HOT TIP // Marginal Utility

The mythology of instagram minimalism is having as little as possible: one bowl, one towel, one pair of shoes.

But having multiples of some items is valuable,  as long we’re aware of marginal utility.

Marginal utility is an idea from economics about how a consumer’s benefit changes when they get an additional unit of a good or service. Marginal utility might increase, stay the same, or decrease

Take socks, for example.

If we only have one pair of socks, getting a second pair adds a tremendous benefit: we don’t have to wear the first pair day in and day out until our big toe pokes through, or go barefoot when they’re in the wash.

A third pair adds some more value. A fourth adds more. A tenth pair adds a little more, but that change in benefit isn’t quite as dramatic as that 2nd pair.

At some point, an additional pair of socks won’t add value at all. Accumulating socks past that point will actually start to have a negative impact. 

We can’t store all of our socks in our drawer and it takes an hour to match up each sock after laundry day. Having more and more socks has made our life harder. 

Our containers help keep us at that ideal number, and weeding periodically will return us there if we’ve exceeded it. As long as our multiples are adding value and not creating burdensome redundancies, we can keep them with confidence.

HOT TIP// We Are What We Wear

When the pull to spend all day in a robe is strong, I remember the concept of “enclothed cognition.”

What we’re wearing has a profound effect on our thoughts and our behavior.  Research has shown this effect time and again, and we likely have anecdotal evidence of this effect in our own lives.

A tailored jacket can imbue confidence and focus our attention, while casual jeans can make us feel friendlier and more carefree.

A day in pajamas can make us feel cozy and relaxed on a Sunday, but lazy and unproductive on a Monday. 

Now, I typically keep my stuff instead of buying and purging, buying and purging. That cycle strains our wallets, our planet, and our home’s organizational systems.

But after having a baby, I needed clothing that fit my body as it is now, not how it used to be. I wasted a few days feeling uncomfortable and self-conscious in pre-baby pants, and a few more days feeling frumpy in my stretch pants.

Then I got wise and went shopping for a capsule wardrobe updated for my new hotness. My energy and mood is better when I put on my new jeans and a cute nursing-friendly top. Now more than ever, my wardrobe needs to be comfortable, curated, and 155% machine washable. 

Paying attention to how we feel, think, and act in our clothes is a simple way to declutter our closets AND a powerful way to shop with intention.

HOT TIP// Click Point

Is our home simplified... or barren? 

Cluttered.... or abundant? 

What’s our personal “click point?”

Marie Kondo says the “click point” is when the amount of space and the amount of  stuff are in perfect balance. When we reach this optimum, our home’s energy  is calm and cheerful. That’s the magic Kondo is getting at in the “Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” 

My house has been far from my click point these past few months, absorbing two adults working from home and a new baby. Living above my clutter threshold had been an additional stressor in a stressful year, particularly when 95% of that year was spent in the house.

But  now, I’m slowly  getting back to that preferred state. Clearing out the makeshift office, letting go of ill-fitting clothes, passing along hand-me-downs our baby didn’t need, cooking through the overstock of pantry goods.

We might be tempted to slash and burn our way through our house out of desperation, black trash bags in hand. 

But we’d serve out future selves better by slowing down and tuning in to our gut. That way we don’t stop decluttering too soon, or blow right past our click point and feel deprived and ill-equipped for our lives.

As more things leave my home than enter these days, I feel closer to the serenity and simplicity that I enjoyed in previous seasons of my life. My click point might be different these days, but I’ll know it when I reach it.

HOT TIP // Corkscrew Test 3.0

I once prided myself on my practically empty basement. 

Then I had a kid.

Instead of my “minimalist baby essentials,” which would likely only apply to my kid, my house, and my lifestyle anyway,  I’ll suggest the Corkscrew Test.

The Corkscrew Test is just three simple questions, adapted from Sam Bennett's work at The Organized Artist:

• Is there an alternative to the tool that would work just as well?

• Do you do that job so frequently that your life would be markedly easier with that specific tool?

• Is the tool challenging to store or to keep clean?

With this test in mind, we skipped the bottle warmer. We don’t use bottles that often, and we can just heat  water in a mug if the need arises.

But we registered for not one but TWO weighted wipe containers. One-handed wipe grabbing on every floor?! Yes, please!

Sometimes a hyper specific item is no match for a versatile workhorse. Other times, it eliminates enough daily friction to justify its place on our registry and in our homes.

And someday, when I’m an empty nester, I’ll long for the days my basement was filled with a dozen huge bins for one single tiny human.

HOT TIP // Gift Cards

I’m pro-gift card. Roughly ⅓ of the stuff that I haul out of my clients’ homes were gifts purchased for them by other people. Ill-fitting clothing, decor not to their taste, food they don’t eat, on and on. Gift cards help prevent that.

That said, gift cards can still generate clutter if we’re not careful.

Gift card givers say: Get something you would never buy yourself otherwise!

I say: Get something you would definitely buy yourself otherwise!

Gift cards can feel like bonus money, so we often blow them on “bonus stuff.” Bonus as in unnecessary, impulsive, and potentially future-clutter.

Clutter we get for free is still clutter. And clutter is expensive. 

Instead of accumulating free clutter, we can “budget” our gift cards to make purchases we want and need from our shopping list.  Gift cards are typically valid for at least a year. No need to purchase something RIGHT NOW.

We can make a note in our shopping list of the gift cards we have available and, as we add needs to our shopping list, scan to see which items we can purchase with which gift cards.

We can also convert gift cards to cash on one of the many internet marketplaces for such things, or pass them along to someone who could really use them.

I gratefully use gift cards to buy regular, unsexy purchases like food, gas, and toiletries. I’ve enjoyed months of coffee at home buying bags of beans with Starbucks gift cards. I just added Dr. Bronner’s to my shopping list and saw that I have $15 to Target, which could satisfy my soap needs and prevent me from blowing that money on future-garbage at the Dollar Spot. My clutter-free home is a gift that keeps on giving. 

HOT TIP // Fixed vs. Fluctuating

I’ve made a few purchases to live with less clutter. 

I realize that sounds oxymoronic, but sometimes purchasing an item with a fixed volume can corral, or even replace, items that have fluctuating volumes.

Fluctuations can lead to mess because nature abhors a vacuum. We use up items at different rates, and space in one area attracts the overflow from another. Like when our stash of paper plates topples over into the space created when we deplete our paper towel reserves, or our long-forgotten bag of polenta collapses into the space created by our dwindling bag of brown rice. 

But when volume is fixed, we can design and maintain a good system long-term.

One way to move from fluctuating to fixed is to purchase containers and decant.

Containers create a firm boundary and always take up the same amount of space no matter how full they are. The level of rice may change within a glass jar, but the jar itself takes up a fixed amount of space no matter what, maintaining the organization of the pantry and preventing a vacuum. 

Another tactic is to purchase reusable versions of disposable things when appropriate. 

A reusable Keurig cup, a handful of microfiber cleaning cloths, a refillable water bottle, stainless steel straws, reusable shopping bags… these purchases will eliminate the wild fluctuations of their disposable counterparts. Plus these alternatives save time and money in the long run and create less waste. 

Our homes will always be dynamic. But if we can tip the balance in favor of fixed over fluctuating, we can spend less time organizing and re-organzing our homes and more time simply living in them.

HOT MESS // Parkinson’s Law

How come we’re more productive when we have a full schedule? Why does it take us practically the whole day to complete one tiny task if we have loads of free time? 

Two words: Parkinson’s Law. 

Parkinson’s Law suggests that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. 

We often assume that if only we had more time, we’d be able to do more things, and do them better. Parkinson’s Law suggests that’s not often the case. 

If we have an hour to write an email, best believe we’ll use up that whole hour. We’ll spend it writing the email, and rewriting the email, and getting distracted by shiny objects, and suddenly feeling very, very hungry. 

If we have only ten minutes to send off that email, we’ll probably finish in 5.

Deadlines and hard stops focus our efforts and attention on the task at hand. Plus, we’re faster and better at doing tedious things if we know in advance when they’re going to end. 

Parkinson’s Law explains why my house gets so clean, so quickly when an impromptu guest is coming by.  

It also explains why companies stick with an outdated 5-day workweek when plenty of experts agree a 4-day work week would be plenty sufficient. Nothing expands to fill the time allotted like a routine meeting. 

I try to hack Parkinson’s Law by scheduling nagging tasks into the nooks and crannies of an already full day, knowing that the momentum of productivity and the time crunch of my next obligation will keep me efficient. If I do need to accomplish a nagging task on an otherwise leisurely day, I’ll set a timer or listen to a short podcast to prevent it from seeping into my whole afternoon. 

Parkinson’s Law is another reason I highly discourage setting “get organized” as a New Year’s resolution. If we give ourselves a calendar year to “get organized” we can be sure it’s going to take us that entire year and then some. 

If we dedicate a weekend to tackling our organization projects once and for all, we’ll head into Monday with a tidy home.

HOT TIP // The Spectrum Test

We all know and love the Marie Kondo test: Does it spark joy? This yes or no binary is beautiful in its simplicity, but sometimes that question can feel unanswerable. 

Enter the Spectrum Test. We arrange each item of a category in a spectrum across a bed or a clear stretch of floor. 

At one end, we put the item we love the most. At the opposite end, we put the item we’re most looking forward to getting rid of.

If we need some help to determine these anchor items, we can use this little thought experiment:

If there were a leak in my ceiling and I could only save one item from the impending waterfall, which cherished item would I save?

If there were a leak in my ceiling and I could save everything else by using one item to plug up the hole, which item would I sacrifice?

Once we’ve set the poles, we can arrange all the other sweaters, or books, or coffee mugs, in a line from most cherished to least. 

It helps to make the spectrum quickly without analyzing, or even thinking, too much. Our subconscious knows how we really feel about an item, and it will tell us through our gut reactions. 

Then, with our spectrum complete, we get to decide the cut-off point for keeping things. Is our closet/kitchen/vanity only open to those items in the top 50%? The top 25%? The cream-of-the-crop top 10%? 

We get to be the bouncers at the door of our very exclusive house party.

HOT MESS // Busy

Our brains give us a little hit of dopamine each time we accomplish a goal or cross a nagging task off our to-do list. (Conversely, leaving things undone means they linger in our cognitive awareness, distracting us from what we’d prefer to focus on.)

It’s natural to seek the small thrill of getting ish done. But we can resist the siren song of “busy.” 

Busy is not the same as productive. In fact, they’re practically antonyms. Productivity means efficiency: achieving more output with less input. Productive means conserving resources while still reaching the desired result.

Productive is NOT multi-tasking, doing two or more things poorly and at great energetic expense. It’s not rushing from one thing to the next, or working to exhaustion, or forgoing rest and leisure. 

That’s busy. Busy is inefficient. Busy is exhausting. Busy is inherently unproductive, because it involves inputting more time and energy towards a desired output. 

Busy is addictive, numbing, and self-reinforcing. The busier we act, the less we can concentrate, reflect, analyze, and reorient, which are precisely the processes required for reducing our busyness and designing more productivity into our day. 

And in our hustle and grind culture, busyness is seen as a badge of honor. How often do we reply “so busy!” when someone asks how we are?  We use “busy” as shorthand for important, successful, valuable, when maybe it’s more appropriate to equate busy with frazzled, unfocused, anxious, or adrift.

Productivity is a laudable goal: make progress more efficiently so there’s plenty of time and energy left over. We get there by eliminating unnecessary work, batching similar tasks together, giving the task at hand our full attention, streamlining our processes, running on habitual auto-pilot for regular routines, and automating and delegating where appropriate.

It also means having a quitting time, a Do Not Disturb setting, a habit of unplugging from work and reconnecting with our interests, our loved ones, our selves. Being truly productive means our periods of work will be balanced with periods of daydreaming, downtime, and pure unadulterated boredom.

There’s value in letting our fields lay fallow. 

HOT TIP // Vote With Your Dollar

Minimalism is not political, per se. But it is about our relationship to stuff, and purchasing stuff is inherently political. 

Every time we purchase anything, we’re supporting a certain store, a certain company, a certain set of business practices. 

And since the Supreme Court upheld the claim that corporations have the same rights as American citizens, we’re often indirectly supporting political candidates and policies with our spending. We vote with our dollar, whether we’re intentional about it or not. 

With the compounding disasters of a viral pandemic, economic distress, corruption and incompetence in our executive branch, and ongoing racial injustice, now is an excellent time to pay attention to what we’re endorsing with our shopping.

The site and app Goods Unite Us compiles data on which companies donate to which political candidates in federal and state elections so we can make informed decisions about our purchases.  

I prefer to shop at companies that refrain from using their money to influence politics entirely. (Yet another reason I love Aldi.) When an apolitical option isn’t available, I choose a brand that’s not a Trump donor.

Goods Unite Us also scores companies on their response to Covid-19. How are companies treating their workers during this pandemic? Do they provide sick leave? Is it paid? Are they retrofitting work spaces with protective barriers and enabling social physical distancing? Or are they expecting their employees to be grist for their profit-generating mill?

The site doesn’t yet score for this, but it’s worth asking for ourselves: How are companies responding to the clarion call for racial justice? Are they silent? Are they issuing a carefully crafted public statement while their employees express outrage over company-wide discrimination and lack of representation in leadership? Are they taking action to interrogate and remedy the way systemic racism has influenced their organization?

Small, independently owned businesses have fewer resources to respond to these crises as thoroughly as a big corporation with deeper pockets. That doesn't mean they don’t deserve our support. Provided they’re not discriminatory, small businesses owned by our neighbors are often most deserving of our patronage. We might not agree on everything, but every neighbor wants a safe, beautiful,  welcoming, and functional community. 

Some of us are coping with unprecedented loss and stress right now, and the thought of dedicating any time and attention to scrutinizing our spending seems untenable.

But for those of us who are physically and financially healthy, I’d argue we have a moral imperative to scrutinize our spending right now.

HOT MESS // Crisis Unaverted

The past few months have been the worst of the worst, agreed? 

Here’s all our “what if” fears made manifest. Our fears of ill health, of financial insecurity, of loss of connection and identity, of grief. All very valid, and now compounded. 

This is the hellscape we’ve been preparing for, the one we had in mind when we held onto all those items “just in case.”

And guess what?

We’re still not rereading those magazines from 2010. 

We’re still not wearing those ill-fitting pants, or displaying our participation trophies, or using that mini cake-pop maker. 

We now have over 3 months of these atypical  “somedays” as proof: those items never have and never will be of use to us, and our space would be better off without them.

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about how minimalists must be miserable in their empty homes during quarantine. That’s not true. I’m not happy with these circumstances, but I’m not miserable in my house.

First of all, my home is not empty. It’s filled with all of (and only) my favorite things.

And having a tidy and minimalist space makes it pleasant to cook, work, and hang out at home, which is particularly great now that I’m here 99% of the time. 

Some folks are writing about how they’re glad they’ve never decluttered because now their accumulation of tee-shirts is vindicated.  I call BS.

Now, some folks that donated leisure items like board games and sporting equipment in the past have now repurchased them since they have more free time. Great! When our circumstances change, it makes sense that our possessions do, too. Rather than collect dust in the basement for years until the world turned upside down, some other family actually got to use those items in the meantime. 

But an overabundance of tee-shirts we don’t wear is cold comfort. We know what truly helps us feel secure: connections to our loved ones, a sense of community belonging, a financial buffer,  a feeling of autonomy in our environment. 

Our possessions can’t satisfy all of our needs, particularly now, and we’d be wise to remember that.

HOT MESS // Household Litter

I’m trying to reduce the amount of waste I produce, but Trash Happens.

Trash can easily become procrasticlutter, especially the small, odor-free variety. The tags we cut off a new shirt, the mile-long CVS receipt, the empty seltzer can… these items can accumulate quickly and make our living space seem cluttered, even if we have minimized and organized our possessions. 

When city leaders want to reduce littering in the streets, they install more trash cans. If a nearby trash can is just as convenient as throwing trash on the ground, people respond to that convenience with better behavior. (Hefty fines don’t hurt either…)

We can use the same principal in our homes. The more bona fide trash receptacles we have in convenient locations throughout our house, the less household litter will collect on our surfaces. 

If the minimalism police saw my numerous waste bins, they’d revoke my membership. 

But if I had to walk to one singular kitchen trash can with every used tissue and torn envelope, inertia and laziness would override my best intentions. I’d end up placing them on the nearest surface, where they’d be the first of many additions to a stalagmite of trash.

So, I have additional small waste bins in the office/guest room, the bedroom, the bathroom, and the laundry room. 

I’ve even considered getting a recycling bin counterpart for my bathroom for empty boxes and toilet paper rolls, but for now I just chuck those down the stairs for future-me to place in the kitchen recycling.

Unless we go zero waste like those committed heroes with their astonishingly small jar of yearly trash, we’re going to need to regularly and routinely contend with trash.

If household litter is making your home untidy, the silver lining is this: contending with garbage takes some time and effort, but requires almost no thinking. No decision-making, no identifying a beneficiary, no optimizing storage and retrieval. Just round it up and take it to the curb.