning. I’ve dropped my keys down an elevator shaft, locked them in my car, and thrown them in the trash. I have also lost untold numbers of gloves, hats, scarves, library books, and umbrellas, most of which I never got back, and purses, day planners, checkbooks, and wallets, most of which people were kind enough to return to me. Like I said, I’ve had issues with lost objects, as well as my other distraction issues. I lean ADHD, and what I do has worked for me. I also teach these methods to my chronically disorganized students and clients. Pay attention to TRANSITIONS between one scene and another, one activity and another, one time of day and another. Transitions! Pause and look around every time. Pause when you get ready to leave for work. Pause again when it’s time to come home. Pause when you stand up after a movie. Pause when your bus pulls up to your stop. Pause, and check. Pause, and check. When it’s a habit, it only takes two seconds. I often talk to myself while I am doing this. I have my keys, my wallet, my sunglasses. The reason I do this out loud is that it often triggers my companions to remember their own stuff. Before we leave for a road trip, I always recite a list of stuff. Often my buddies have to get out of the car and go back inside for something. Wallets, passports, phones, chargers, hats, gloves, scarves, boots, medication, socks, underwear... I can’t wait for the day when a smartphone will remind us of these things automatically. When I leave a hotel room, I do a perimeter check. Check the shower and the bathroom, check the closet, check each drawer. I do the same when we move, and I take a quick video of all the empty rooms. The hotel check takes two minutes, and the empty apartment check takes less than ten. Peace of mind! Other than the transition ritual of pausing and checking, it helps to have clear surfaces in the home. This one is almost impossible for my clients. The more I try to teach them to focus on their living space and the functions of different work surfaces, the harder they cling to their ten-times-too-many belongings. Yes, of course I’d rather have three hundred pounds of old clothes than the ability to use my tables and countertops! Have a clear area near your front door, like a table. Never put anything on it but your significant daily objects. Have a clear area next to your bed. Have a clear area in your kitchen. Have a clear area next to where you sit to relax, like an end table. Have a clear area at your desk, if you have one. Have a clear area in your car, like a cup holder organizer. Carry less stuff around in general. The less you have to track, the easier it is to track it all. When you have a clear area next to you, it’s easy to check at a single glance and make sure you have everything. It should be completely empty when you’re not using it. Completely empty 90% of the time! A flat, clear surface makes it easy to see your phone, your pen, or whatever else you carry around. It’s easier to keep surfaces clear when you have the right catch-all. We have drawers in our bathroom, desk, and of course the kitchen. The purpose of the drawers is to hold important stuff that we use all the time, every single day. The purpose of the drawers is not to store stuff that we forgot was in there! We also use small baskets. There’s one next to the front door for my keys, the garage door opener, and the laundry card. There’s one on the dog crate for his leash and treats and toys. My hubby has one for his daily objects. I have my work bag, and it hangs on my desk chair. I often get things out of it and put them back in, several times a day. My stuff “lives” there and I simply don’t allow myself to put it anywhere else when I’m done. Never set anything down “just for now”! It’s either in its parking spot or you are using it. Think of the spot for this item as a cute little cozy little house. Like a kitten in a basket or a birdie in a nest. This object likes it there. If you set it down somewhere else, it will be cold and lost and alone, shivering and crying, Why don’t you love me?? Actually don’t do that. Thinking that your stuff has emotions is one of the major reasons that my clients have so much stuff in the first place. But if it does help, then go for it. If you have tons and tons and tons of stuff, don’t despair. It’s a lot easier to clear a single square foot and keep it clear than it is to sort everything first. Just clear the area and put the stuff that doesn’t belong there in a box. Yeah, you’ll probably still have that unsorted box three years from now, but at least you have a chance of using your nice clear flat surface. Clear surfaces seem sterile and boring and ugly to most of my people. In reality, they are in constant use throughout the day. Our clear kitchen counters have meal prep going on in bright colors at least four times a day. Our clear bathroom counters have bright, colorful containers on them every morning and evening while we get ready. Our clear desktops are scattered with brightly colored objects while we’re working on projects. What really fills a home? Laughter, conversations, music, the cheerful business of life. When a home is cluttered and people are always losing track of things, what could be a happy place is instead filled with stress, confusion, and harsh words. Clear your space, make a home for all your significant daily objects, and use the time you save to read, take a nap, or hug someone. This is what I know about travel. It’s easier when you don’t bring very much.
This is why I’ve been walking around with fifteen pounds of sand in my backpack. We’re planning another adventure, this time an urban trip, and I’m buying a sub-40-liter pack because my 65-liter expedition pack is too big. I don’t need room for all the things I usually bring, like the sleeping bag and the space blanket and the double set of thermal underwear and the first aid kit and the cooking pot and the stove and the fuel and the solar lantern and the folding chair and the, I might as well just admit to it, the entire two-person sofa that I pack around. Go ahead and laugh. My expedition pack still weighs less than the clothes, shoes, and toiletries that most people bring on trips. I went on a weekend trip with a couple of old friends. The wife had a shower kit that was half the size of my entire suitcase, and then she had a second one! “You brought full-size bottles of shampoo?” I told her it looked like she had a “just in case” bag, and that she’d just grabbed everything from her bathroom that she thought she might need. She nodded, of course, that’s exactly what I did. I showed her my TSA-approved shower bag, and explained that I start with that. If it doesn’t fit, then it can’t come, because I don’t check my bag. Everything I bring fits under the seat on the plane. Start with the container, not the stuff. The way I deal with my desire for a wide selection of shower products is that I have a bunch of 2-oz bottles. You can go even smaller with a few contact-lens cases. The other thing to keep in mind is that... they HAVE SHOWER STUFF in other countries. You can buy toothpaste and soap and deodorant and shampoo. You don’t even have to if you’re staying in a hotel. Not only is it safe to forget stuff or finish it off before you go home, but it’s a shopping opportunity to test out something that may be better quality than what you get at home. People overpack out of insecurity, anxiety, and indecision. This can ruin the trip. The heavier your bag is, the more miserable you’ll be at the airport. Oops, did I say ‘bag,’ singular? I mean, the heavier your multiple unnecessary bags are. You’re doing it to yourself. I’ve seen people travel with suitcases so big that they could crawl inside. In one case, there was nothing really in it except a set of swim fins and some stray towels, and I know that because the owners had it open on the airport floor while they frantically searched for something. Why would someone bring towels on vacation?? The more stuff you bring, the harder it is to tell if you’ve forgotten something important. Really important. The only truly important things to bring on a trip are your ID, because you can’t get through otherwise, and a way to pay for things. You can do the whole thing with a passport and a credit card. Arguably the next two important things are vaccinations and a plan for the trip, although the travel arrangements can also be skipped if you feel ready for the Wing-It Method. I utterly can’t understand why people insist on bringing so many extra duplicate redundant backup changes of clothes. Really? I’m paranoid about getting cold and even I don’t let that trick me into overpacking. I have a points system. I lose one point for every item that I bring on a trip and don’t use. The only exceptions are the first aid kit, which I hope not to need, and extra underwear, because they’re small and lightweight. What’s the point of bringing anything that you don’t use? If you don’t use it, then it is by definition useless. The extra stuff you insisted on dragging around is no more use to you than a fifteen-pound bag of sand. Oh, I suppose a bag of sand could potentially be useful. You could drop it out a window and stop a robbery. You could cut it open and shake the sand out if you needed traction. You could pour it out on the airport floor if there’s a delay and invite other stranded passengers to create a meditative sand mural. You could put it in your bag to weigh it down and deter thieves. Because if even you don’t want your stuff enough to actually use it, then why would anyone else? I walk around with a bunch of sand in my new backpack because I’m testing it out. I’m checking how the load risers are adjusted. I’m reminding myself how tiring it is to climb a flight of stairs with an extra fifteen pounds on your hips and knees and feet. I’m also reminding myself what it felt like to weigh this much without the backpack! I do this a lot. Now that I’m stronger and more active, I travel more, and I have more fun doing it. My husband and I typically walk or hike 8-10 miles a day, including elevation gain and many flights of stairs. We’re strong enough to see everything we want to see without being utterly wrung out and exhausted at the end of the day. I can go three weeks with only four changes of clothes. They, um, they have laundromats. Who cares what you’re wearing? Honestly? You do, or at least you will if you insist on wearing hurty shoes and limping around with bleeding blisters. If you insist on wearing a sundress when it’s really too cold. If you’re so worried about looking cute that you’re late getting ready every day. I know because I made all those mistakes when I was young, and it really got in the way of enjoying travel. Not just for me, but for everyone else on my trip. There is no adventure in bringing a bunch of stuff from your house with you everywhere you go. You already know all about your stuff. If you’re leaving the house at all, it’s to see things and have experiences and meet people. Remember why you’re packing and try not to bring fifteen pounds of sand. The concept of an inheritance is, I think, becoming dated and antiquated. It’s something of a Baby Boomer thing. Those of us who are younger probably understand that the world works differently now. Still, it’s worth talking about. There is a vague dream of a someday inheritance, a financial windfall, that will somehow eliminate all our problems. This is not just a dangerous illusion, but an illusion that can poison ambition and domestic contentment. Kill your inheritance, and kill it in self-defense.
Now, it’s a good thing to think of a legacy in non-material terms. We can be proud of what we’ve inherited from our family when it comes to values and character traits. Hospitality, sense of humor, frugality, ingenuity, a gift for storytelling, grit and fortitude, these are the sort of gifts we should be proud to carry on. This kind of gift is non-zero-sum, meaning it never runs out. The more you share, the larger it grows. You can roll it out and make enough room for spouses, kids, and friends. All of that goes completely out of the window when we start talking about money, real estate, and material goods. In my work with clutter, I have seen it over and over again. People will quit talking to each other over a photo album, a single ring, some old furniture, or a stupid teacup. Unbelievable. You’re saying you’d TRADE your blood relation for a piece of scrap that wouldn’t sell for fifty dollars in a pawn shop? A lot of this stuff couldn’t be sold for a bent nickel. The problem is that grief makes people temporarily insane. It’s understandable. With time and some healing, we’re sometimes able to get enough emotional distance that we can recognize our own irrationality from our own mourning periods. Not likely in the heat of the moment, though. Whatever it is about the old, I dunno, the old 8-track player or the blurry slides from 1958, it seems to activate everyone’s feelings of thwarted power and desire from earliest childhood. GIMME! It’s MINE! Like fighting over the last popsicle. Then we get to the house and the money. That sweet, sweet munnah. Back in the bad old days, the land was almost the only thing a family owned. Material goods were expensive and hard to make, and people had very little in terms of clothes, furniture, and housewares. Property went to the oldest son, and the rest of the family had to make do or beg for a place at the table. Imagine being an unmarried adult daughter and having to wheedle your big brother for a chance to stay on and do all the cooking and laundry, because it was that or panhandle in the road. Then property started to be divided between descendants. Probably more fair, but fast-forward a couple of generations. The first block is divided between four kids. Then they each divide their share between their five or six kids. Then each of those grandchildren has eleven or twelve grandchildren. It doesn’t take long before the tiny slivers that are left are too small to support a family. Or the global economy changes in response to technological advancement, and the world moves on. But somewhere inside all of us is a glimmer of ancestral memory, when our family several generations back were higher in the societal pecking order. Those photo albums and rings and teacups and old furnishings remind us of a vanished time, a time that we partly believe is our true place. I have copies of old family pictures from the Civil War through the Victorian era. Look, they’re wearing suits, and fancy hats, and dresses with bustles! Never mind that they probably owned only one or two changes of clothes. I DESERVE. Some of that genteel feeling, we could easily get back. We could get it by hand-tailoring our clothes in our own living rooms, the way earlier generations did. We could get it by speaking more formally, using appropriate terms of address and ritual politeness formulas. “Good day to you, sir.” It’s not money that they had, so much as stricter rules for social decorum. We’d probably find it unbearably stuffy and restrictive. Personally, I prefer modernity with its electronics, egalitarianism, and endless options. One of the most dramatic changes of our era is our incredible longevity. Human lifespan has basically doubled in the last century, certainly within the last two hundred years. I’m forty-three and it wouldn’t have been at all uncommon for a woman my age to be gone already. Now it’s not uncommon for a woman to still be up and doing at eighty-six, double the age I am today. What this means is that our old structure of “inheritance” is going to have to change, the same way the way we think of “retirement” has to change. It was different when the retirement age was sixty-five and most people died by sixty-three. Now a lifetime’s savings and investments will be needed for the next twenty or thirty years of life. A house that would have lasted thirty years, enough time for a young family to grow up and for the owners to age properly, will now be worn out and needing major repairs just in time for that retirement. Buy a house at 35, and at 65, guess what? It’s going to need a new roof, all the appliances are going to wear out, maybe even the foundation, plumbing, wiring, windows, and floors will need to be redone. How will there be any money left for the adult children after funding the retirement needs of advancing longevity? How can someone fund such a long retirement, working 30 or 35 years to pay to retire for 20 or 30 years or more? How could it be done at all, much less debt-free? How could it be done in perfect health, much less after funding decades of ill health, medications, medical appliances, and surgeries? If anything, these trends are going to be even more pronounced over the next few decades. At some point, the finance industry will figure out a way to rig new mortgages and consumer debt loads. Individuals will adjust their expectations for their personal longevity, how old they want to be when they give up on their physical health, and how they intend to pay for their retirement. Family arrangements will start to look markedly different. We’ll probably move back to having multiple generations under one roof, and in that case, an “inheritance” might just look like redecorating a bedroom so the sixties-aged kids can move back in to assume caretaking responsibilities, for their eighties-aged parents and their grandparents who are still here as centenarians. Expecting an inheritance, according to research, tends to lead to more debt and less career success. Today’s reality is that whatever investment money and home equity are there, will most likely be consumed by the daily living expenses of unprecedented old age. This is fantastic, if you actually love your relatives and cherish having more time with them. It’s a bummer, if you’ve always had this lingering hope that they’d shuffle off this mortal coil and leave you enough to pay off your credit cards. I’m very fortunate to have young parents. They’re still working, and I’m middle-aged, well aware that I need to plan for my own old age. When I “retire,” they may still be spry enough that we can go on vacation together. All I want for them is that they have enough saved to take care of themselves and preserve their independence as long as possible. The inheritance that I desire is a legacy of strength and savvy, and perhaps the secret to a seventy-year marriage. Cozy Minimalist Home is the book I wish my clutter clients would all read. I’m always trying to get them to consider how they use their space rather than how they feel about each and every single object they own. This lavishly illustrated book shows us how it’s done. Myquillyn Smith explores how to design cute, comfortable, stylish rooms that focus on function rather than tons of decorative items. She suggests that it’s better to focus on the room as a whole, rather than specific objects. The results are charming and convincing.
We really can have “more style with less stuff.” Smith suggests that we start by creating one sane space for the household to hang out and relax, even in the midst of large remodeling projects. No matter what else is going on in the other rooms, there needs to be somewhere for regular daily life to go on. Moving and redecorating are serious undertakings, rife with pitfalls. Smith finds a lot of comedy here. “This is real life. There would be no buying all new furniture like they do on TV.” She deals with the realization that she’s been dragging a lot of decor through multiple moves, only to find that it isn’t doing her home any favors. The money she had spent on small things could have been saved up for larger pieces she would have liked better. Smith is relatable and really funny. She voices so many contradictions and frustrations: wanting to streamline and wanting to shop; feeling attracted and repelled by the same style; aiming for domestic harmony and hospitality while wanting the home done her way. She doubts her own design choices, and even her decision to buy a house that she doesn’t absolutely love. How to deal? Smith becomes Chief Home Curator. Like most of us, she has to solve problems of her own creation, sorting through a mountain of stuff that she herself chose and brought home. She learns to “quiet the room” and scrap previous design attempts before finally working out something that she and her family can love. Generally, what they like has greater design impact while using and displaying far fewer things. One of the best and most endearing features of Cozy Minimalist Home is the appendix with Before and After photos of Smith’s rooms. She shares what was going on behind the scenes as photos were staged for the book. This focus on process is so helpful for readers who don’t know where to start in their own homes, making the endeavor feel more possible. Cozy Minimalist Home is a very practical book. It teaches the fundamentals of design, starting with what order to paint, buy furniture, choose window treatments, and hang pictures. For absolute beginners, there are useful discussions on how to discover your own style, create pinboards, and plan rooms. This is a beautiful and useful book that can build confidence and a sense of possibility in even the most nervous novice. Favorite quotes: Just because we know perfection isn’t the goal doesn’t mean we don’t long for—and need—function and beauty. My dirty little secret was that my stuff was draining me. If I was so good at finding great deals, why didn’t I trust that I could find them a year or two later and not lug all that cute stuff with me from house to house? Doesn’t an empty kitchen counter seem like the most extravagant luxury? We keep forgetting that we’re living in the future. It’ll probably take about two generations before we start to figure it out.
This is the argument that I use when setting policy with my husband about our domestic arrangements and mental bandwidth. How would this be different if it were automated? If it were engineered out of existence as a problem? Offload it, sure, abdicate it, absolutely. Tell Siri, though, not me. We’ve had a lot of success with delegating household chores to “the robots,” as we call them, and now I’m trying to teach him to do it with the administrative stuff. The thing is, like a lot of people, we each have a smartphone in our pocket. Along with all the many other features of these incredibly powerful computers, which are far and away better than what was used to get the first rocket up to the Moon, there is a voice assistant. It can do stuff, and, arguably, it should. Set timers Send reminders Take dictation Check the weather Read off lists Probably a million more things that we haven’t realized it can do We both grew up with moms who were traditional in most ways. We both had the kind of mom who did most or all of the cooking and housework, the kind of mom who knew how to sew and make Halloween costumes, the kind of mom who basically ran the household while the dad did the fix-it stuff. We both had a certain internalized expectation that the woman of the household is also the secretary and receptionist of the household. But then, we met each other in the workplace. I literally WAS his office assistant. It literally was my job to take notes at his meetings, sort his mail, make his photocopies, and copyedit his technical documentation. (He was one among a staff of 75 others). This probably helped when we got married years later. It helped to make clear that certain types of tasks were PAID and, thus, valuable. As an engineer, my husband understood full well exactly why these low-level administrative tasks are delegated down. It’s a silly drain on the mental bandwidth of a professional who has more interesting things to do. He gets it that if these random and small interruptions keep popping up for me to handle, then it interferes with the headspace I need as a writer. I can either be a full-time stay-at-home spouse, maintaining the perfect household and cooking great meals from scratch, OR. Or I can be something else, something more interesting and fulfilling that also generates a higher income. Both are valid paths to lifestyle upgrades for both of us. One is depressing, boring, and annoying (for me at least), and the other is awesome. More to the point, why should a human (including me) do something when a robot or an artificial intelligence can do it? Back to the robots. We have a Roomba and a countertop dishwasher. We also have a robot mop, but we currently aren’t using it because our kitchen floor is about the size of a beach towel. Once upon a time, we had a washer and dryer. We “start the robots” before we go to the movies, and we come home to a clean apartment. The only things “the robots” don’t do (yet) are to knock down cobwebs, dust surfaces, clean the bathroom, put away laundry, and make the bed. We sort laundry by having a hamper with two detachable bags, one for lights and one for darks. That’s not robotic, but it is based on principles of lean engineering. This is the premise on which I am building my empire, my Kingdom of Mental Bandwidth. The goal is for both of us to have as much high-quality uninterrupted System 2 thinking time as possible. I’ve made my case for how much I do to support him as he works on his third patent, and he appreciates that this takes care and focus. This has helped me make the case that I, too, need help protecting my thinking-cap time. As an engineering principle, our household should be as well-maintained as possible with the least amount of effort as possible. This is known as “low-side compliance.” It’s extremely important in engineering, because an engineer’s time is expensive, and even an extra hour putting in an extra feature might blow both the budget and the production schedule. Low-side compliance helps avoid “scope creep,” which is what happens when the specifications of the product keep expanding. Scope creep makes everything more expensive and complicated, and also more vulnerable to failure. Running a household is the classic example of scope creep. It’s also a stupid place to put that kind of cognitive and emotional focus. Together, we’ve worked out a way to automate, systemize, or eliminate as many household tasks as possible. This includes chores and errands. The next step is to automate more administrative tasks like ordering dog food, scheduling appointments, and booking travel. Another horizon would be keeping track of where things are. I have what amounts to a 3D mental hologram of every object in our home, as well as several other homes of family and friends. My superpower does not, though, make me responsible for keeping track of other people’s stuff! One day, an AI will have this ability and then it will make sense to interrupt *it* instead of me. Since this function would be so valuable in manufacturing and inventory management, it WILL eventually arise and become widely available. The household of the future will run itself. It will clean itself, schedule its own maintenance, stock itself with supplies, and track the location of objects, maybe even uninvited insects. With 3D food printing, everyone can have a personalized meal on demand, including guests. The house and the computer will effectively merge. Household chores and errands will become as antiquated for the average suburban family as churning butter and trimming lantern wicks are today. We’re already at the point where commonly available software can track our budgets, order groceries and other household supplies, schedule appointments, and even suggest entertainment options. Not that far into the future, there will be nothing left to argue about except whose job it is to give the cat a pill, unless of course it’s a robot cat. We might as well get started on figuring out what to argue about next, and maybe the voice assistant of tomorrow can mediate. It all started when I set out to clean the oven at our rental house. I had a joke from one of my clients: “Oven’s dirty, time to move!” I was starting to learn about “ask, don’t task” and realizing that it can be very useful to have an engineer around. I thought out how to reframe my problem of DIRTY OVEN.
That’s what I did. I outlined the problem. I reminded him that when he helped me move out of my apartment after two years of dating, it had taken me three hours to clean the oven. I estimated how much it would probably cost to hire a cleaning service, many of which will not clean ovens just as they won’t wash windows. I believed there had to be a better way. Take off the oven door, maybe? “Hold on,” he said. He went out to the garage, a promising sign. He came back out with... the cordless drill. He attached a scouring pad to it, an abrasive tool that was designed for shop use. He got some cleanser out from under the sink. He pulled out the oven racks. He pulled up the wooden step stool that I use to reach high kitchen shelves and he sat on it. He turned on the drill and started scouring the black volcanic mess that was our oven. Fourteen minutes later, that oven was showroom clean. “That should do it,” he said, and he took the drill back out to the garage. I was still standing there with my jaw hanging open when he came back. (Then I found a silicon oven liner for $20 and we’ve never looked back). We’ve spent a considerable amount of time since then (2010), talking about how engineering could solve so many scutwork problems, if only someone were to bring them to the attention of an engineer. In the years since, we’ve seen various solutions hit the market, and I own some of them. Drill attachments specifically for tough housework jobs Power scrubbers with extension poles for jobs like scrubbing bathtubs Window-cleaning robots in two types, suction and magnetic A robot vacuum that picks up pet hair (but not feathers, hint hint) A robot mop Robot lawnmower? A joke that I made in 2010, it’s now a reality I’m still holding out for a toilet-cleaning robot ($500, nowhere to store it) and a laundry-folding robot, once they become efficient enough to be worth the effort. We have a joke about “starting the robots” when we leave our apartment. We spend about five minutes crating our pets, picking up the dog dishes, and checking for charger cables on the floor. Then we turn on the countertop dishwasher and the Roomba. We also used to have a washer and dryer. We would go to the movies, laughing about how robots were doing our housework and speculating on what we could delegate next. There’s another thing that we do, something that feels like a total impossibility for most households. That is to live in a deliberately small space and own few material objects. Sing HEY! for minimalism! It doesn’t take us long to clean because there isn’t much to clean. You can almost reach every surface of our kitchen or bathroom by standing in one spot. We can’t keep a lot of stuff out on countertops because we don’t have much counter space. We can either preserve one square foot of countertop for cooking meals, or we could put one thing on it. Which one thing is more valuable than the ability to prepare meals? A stand mixer? A cookie jar? A pile of junk mail? I’ve found in my work with clutter clients that the more they wish for old-fashioned home cookin’, the more stuff they have in their kitchens, and the less they actually cook. Any professional chef would tell you that you can do it all with one good knife, a cutting board, a large bowl, a spatula, and a pan. My people keep more than that stacked up in their sink, much less the entire room. What crushes me about all of this is that almost all my people have a functional dishwasher. I grew up without one. In point of fact, my husband had to teach me how to load a dishwasher because I made it into my thirties without really knowing how they work. It takes four minutes to unload a clean dishwasher. Unload it once a day and spend 10 seconds put dirty dishes directly into it after each meal. It’s like a miracle! Yet you’re all out there weeping bitter tears about how much work it is. Are you kidding me with this??? The truth is that it’s entirely possible to cook nutritious, balanced meals in a microwave in under ten minutes and then spend about 90 seconds cleaning up afterward. I cannot cognitively fathom why there is so much angst over kitchen work. But then microwaves and dishwashers feel like the Star Trek future to me, and garbage disposals do, too. So much of this is about how we internalize what we perceive as social expectations, and how we react emotionally to those expectations. Breaking down these tasks as engineering problems is a way to distance them from the emotional landscape. Would I feel resentful and burdened about this if a robot was doing it? If it never even became a problem? The first time I shook off some blackened spilled pie filling from our $20 oven liner, I also shook off some mid-20th-century expectations. I’m ready for my 21st-century kitchen and wondering what else I can pawn off on household robots. I met an interesting character the other day. We struck up a conversation while waiting at a stoplight. By the time we had crossed the street and walked through the park, we had managed to interview each other and exchange some interesting ideas.
Living on the pier is a crossroads of humanity. There’s a constant flow of families, dog walkers, transients, drunks and drug users, tourists, musicians, joggers, skateboarders, cyclists, young couples, barefoot surfers in wetsuits, students on field trips, retirees, and also a few neighbors. It’s busy here. It’s also not unusual to bump into someone who is at leisure at 2:00 on a weekday afternoon. Wealthy people look different. It’s basically impossible to fake that posture, haircut, skincare regimen, wardrobe, and aura of prosperity, just like it would be pretty challenging to fake the hard-worn look of someone who has spent years sleeping rough. I’ve learned this through having lived in many different neighborhoods over the years. I don’t particularly prefer to live among the wealthy. They spend a lot of time talking about things that bore me senseless, like where they bought stuff, what their yapper dog is up to these days, and how “good help is so hard to find.” They also can’t usually relate to why my husband and I live in a studio apartment and don’t have a car. That’s what made this conversation so interesting. We discovered we were both strangers in a strange land. It basically went like this: “What a gorgeous place” “Another day in paradise” “I’m new in town” “Were you here for the butterfly migration?” Blah blah blah “I live on a sailboat” “Oh, are you a nomad?” “I don’t know what I am, what’s that?” “There are a lot of people who are financially independent, who travel around the world, it’s a thing” “Are you one of them?” “Well...” That’s when we started comparing strategies and a few numbers. “What’s your efficiency?” he asked. By that I understood that he meant what we call “the nut” or monthly overhead. “You should live on a sailboat,” he said. It costs him $1600 a month to stay at the marina (right next to our apartment complex) and apparently it comes with access to a gym and a steam room and stuff. He went over what it took to manage such a feat, how he learned to sail various types of boats, starting with the very smallest size and working his way up in complexity. I asked how old he was when he learned to sail, and he said he started about ten years ago, which both did and didn’t answer my question. I gather that he was at least in his thirties when he suddenly decided, Hey, I should learn to sail. That somehow turned into, Hey, I should live on a boat, sail from Canada to San Diego, and figure out where I want to settle down. Or not. I have my own opinions about all this, of course. I’m not a strong swimmer and I can only really manage myself in a canoe or a kayak. I have read quite a lot of nautical adventures, though, and that’s why I asked a few more questions. “What do you do in the winter? What about when it storms?” “I haven’t done this over the winter yet,” he admitted. Ugh. I told him I wanted to go to sea as a child, that my fantasy was to become a “cabin boy” and that I was very disappointed to learn that wasn’t a job anymore. At least, I was disappointed when I was nine. As a middle-aged woman, going through a tropical storm in a sailboat of any size sounds pretty darn dreadful. There are other factors, too. I don’t know this man’s story, or why he’s suddenly free to sail down the length of North America alone. Was he married before? Does he have kids? Is he retired? Is he actually F.I. or is he burning through cash reserves while he bounces back from divorce, getting fired, or losing a lawsuit? Who knows? Me, I live with a man, a dog, and a parrot. Noelle would probably love being on a sailboat and smooching kids at the marina, shaking out her nice red tail feathers. Our frail, ill, elderly dog would not enjoy himself at all. Could my husband and I deal with sharing a tiny ship cabin, a tiny ship stove, a tiny ship heater, and of course the tiny ship’s head, with the shower spraying on the toilet? Eh, maybe, maybe not. We actually are the type of married couple who could probably do well while living on a sailboat. We’re already minimalists. We’re good at what we call Pack-Fu, or the art of fitting objects carefully into a tight space. We’ve spent weeks backpacking and sharing a tent together. We’re both handy with tools and we have the kind of discipline that is needed to stay on top of leaks and mildew. We do, of course, also love money and the saving thereof. Paying an “efficiency” of $1600 a month sounds pretty great! It sounds great until we factor in the part about buying a small, used seafaring vessel. “It’s like an RV,” I say to this sailor/retiree I’ve just met, and he agrees. In my mind, that means it’s high maintenance, hungry for repairs, expensive to fuel, and hard to park. You’re stuck with it, like it or not, and it can be hard to find a buyer when you realize it isn’t your dream of an easy, relaxing retirement after all. What a great fantasy, though! If you don’t like your neighbors, you can simply sail away. Sail away from thoughts of trouble, sail south when storm clouds gather at the horizon. Sail away toward... toward what, exactly? We saved 48% of our income last year.
What that means, specifically, is that 48% of our net base salary went into our retirement accounts. Net = after taxes and any other non-retirement withholdings. Base salary = the amount in the employment contract. This does not include money that went toward paying down debt. For example, I finally managed to pay off my student loan. How is this possible? I’m going to write a somewhat abstract post because I don’t want to just baldly state our actual income. Some people do that, but *shrug* I’m not going to. The point is to focus on STRATEGY for those who will find it helpful. Posting actual numbers, Money Diary style, tends to draw doubters and naysayers. That’s not my audience. Big hair, don’t care. How is it possible to save half your income? Two ways: offense and defense. My husband taught me this. I’m an extremely hardcore full austerity frugalite. I play D. I can casually do a Buy Nothing Month and barely notice, because I’ll just spend the time reading library books and journaling. I’ll cheerfully serve up lentil soup, darn my socks for a third time, and dilute my laundry detergent to 80%. The trouble with this scrimping method is that you can only get your expenses down to zero dollars and zero cents. There’s a finite limit to how much you can save by playing defense. I married a strategic thinker. He plays O. There is an infinite amount of money that someone can earn. There is no top level to how much you can escalate your income. In his mind, it’s a lot easier to find a way to EARN ten thousand dollars than it is to SAVE ten thousand dollars. That’s why he quit his job as a logger to go back to school and become an aerospace engineer. We’ve learned to respect each other’s mutual styles and use them to work together. He appreciates my sincere desire to cooperate toward financial independence and stay on plan. I appreciate his ludicrous ability to read textbooks for fun, design things that go to space, and accrue patents. We take turns suggesting lifestyle pivots and talking each other through the pitch. That’s how we’ve wound up in this bizarre, outlier situation of banking half our income. Step One: Cooperate and tell the truth about your life. We have a breakfast meeting every single week where we talk about our finances, among other things. We’re able to do this without blame and recrimination because we share the goals of early retirement and excellent vacations. We’re allies. Wealthy celebrities go bankrupt and get expensively divorced all the time because they don’t know how to work as a team, and this is why cooperation comes first. Step Two: Focus on career direction and earning potential. We’ve relocated for jobs four times in our ten-year marriage. We don’t have a mortgage but we both work at our dream job. The goals here should be, how do we do the most fascinating possible thing all day while mentoring younger people and also making it rain money? Step Three: Lifestyle design. The tricky part. The most valuable parts of anyone’s lifestyle are usually outside the cash dimension. Love and friendship. Self-expression. Connection to the natural world. Developing a personal philosophy. Sleep quality, cooking skills, having a home filled with laughter and conversation. Put a price on any of that. We build our feeling of home and being entertained around the intangibles, and that’s what makes it relatively easy for us to chop expenses. Okay, seriously though, how do we save half our income? The lifestyle: We live in a studio apartment close enough for my husband to take the bus to work. I work at home. We got rid of our car two years ago because all they do is eat money 90% of the time. We cook at home, only going out to eat maybe once a week because we’re really too busy. We’ve only had pizza delivery ONCE in our entire thirteen-year relationship, and it wasn’t very good either. We don’t drink alcohol or indulge in any other recreational substances such as pay cable. We don’t “shop” as an activity, and that’s no sacrifice, because we both hate wandering around in stores. Also, we live in a 612-square-foot studio, so where would we put anything? Our default weekday is to work all day, go to kickboxing class together, bike home, shower, eat dinner, hang out with our pets for a while, and go to bed. The money: Base salary. See above. We’ve prioritized earnings over our own lifestyle throughout our marriage. That has meant moving away from family and friends over and over again. It has also meant getting rid of at least 80% of our possessions and living in a quarter of the space we had as newlyweds, because we’re nomads now. Overtime earnings. Many jobs don’t have this as an option, and not everyone is in a position to take advantage of it. My family’s perspective is that working overtime helps take the pressure off of all the colleagues with young families or other caretaking responsibilities. Take one for the team, ka-CHING. Bonuses. My husband has this terrible habit of winning awards at work. Unfortunately he might also wind up making money off his patents at some point, too. It’s dreadful. Non-cash perquisites. One feature of frequent business travel is that it racks up a lot of points and miles. Another is that a lot of passthrough expenses go through our credit cards, building up yet more points and miles. We typically don’t have to “pay” for plane tickets, hotel rooms, or rental cars anymore. Side hustle money. Everything we make on the side goes toward things like electronics upgrades, vacation, or vet bills. It used to go toward debt payments. There’s something highly motivating about thinking, “I’m going to earn myself a brand new Mac” or “this will buy our dog another year” as opposed to abstract numerals with a dollar sign in front. The treats: Part of why our lifestyle works for us is that we’re both motivated by the same major goals, one of which is financial independence and the other of which is travel. We splurge on vacation, as well as a few other things: Our phones, robotics textbooks, spoiling our pets, hanging out at Starbucks, and going to our boutique gym. Since we save half our income, we feel entitled to indulge ourselves in the ways that matter to us, as opposed to things that don’t, such as owning two vehicles, eating snacks and drive-thru food, watching cable TV, or living in an average-size house. We moved into a studio apartment so we could get a year ahead on our retirement savings, instead of a year behind. (Scrambling to pay 2015’s IRA contribution in spring of 2016, whereas now we’re already saving for 2020 in 2019). It worked! Saving crazy amounts of money has been fun for us and it’s helped us to build a stronger marriage. The stress of debt is so, so much harder than the stress of sharing a tiny living space and basically living like college students. It’s that time of year and spring is coming!
Spring announced itself in my neighborhood with a mass butterfly migration. I guess they all woke up and decided it was time to move, based on warmth, sunshine, and presence of flowers. There are few things more joyous than being surrounded by hundreds of butterflies everywhere you go for days on end, and noticing your neighbors notice. Spring is here, summer is coming, and planning can help us make the most of it. How long has it been since you: Had a picnic Threw a Frisbee Went to the beach Played in a sprinkler Roller skated Napped in a hammock Rode a bike Laid down a blanket for stargazing ...and how much of your warm-weather-related outdoor equipment is buried in a garage, shed, storage unit, or other impossible mound of junk? I like to do semi-major cleaning jobs on a quarterly basis. This is partly because there’s no way I would want to save it up and do it once a year. It’s also because it’s my way of declaring that I’m taking the next few months off. Yes, I’ll do laundry and cook meals and wash dishes and clean the bathroom. No, I will not be doing any major clutter clearing, sorting of closets, or moving of furniture. I AM TAKING TIME OFF! I fully intend to spend the six warm months of our region out playing and having fun. I’m going to go for walks and ride my bike with my husband. I’m going to lounge around in my favorite chair on our tiny patio with the parrot and the dog. I’m not going to wear socks. So ha. In December, I deal with my severe cabin fever by sorting stuff and purging files. I love starting the New Year with a clean slate, and I really have this huge thing about getting our apartment ready. All surfaces should be dusted and polished. That’s how I celebrate, by making an area look pretty and ready for guests. I like to go through every single cupboard and cabinet and drawer, getting rid of anything that has served its purpose. Things have a certain specific useful lifespan, whether they are lightbulbs or pasta noodles or socks or serving platters. Material objects are designed to be used in certain ways, and if they are truly useful then they eventually get worn out. Just like the Velveteen Rabbit. Sometimes the useful lifespan of an object is just the time that it was useful to me and my household. I can pass it along, where it can become useful to someone else. It’s not up to me to find out who that person might be. I send things back to the Stuff Place, where they rejoin the current of usefulness. In my home, they would get in my way and sit around, drained of meaning, while that other person would have to do without. Almost everything, as far as I’m concerned, should remain in the Stuff Place. I don’t need things until I need them. I don’t like the feeling that I am surrounded by mysterious “supplies” that might or might not “come in handy” for some future disaster. I need my space for my personality and my thoughts. I need a little bit of blank wall and a little bit of room to expand, just in case I want to. When I pass things on and send them back to the Stuff Place, it makes room. It creates breathing space in my home. I have space to live. Why should a bunch of random material objects have more of a claim on my home than I do? Than my husband and my pets and my friends do? I can fill my space with friendship, music, conversation, laughter, thoughts and plans and dreams. Or I can fill it with STUFF. One of the things I do when I shake down my house, at the change of the seasons, is to look at how I’ve been spending my time. One of the areas that gets the most attention is the kitchen, because we cook differently in cold and warm weather. In the winter, I want the soup pot and the big baking pans. In summer, we do a lot more dinner salads. Another area that gets extra focus is the bed, because we swap out our bedding too. That’s as good a time as any to think about what we want near us when we sleep. In the past, we both had cluttered nightstands, and that tends to generate dust. It’s nice not to have to worry about that. Then there’s the area where we both get ready, which in our current studio apartment consists of the bathroom and walk-in closet. What’s going on in the shower rack? How many partial bottles of dog shampoo do we need, really? I clear out my one get-ready drawer next to the sink. I look at my sandals - wait, I don’t seem to have any sandals - and my warm-weather clothes. My husband wears the same clothes all year, and therefore spends the time I am sorting through my closet... napping on the couch with the dog. Behold: minimalism. I have a bag to donate and another bag to take to the clothing recycling bin. (If you’re crafty and you have tons of “cabbage” in the form of fabric scraps, you can recycle that too). You know what I ought to do? I ought to take a few more books off the shelf and plan to read them out in the sun, in the park or next to our apartment pool. I just realized that one of my unread books has passed its ten-year anniversary, because I bought it on a trip with my brother and that was before I got married. Isn’t it crazy, when we realize that some of our stuff has been with us longer than our relationships with mates or pets or even siblings? I love summer. I associate it with a lot of summery activities that, often, I haven’t actually done in years. Maybe decades. I haven’t made the time to do them. Summer comes every year, and then it goes. It goes whether I’ve gone on a picnic, or held a sparkler, or eaten a root beer popsicle, or rollerbladed along the beach... or not. No matter what time it is, now is the time. At this moment, it’s time to plan for fun, and make sure it happens! Cal Newport is back to help us think clearly. It’s no surprise that the author of the incredible and essential Deep Work would bring us a thoughtful, well-researched book like Digital Minimalism. Let’s pause a moment and consider whether our use of electronic devices and social media is intentional.
Newport makes a compelling case that our digital lives have become pervasive without our really realizing it. We never planned to be checking our phones so often; it just happened. Further, this unintentional creeping was deliberately designed by tech companies. They manipulate our attention, using intermittent rewards to keep us hooked and using their products as many minutes a day as possible. What should we do? We should protect how we spend our time. We should make those decisions based on our deepest personal values and the activities we enjoy the most. Digital minimalism is making sure that our social media use, streaming content, gaming, and other uses of our time provide massive value. It’s also making sure that our digital lives aren’t completely crowding out delights like playing music or visiting friends face-to-face. There’s a “new economics” that shifts the unit of measure of value from money to time. Many of us feel that we don’t have enough time, no matter how much money we have. Minimalism is a way of reclaiming our time from cultural default activities and rededicating it to people and activities that are truly important to us. Newport cites the financial independence community and Mr. Money Mustache as examples. Intention over convenience is the goal. Are we actually choosing how we spend our time, and are we respecting our own priorities? Hacks are insufficient for reining in digital consumption, though people have tried. Newport advises a detox, a thirty-day digital declutter, during which we can rediscover all the things we love to do but forgot about, because we always have our phones in our hands. We can then gradually reintroduce digital content, remembering that permanent transformation is what we need to get our lives back. Other people have done it and we can use their example. Digital Minimalism has many examples of digital minimalists who started painting and reading again, among other things. We can use the internet in service of a “leisure renaissance,” learning to do new things, connect with people who share our interests, and find out about events and activities. Digital Minimalism offers a Seasonal Leisure Plan, which can be built either around the academic calendar, quarterly business cycles, or anything else that the individual prefers. Newport also has a plan for Slow Media, a good idea for news junkies like me. We can continue to engage in social media, though most people can get their needs met in 20-40 minutes of use per week! This is a provocative and interesting book. I read it after realizing that I had been filling far too much time reading news articles, and making the resolution to be more aware of my news consumption. I decided that the easiest way to deal with this was to focus on reading full-length books instead, like I’ve done most of my life, and using my devices to support that. It has been wonderful! Why read a bunch of clickbait instead of novels and fascinating books like Digital Minimalism? Now that warm weather is coming, I’m going to sit myself down and think about all the fun things there are to do outdoors, with my phone zipped into my pocket. Favorite quotes: For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds. As I’ve learned by interacting with my readers, many have come to accept a background hum of low-grade anxiety that permeates their daily lives. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the more someone used social media, the more likely they were to be lonely. Here’s my suggestion: schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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