OK, so did you start your 100 Item Release For Peace Challenge yet? If so, you’re on your way to a less cluttered space.
Today we’re gonna look at ways to declutter your time.
Just like the Use/Love philosophy for stuff, your time commitments should consist (mostly) of tasks you know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. In other words, if you love it, keep doing it. Ideally, your time should be spent on things that bring you joy or serve an important function in your life (OK, most of us don’t love our jobs but they do serve a very important function of making us money to pay the mortgage and get Chinese take out, are you with me?)
Obviously, there may be some commitments that don’t meet these criteria, which you just can’t get out of. But I’ll bet there are some you can ditch without too much trouble. Still inspired by your book club, or have the pages worn thin? Does your toddler really need to do gymnastics, swimming, and T-ball? You get the picture.
One way I declutter my time is by outsourcing tasks I really dislike. Housecleaning is one of them. Remember when I said on Day 2 that Simplicity is not the same thing as Thriftiness? Yeah, the cheapskate in me really hates to fork out the dough to pay someone else to scrub my toilets, but Simplicity guru in me really loves it 😉 It frees me up to do things that I enjoy – things that bring me energy instead of drain me.
I’ve also paid local high school or college students to do ironing, data entry, or catch up on filing. If money’s tight, maybe you can swap with a friend. You do her dusting and she mops your kitchen. Add a glass of wine, talk about the latest issue of Cosmo and BINGO – you’ve just done book club 😉
Got other ideas for how to declutter your time? Are there activities you can eliminate from your schedule? Tasks you can outsource? Leave a comment below and let me know!
