Simplify Your Life — at Work and Home
10 Tips to Get You Started
While your life has plenty of “moving parts” and complexity, you’re not powerless to make changes that can enhance your happiness — and simplifying is a great place to start. What does it mean to simplify? It’s actually different for each of us, but you might think of a simplified life as one from which extra mental and physical clutter have been removed — so you have more time for the things that really matter to you.
Here are 10 simplification strategies from the website Making Sense of Cents — most of which you’ll find are appropriate for work and home:
1. Be more organized. If you’re unorganized, you’re probably wasting a significant amount of time — and certainly adding unnecessary stress to your life. Simply Orderly found the average person spends 12 days per year and the average office worker spends 1.5 hours a day looking for things they can’t find.
2. Spend less time on social media. Imagine what you could do with all that time you spend on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Some statistics say the average person eats up five hours a day on this “pastime.”
3. Declutter. Take a critical look at your surroundings and see what you can easily live without. Sell, donate or trash unnecessary things and you’ll feel a sense of lightness — and you may even be more efficient at work.
4. Consider downsizing. Could you live happily in a smaller space? Moving from a big home to a smaller one will lower your utility bills and insurance costs, decrease your maintenance and repair spending, and lessen your cleaning time, among other benefits.
5. Have fewer clothing options. Is your closet bursting at the seams but you never have anything to wear? Get rid of items you haven’t worn in months and build your wardrobe around the pieces you know you love and will wear more often.
6. Automate your payments. Are you still writing checks to pay your bills? Make your life easier — and make it less likely that you miss a payment — by using your creditors’ autopay options or bill pay from your bank. No more searching for stamps and crossing your fingers that your check gets there on time.
7. Think before you multitask. Consider your strengths and weaknesses to determine whether doing more than one thing at a time is right for you. It’s possible you can multitask some things, but others need your full one-on-one attention.
8. Sit in peace. Can you remember the last time you simply sat in complete silence, with no distractions? I bet not. Doing this once in a while can help you reflect on your life, as well as relax, destress and clear your mind.
9. Create reminders. With so many things on your plate, it’s easy for something to be overlooked — unless you’ve created a reminder for it. You can certainly do this on a paper calendar, but why not use the power of your phone to create reminders for things like business tasks and to-do lists, when it’s time to pay estimated quarterly tax payments and renew license plate tags, and even call a friend?
10. Start saying no more often. If you’re a “yes-person” who simply can’t refuse any request, consider saying no sometimes. Think about everything you’ve said yes to and ask yourself: Did that bring me joy? Did the benefit of the task outweigh the stress it caused? Was I able to make a meaningful difference for myself or someone else? If your answers are mostly no, it’s time to say no the next time you’re asked.
Ready to start simplifying your life, at the office and at home? You’ll find it’s very worthwhile goal that really doesn’t take much effort to achieve.