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Simple Manifesto #72: Will this decision simplify my life?

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:54:15 +0000

This is part of our series on Leo Babauta’s Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 72nd (and final) idea in the manifesto is:

Always ask: Will this simplify my life? If the answer is no, reconsider.

Looking for direction | Photo by Jonathan Blundell

In the spirit of this point in the manifesto, I hope you’ll excuse me to keep this post brief.

My mind is a million other places today — and unfortunately one of those million places is not this website.

So I’m asking… and challenge you to ask yourself today… “Will this decision simplify my life?”

If the answer is no — simply reconsider or don’t do it.

As an aside, if you’re the praying kind, I’d appreciate your prayers for My Life and our boys today. They’re OK but there’s been a few areas of concern as of late. My Life has been off work since Thursday and she went to see her doctor (unscheduled) this afternoon while I’m still at work. We’re hoping for a few answers and/or good news from the appointment. We greatly appreciate your thoughts and concerns.

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Simple Manifesto #72: Will this decision simplify my life?

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Simple Manifesto #67: Simplify your financial life

admin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 14:55:05 +0000

This is part of our series on Leo Babauta’s Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 67th idea in the manifesto is:

Simplify your financial life. Article from a financial planning expert here.

Financial Blues | Photo by Psyberartist

I know very little about finances outside of the standard checking, savings and credit card accounts.

Currently our financial planning involves the automatic deductions our companies take out for retirement. Perhaps its the simplest approach — auto-pilot — but I realize it’s also probably not the smartest.

However, Damien Olenslager gives some great advice about investing your age.

Damien suggests the older you are, the less risk you want to take with your investments.

And the younger you are, the more liberal you can be with your risk since you have more time to recover if your investments go south.

So if you’re 20 years old, you should invest 20% of your investment money in safe, secure funds. The other 80% should be invested in stocks. By the time you’re 31 (like myself), you should invest 31% of your money in safe funds and the other 69% in stocks.

As you age you continue to adjust the funds to stock ratio.

(Read more in Damien’s FREE e-book)

Are there other tips/pointers you have for folks like me who have simply put their financial life on auto-pilot?

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Simple Manifesto #67: Simplify your financial life

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Simple Manifesto #66: Simplify your budget

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:40:25 +0000

This is part of our series on Leo Babauta’s Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 65th idea in the manifesto is:

Simplify your budget. Many people skip budgeting (which is very important) because it’s too hard or too complicated. Read more here.

The Pike Place Piggy Bank | Photo by Jonathan Blundell

Laurie and I would say we have a pretty simple budget — most of it’s in our head.

But that’s also where we can get ourselves in trouble — like everyone else, right?

We have to remind ourselves to stop and review our budget every couple months to be sure we’re staying on track with our plans. And with the twins coming, we’re in the process of finding ways to tighten our belt even more and cut back in other areas.

Overall, the key to budgeting is keeping the budget balanced.

Whether you automate or unautomate your finance you must ensure you’re bringing in more money than your letting go of.

Economics 101.

Tools for managing your finances…

There are countless tools out there for managing your budget, but one of our most used tools are the apps our bank provides for monitoring our accounts on our phones. It’s makes it uber easy to be check-in and see where we’re spending our money.

We also use the apps (and/or the website) for online bill pay as well.

If your bank doesn’t offer a specific app, check out Mint.com. They have apps for iPhone and Android that do essentially (if not more) that our bank’s apps.

We’ve also used the cash/envelope method in times when we really need to tighten our belts. We’ll pull cash out of our accounts each month for gas, food and misc. expenses. It’s a huge help. Actually using cash makes you really re-think your purchases.

It’s like visiting a casino or an arcade that uses coins vs those fancy “debit cards.”

When you’re using coins you’re a lot more aware of what you have left vs. the seemingly unending supply of credits on the cards.

In addition to these ideas, you can also find a lot more information and tips on budgeting and finances from:

What have you found works best for maintaining your budget and finances?

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Simple Manifesto #66: Simplify your budget

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Simple Manifesto #65: Simplify your budget

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:55:54 +0000

This is part of our series on Leo Babauta’s Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 65th idea in the manifesto is:

Simplify your budget. Many people skip budgeting (which is very important) because it’s too hard or too complicated. Read more here.

The Pike Place Piggy Bank | Photo by Jonathan Blundell

Laurie and I would say we have a pretty simple budget — most of it’s in our head.

But that’s also where we can get ourselves in trouble — like everyone else, right?

Overall, the key to budgeting is keeping the budget balanced.

Whether you automate or unautomate your finance you must ensure you’re bringing in more money than your letting go of.

Economics 101.

Tools for managing your finances…

We also use the apps (and/or the website) for online bill pay as well.

If your bank doesn’t offer a specific app, check out Mint.com. They have apps for iPhone and Android that do essentially (if not more) that our bank’s apps.

It’s like visiting a casino or an arcade that uses coins vs those fancy “debit cards.”

When you’re using coins you’re a lot more aware of what you have left vs. the seemingly unending supply of credits on the cards.

In addition to these ideas, you can also find a lot more information and tips on budgeting and finances from:

What have you found works best for maintaining your budget and finances?

Join us!

Write a blog post about the point above and then share the link in the comments below…

Simple Manifesto #65: Simplify your budget

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Simple Manifesto #64: Simplify your online life

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:19:20 +0000

This is part of our series on Leo Babauta’s Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 64th idea in the manifesto is:

Simplify your online life. If you have too much going on online, here are a few ways to simplify it all. Article here.

Where’s the any key? | Photo by Jonathan Blundell

We’ve written about simplifying your online life before, but it never hurts to remind each other again and again.

Like many things in life, it’s easy to take a stand and simplify our online life.

We make a big effort and tell folks about all our new changes. We commit to a new lifestyle of only checking our e-mail 3 times a day, turning off all our Facebook notifications, etc. etc.

We take extreme action, simplify our online life and then slowly but surely, it all starts creeping back in bit by bit (literally).

I’ve seen it in my own life as well.

When my schedule gets slow, I find myself checking in with Twitter and Facebook more.

And when my schedule gets busy, I see my e-mail inbox going from zero to full clutter.

Simply put — we have to continually set our mind upon simplifying our life — both online and offline.

Some of my rules for simplifying online…

Turn off your online notifications. You don’t need to be reminded to check your e-mail or online networks.
Reduce your online networks. If you need to be on multiple networks, pick two or three and focus on those only.
Inbox zero. Every time you check your e-mail (hopefully only a minimal number of times a day) make it a priority to leave no e-mails in your inbox.
Unsubscribe. Remove yourself from as many e-mail and RSS subscriptions as possible.

What other ways have you found to simplify your online life?

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Simple Manifesto #64: Simplify your online life

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The Simple Manifesto #60 – Simplify your RSS feeds

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 03:48:40 +0000

This is part of our series on Leo Babauta’s Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 60th idea in the manifesto is:

Simplify your RSS feeds. If you’ve got dozens of feeds, or more than a hundred (as I once did), you probably have a lot of stress in trying to keep up with them all. Simplify your feed reading. See How to Drop an RSS Feed Like a Bad Habit.

RSS Feeds

This is an area I’ve made some drastic cuts in over the last several months. When I started this journey (January 2010) I was subscribed to more than 300 feeds in Google Reader. Shortly after reading Leo’s book, I decided to simplify some more and dropped down to around 270 subscriptions. By the end of February, I was below 200 — at 198.

Somewhere along the way I was down to 175, but I’ve also slowly seen that number creep up (currently at 186) as I’ve found a number of amazing bloggers writing about Living Simply and Minimalism.

Leo on the other hand only reads 16 or so RSS feeds a day. Crazy!

Of course my wife checks in with only 20 or so blogs each day (if that). And she keeps it simple by only bookmarking the sites she really cares about. When she gets the time, she’ll open her browser and manually visit each of the sites she wants to check in on.

So what is it about my RSS reading that keeps me checking in?

I honestly enjoy checking in on the latest news. I enjoy being “in the know.”

But I’ve also realized that my enjoyment can be taken to the extreme for sure — which is why I’ve cut my subscriptions in half over the last several months — and why I’m continually checking to see if there are other feeds that need to be dropped.

It’s like purging everything else — if I haven’t read it or received any noticeable benefit from it in the last three months — toss it.

Tips for purging…

One of the best ways I’ve found to track this is with Google Reader’s built in trends information. Simply click Trends on the left hand column (in the top section under Home) and you can find out which blogs you read most, which blogs you share content from the most, and how active your various subscriptions are.

In addition, I know some of you still aren’t using an RSS reader (which is fine) but perhaps you’ve subscribed to lots of newsletters in your e-mail. Now’s a good opportunity to get rid of the ones you rarely read.

For a quick solution, simply search, “unsubscribe” in your inbox and start unsubscribing from those e-mails that haven’t benefited you in recent months (just don’t unsubscribe from ours!! ).

Remember, there’s nothing inherently wrong with subscribing to a lot of RSS feeds, or e-mail newsletters, its like anything else — when it consumes your time and energy and takes you away from the things that really matter — that’s when the problems begin.

So, how many RSS feeds/newsletters will you purge today?

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The Simple Manifesto #60 – Simplify your RSS feeds

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Simple Manifesto #58 – Read Simplify Your Life, by Elaine St. James

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:49:51 +0000

This is part of our series on The Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 58th idea in the manifesto is:

Read Simplify Your Life, by Elaine St. James. One of my favorite all-time authors on simplicity. Read my review here.

Seattle waterfront (looking east) | Photo by Jonathan Blundell

This is another one of Leo’s suggestions that I haven’t had the chance to do or try yet.

I’ve added it to my Amazon.com wish list — so hopefully I’ll come across it in my favorite used bookstore sometime soon, or find a copy at our local library before too long — otherwise I know where to find it on Amazon.

Perhaps some of you have read the book and would love to share your thoughts on it.

I had a great conversation with one of our readers about Walden by Thoreau last week (you can read it in the comments section here).

So I’m hoping some of you can give us some more background on this book and author as well.

Also, I’d love to hear some more suggestions to who your favorite Living Simply or Minimalist writers are.

The Minimalist Business

And while we’re on the topic of books, Everett Bogue, who I mentioned last week in the post about Walden, is re-releasing his Minimalist Business book tomorrow.

Everett’s writing keeps getting better and better — and he’s the real deal when it comes to running a successful minimalist life and business.

If you’re interested at all in a successful minimalist business, either part-time or full-time, I’m this will be a great resource for you.

You can create a minimalist business in order to live and work from anywhere.

The Internet has broken down all of the barriers in communication, and this in turn has broken down all of the barriers in sales. If there are no costs, you can sell to anyone in the world.

Any one person can contribute value to a tribe of 1000, or 10,000 people who will support them online.

I’d encourage you to pick up this book as soon as it’s released (10 a.m. PST).

I missed it the first time around, but luckily tomorrow he’ll continue his special early-bird pricing for the first 24-hours.

So get in early.

Click here to view more details.

UPDATE: Joshua Becker has a great review of Everett’s book here.

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Simple Manifesto #58 – Read Simplify Your Life, by Elaine St. James

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Simple Manifesto #48 – Simplify your filing system

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 01:20:35 +0000

This is part of our series on The Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 48th idea in the manifesto is:

Simplify your filing system. Stacking a bunch of papers just doesn’t work. But a filing system doesn’t have to be complicated to be useful. Create a simple system.

Scanning paperwork | Photo by Jonathan Blundell

I’m still working on my filing system both at home and at work.

We’re probably doing better at home than I am at the office.

My preference is to scan everything and toss it in the trash, but because of the nature of my job, that’s still not possible — even though it’s been requested that we move to a paperless office.

So typically, I scan everything (work related) at the office and toss everything that’s not legally required to be kept.

Unfortunately, it’s that pile of legally required paperwork that grows on my desk. Since it’s supposed to be filed in another location, it normally piles up over several weeks (or months) until I take the time to go file it elsewhere.

At home, I’d also prefer to scan and then toss everything, but we haven’t gone out and found a good scanner yet to do the job. (Got any suggestions?)

Instead, we typically clip our incoming bills to the fridge (so they’re visible), file any important papers in our one drawer filing cabinet (home, new home, newer home, truck, car, car insurance, health insurance, etc. etc.), and then throw everything else away.

No matter what you do, the key is to process your paperwork consistently.

Don’t let it pile up — because then it only gets that much harder to do.

Secondly, toss anything and everything you don’t need.

It’s far easier to process and file papers when you have less of them to process.

Finally, create a system that works for you.

Whether it’s alphabetical, by topic, or by date, create a filing system that makes sense to you and you can stick to it. I’m not going to be the one looking for your important papers, Leo Babauta wont, and neither will David Allen.

It’s got to be a system that works for you, keeps your paperwork easy to search through, keeps the number of papers to a bare minimum and keeps your clutter down to zero.

Got any other ideas for great filing systems? What’s worked best for you?

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Simple Manifesto #46 – Simplify your goals

admin — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:50:52 +0000

This is part of our series on The Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 46th idea in the manifesto is:

Simplify your goals. Instead of having half a dozen goals or more, simplify it to one goal. Not only will this make you less stressed, it will make you more successful. You’ll be able to focus on that One Goal, and give it all of your energy. That gives you much better chances for success.

109/365 Goals | Photo by Vinni

A while back, I put together a simplicity statement:

I will live simply by investing in people and reducing my dependence on stuff so that I may truly love all that’s been given to me and create a better world for those around me.

While this is a great mission/simplicity statement, it may be a bit lengthy to serve as a single goal for my life.

I’m also not sure it includes everything I feel passionate about.

Simplicity is definitely a great goal — but it’s not the whole of me.

So as I think about my life, my goals, my aspirations, and the things that matter most in my life, I’m drawn to borrow a phrase from my community of faith…

Build spaces of grace. Create intentional relationships. Share relevant truth.

This has been a goal of our community since day one and it’s something I’ve adopted as my own.

Whether it’s in my marriage, meeting with guys during the week, blogging here or blogging elsewhere, writing books or just working my 9-5, this is my ultimate goal.

Build spaces of grace.

Create spaces where people are welcome
Where people are loved
Where your past is not held against you
Your present is not held against you
A space where we’re focused on a better future for everyone

Create intentional relationships.

Relationships don’t just happen over night
They take time
They take someone stepping out and being vulnerable with another
They take a willingness to love others
Even the unloved
I’ve found the Intentional Challenge (aka community fertilizer) to be a great help in this regard

Share relevant truth.

Truth can be used against people, or for people
Sometimes it can be used in very hurtful ways
My hope and dream is that whatever I’m doing, I’m sharing truth that matters to that person and that moment
And not only relevant truth — but sharing it in a loving, gracious manner
Telling someone the benefits of a simple life may be wonderful — but it’s not always relevant to a person’s needs
The only way you can truly share relevant truth with someone is if you’ve built a space of grace and been intentional about building relationships within it

I have to admit, while this goal may look simple, it really isn’t.

It takes time, effort, sometimes stress and tears to live out.

But I’m also a big believer that Love Wins.

And in the end, the effort is well worth it.

So what about you? What are your goals? How can you simplify them down to one?

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The Simple Manifesto #13 – Simplify your wardrobe

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:14:35 +0000

This is part of our series on The Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 13th idea in the manifesto is:

Simplify your wardrobe. Is your closet bursting full? Are your drawers so stuffed they can’t close (I’m talking about dresser drawers here, not underwear). Simplify your wardrobe by getting rid of anything you don’t actually wear. Try creating a minimal wardrobe by focusing on simple styles and a few solid colors that all match each other. Read more.

I really like this idea. I always have trouble figuring out what goes with what — My Life often has to correct me before I go out in public.

“You’re going to wear that?” she’ll ask with a raised eyebrow.

“Apparently not,” I respond as I head back to the closet to change my outfit.

When I first started my current 9-5, I purchased a number of button down shirts that were all solid colors and would easily go with khakis.

Pretty monochromatic if you ask me.

Which is actually great.

It cuts the time spent deciding what to wear in half.

But of course I love variety and monochromatic can get a little boring at times, so I’d recommend having one or two shirts that you really love but will also go with at least one a couple different pairs of pants (i.e. jeans and khaki).

Because if you don’t love it, you won’t wear it — and if you don’t wear it/use it, you should get rid of it.

Things aren’t valuable if they’re not used. So by holding onto things, you are preventing them from actually being used by someone who needs them. – Leo Babatau

As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve purged my wardrobe/closet recently but I’m sure I can do more.

I’ve hung on to some of those clothes I don’t like wearing, keeping them around just in case I need something a little warmer or in case ALL my other clothes are dirty (like that ever happens).

So, I need to work my way back through my closet, giving those “not so loved” clothes a new home and work harder at buying fewer clothes — that I really love.

How have you simplified your wardrobe? Is it something that comes easily or hard for you?

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The Simple Manifesto #13 – Simplify your wardrobe

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