How to Simplify Your Life with These 9 Strategies
1. Reserve One Evening a Week to Rest
Life can get crazy busy and few people set aside an entire day to do nothing but rest anymore. Our bodies, minds, and spirits still require his time to unravel stress, rejuvenate, and restore. Simplify your life and improve your physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual health by setting aside one evening a week when you are blocked. You can’t go anywhere, or do anything, but unplug from the world, exercise your body, meditate, pray, or just be, read or listen to something wonder or awe-inducing, motivating, or inspiring, get a massage, take a bath, or lay down undisturbed with a good book and a mug of tea.
2. Buy Cards for The Entire Year
Write out all the birthday and event cards you can in one sitting at the beginning of the year. Already address the envelopes and store them in a folder separated by month for easy and fast access.
3. Gift Experiences Over Things
Take the people you love out to experiences instead of gifting things in order to simplify your life and reduce the clutter and belongings of those you love.
4. Put Together Theme Gift Boxes, Bags, or Baskets
You can put together five to twenty theme gift boxes, bags, or baskets that you have ready on hand to gift for surprise birthday parties, dinner invitations, get-well visits, or other opportunities to share your generosity. You may want to put together a basket with wine, chocolates, and a favorite book or movie you recommend, a box with beauty care products like bath bombs, candles, and lotions, or a box with card games, snacks, and beer. Get creative and add a personal touch by including products you love.
By having gifts ready on hand you will save time, effort, and energy in coming up with a new present for each occasion.
5. Create Rituals to Maintain Close Relationships
Life is busy and it can become difficult to invest the time we need to maintain the depth and intimacy in our closest relationships. Creating rituals can help to maintain depth and affection in the relationships that matter most to us. Go minimal with the time investment to ensure that the contact is maintained even when life gets crazy. We tend to overestimate how big-time investments help a relationship and underestimate how quick check-ins can create closeness.
Come up with a specific day and time when you will call someone you care about for just a five to ten-minute conversation. Or agree to meet for coffee for half an hour on the first day of each month. Decided to go for an hour walk and dinner once a year the day after your birthday. Commit to cuddling once a day right after dinner on the couch for five minutes.
Creating rituals will not only simplify how you invest in and grow your relationships with those you love. It will also add higher life quality and positive emotion to your life.
6. Create a List with 6 Favorite Meals
Create a list of your six favorite meals and cycle through the same ones over and over again so that you never need to wonder about what to shop for or cook. Add in one new recipe per week on the seventh day to add variation to your life. Consider adding the new meal to your weekly rotation. Do you have more favorite meals on your list than 6? Then you can create a 14-day meal rotation.
7. Eliminate All Subscriptions for a Month
Life is faster and more distracting, and we have more information, things, and sensory input streaming at us by the day.
There are correspondingly more subscriptions than ever to music, TV, movies, and other entertainment. Subscriptions to boxes of products arriving at your door. Subscriptions of information delivered to your iPhone, web browser, or email account, or mailbox.
Take a step back by deleting all subscriptions for a week. Analyze at the end of the week which, if any, of the subscriptions you missed.
Yes, Netflix is a subscription. It counts. You may be hesitant to give Netflix up for an entire month. Do you know what that means my friend? It could indicate an addiction to the service. You’re creative. I am one hundred percent certain you can brainstorm some other way to entertain yourself and pull yourself up into a more elevated state of being.
You may think you can’t live without the music streaming to your phone. Go old school. Download a few favorite songs to your personal digital device. Go out, buy, and read a physical newspaper for a change. Go to a dollar movie theater. Start going out for walks in nature.
At the end of the 30-day period, you can sit down and select no more than three to six subscriptions to have in your life at any time.
Decide which subscriptions help you to thrive, uplift your spirit and emotions, help you with personal growth, or give you more time, freedom, or serenity.
If you decide you want a new subscription in the future, then you need to delete one of your existing subscriptions first. For example, if you already have a subscription to say, Netflix, Audible Books, Spotify, the Economist, Kindle Unlimited, and the Podcast Oprah, then you need to delete one of the subscriptions to add on Mindvalley. You may need to wait for a paid subscription to end before starting a new subscription. In my opinion, patience is something we have less of than previous generations. Who can blame us when we can get almost anything we want either instantly or in 1-2 business days?
Keeping the rule of only 3 to 5 subscriptions will not only simplify your life, but it will also help your finances. Subscriptions are expensive and almost always automatically renew. It is easy to forget which subscriptions are due to renew at which times and cancel the ones you no longer want or need at the right time. Take time after you start ANY new subscription to go into your account and cancel the automatic renewal button. You will be giving yourself some peace of mind and potentially saving yourself money too.
8. Sort Photos Once a Month. Make a Photo Album Once a Year.
How many photos do you have on your phone? How many photos do you have unsorted and sitting on your computer? When was the last time you looked at any of them?
Go through all the photos you have taken on the last day of the month and delete all of the photos that don’t uplift you. Next, consider simplifying your life even more by only allowing yourself to keep ten photos a month. Ten photos each month will give you one hundred and twenty photos in your album at the end of the year! That is certainly enough photos.
Being forced to choose only ten photos to keep each month will cause you to give more attention to taking photos that will bring you future joy when you look at them. Just how many photos do you need of a party that you didn’t enjoy? Or how many birthday party photos does your child need in the photo album?
Once a year, I recommend January 1, sort your photos into a photo album. You can print the album, or if you are a minimalist, then you can create a video out of the photos and save it to an external drive. You can send the physical or digital photo album out to loved ones, such as grandparents, so they can share in the last year of your and your family’s life.
The process of making the photo album can become a ritual of reviewing the moments of the past year as you move forward into the new one.
Not only that but by having a specific day when you make your photo album, you will be taking one more thing out of the back of your mind that you feel you should get done. You will feel lighter as a result.
9. Clean Your Digital World
Delete every application on your phone for one week. Reflect at the end of the week on how you feel. Only return apps to your phone the next week that uplift you or help you live a higher quality life.
Look through the hard drive on your computer(s) and organize all your files into a system that makes sense to you. Next, consider clearing your entire computer of all files to an external hard drive for a fresh start.
Go through your email and delete all unnecessary correspondence. Unsubscribe from all content for a fresh start. Go one week and then see what you miss seeing in your inbox. You can always subscribe again.
Give up all interaction with social media for a week. Analyze how you feel at the end of each day. At the end of the week consider eliminating all social media but one to free up time in your life.
10. Get Rid of 40-70 percent of What You Own
Sound impossible? You will surprise yourself that you can do without at least half of what you own. Give yourself the potential to open up more freedom in your life. You can become free from the responsibility to care for and organize these belongings. Opening up space will create more time for rest, relaxation, play, fun, adventure, and personal growth.
Start with Your Clothes
How many sweaters do you need? How many pairs of jeans are necessary? Is it adding to the quality of your life to have dozens of lounge-wear outfits? Or do you end up wearing the same clothes most of the time?
Proceed to Your Bathroom
Which personal care products do you use every day? Which do you use every week? How many have you used once and never touched again? Time to do a sweep. Do not keep anything you don’t use at least once a week. Is it unopened and you haven’t used it yet? Place it in a storage box and place it in the closet. Resolve to not buy any new personal care products until all of those you own are used up.
Look into Your Kitchen Cabinets
Which pots and pans, kitchen wear, and utensils do you use weekly? Everything else can be given away. Yes, I know that you think you need a turkey platter for Thanksgiving.
No, you do not need something that you only need one day a year. You can borrow one from a family member or friend, or you can start using that turkey platter for daily use as a cheese and cracker, veggie, or fruit platter.
Go Through Your Linen Closet
Do you love your linens? Are they the highest quality you can afford? High-quality towels and sheets can give your home and daily life a boost in luxury and life quality. Invest in soft, luxurious towels and bed linens. But ask yourself, how many sheets and towels does one require? You may have the perfect amount. Most people buy new sheets but keep the old ones as well. Be sure to release old linens to someone who would appreciate them when new linens come into your home.
Conquer the Other Closets and Drawers in Your Home
Look into the Closets. What do you use regularly? Are there belongings you are keeping for just-in-case scenarios? It is time to get rid of these belongings. If you have not used the belonging in the past 9 months, then it is time to let it go.
Basement, Storage Space, and Garage
Do you have a basement, garage, or Storage Space where you dump things you don’t know what to do with right now, can’t bring yourself to get rid of, or no longer need? You’re not alone. Life gets busy. It’s time to turn our attention to where you have stock-piled belongings that are weighing you down.
Get a large garbage bag and throw all the trash away first. Next, proceed to place all things you have not used in the past 6 months into a giveaway bag or bags. In a final step sort through the belongings remaining and be sure that you either love it, it makes you feel uplifted and happy, or you need it. Organize all things so that they have a newly assigned place, or ‘home’, on a shelf, hook, or box.
Look Through Book Shelves
Look for books you have never read, books that do not bring you joy when you hold them in your hands, and anything you have been ‘meaning to read’ but just never get to. Let these books go to a new person and place that will appreciate them. Free up space. Get light.