1. Reduce the Clutter in Your Life

A giant step on the road to simplicity is to eliminate the odds and ends that clutter up your home, your car, your office, and your life. If you’re moving to a smaller home (#19), paring down will no doubt be a necessity. As you start your program to reduce the clutter, the guideline is easy: If you haven’t used it in a year or more, get rid of it.

Getting rid of it can mean any number of things: give it to a friend, give it to Goodwill, take it to a consignment shop, sell it at a garage sale, recycle it if you can, or put it in the Dumpster if you can’t.

Start with your clothes closets and branch out from there. Clean out every closet, every drawer, every shelf, in every room of your house, including the kitchen. Do you really need a full-sized Cuisinart and a mini-Cuisinart and a handheld chopper and a mixer? (See #35 for some ideas on how to get rid of these things.) Don’t forget the front hall closet, the linen closet, tool chests, and the medicine cabinets. (See #66; it will save you a lot of time trying to decide what to keep.) Remember the laundry room, the garage, the attic, the basement, your office, your car, and any storage space you may be renting or borrowing.

When Gibbs and I started to simplify, we went through this exercise and were amazed at the amount of “stuff” we had accumulated that we simply didn’t use anymore. Getting rid of it all was a tremendously liberating experience.

Soon after that, we came to the realization that we really had far more living space than we actually needed or even wanted, so we moved from our house to a small condominium. In the process of moving, we went through a second uncluttering exercise, and managed to free ourselves from another load of things we would no longer have room for.

We’ve found, as we’ve refined our simplification program over the past couple of years, that we’re getting better and better at letting go of the things we know we’ll never use again. You may not be ready to get rid of everything in your closets on the first uncluttering round or two, but I promise that once you begin to experience the exhilaration and the sense of freedom such an exercise generates, uncluttering will become easier and easier.

You can complete the initial stage of an unclutter program in a couple of Saturday afternoons. Be sure to have your children go through this exercise with you. It’s a great way for them to learn at an early age how to keep their lives uncluttered. Just schedule the time and get started.

Remember, the idea is not to deny yourself the things you want, but to free yourself from the things you don’t want.