I often get asked advice on productivity & motivation. I’ve been self-employed for most of my adult life & I’ve always worked from home, which takes dedication & serious discipline to get right. It’s not easy when you are the boss. The Internet can become a black hole of distractions if you allow it.

So I decided to layout a few of my favorite productivity hacks to help minimise your working day to the bare essentials. Better productivity means less hours working and more hours doing what you love (I love work, but I much prefer doing fun things).

Limit Distractions

For me, this involves leaving my phone in another room. If I have my phone to hand I know I’ll pick it up and get sidetracked. I now charge my phone in the kitchen. I use a bamboo iPhone dock which also charges my apple watch. I find that leaving it out of reach has increased my productivity vastly.

Set a Timer – The Pomodoro Method

I’m not sure where I first learned about the pomodoro method, but the name comes from those pomodoro tomato kitchen timers which many productivity gurus recommend using. I personally use my apple watch & Siri to set a timer, but feel free to use a kitchen timer or any other timer. I set specific timescales for different jobs. For cleaning the house or car I set a 15 minute timer. For replying to emails I set a 20 minute timer. For writing, I set a 30 minute timer. As soon as the time expires, you finish the task you are working on. The motivation of a countdown is enough to make sure I don’t procrastinate. I also find that I can commit full focus for a short period & knowing that I’ll soon be able to take a break makes sure I don’t waiver. An added bonus is that I clean, type or work much faster with a countdown & often finish before the timer runs out.

For this post for example, I’ve got a 30 minute timer running on my watch, so it’s a one shot deal. This makes my work more fluid & stops me putting off working.

Develop Habits

Good habits are essential to improved productivity. It took me 33 years to develop the habits I have today. Foster good habits & change bad habits. My daily habits include cleaning the bathroom as I go in the morning. Putting away any products I use & folding towels. Making the bed and tidying away everything in the bedroom, bathroom and office as I go.

I never leave dishes anymore. Straight in the dishwasher or washed in the sink, dried & put away. I even dry the draining board. I clean & tidy the kitchen as I go. I always clear my desk when I’m finished. I find that if the house is tidy & organised, I don’t find excuses not to do work. An added benefit is that I never have to clean & tidy to receive guests, and I don’t worry about an unanounced visitor. This allows me to sit down & concentrate on work.

Other work habits include setting aside time for certain tasks. If you want to write more, allocate a day of the week to write something. Once that habit sticks, extend it to two days and so on. Before you know it, you will write often & writing will now be a habit instead of a chore.

Install Forest

I use the forest app on my iPhone to cut distractions. Once you plant a tree in forest, you can’t use your iPhone for the specified number of minutes. This has helped me to break free of the smart phone. Forest is also available for the major web browsers. On the browser version, you specify a list of websites which you tend to use for procrastination. I’ve personally added all news sites, all social media sites & YouTube to mine. When I set a timer to sit and work, I set the same timer in forest. This ensures I don’t wander off onto distracting websites when I should be working. Also, by using the app you plant real trees for charity. Bonus!

Take Proper Breaks

This might sound counterintuitive, but your concentration is a finite resource. Sooner or later, you will become distracted & your work will suffer. The problem with distraction & procrastination is that you aren’t working, but you aren’t fully relaxing either. It’s a no mans land & isn’t helpful if you want to be productive. After each timer expires, take a decent break. I find that making a coffee or a snack is helpful. I also step outside weather permitting & have a stretch and a change of scenery. Whatever you would like to do with your break, make sure to do it often. Even 5 minutes every 30 minutes will make a difference.

Perfect your Environment

This will vary from person to person. I always find that music helps me to concentrate. While writing this post I’m listening to punk & punk rock on my headphones. I also enjoy listening to Soma FM when I work. It helps to block out ambient noise & I become more absorbed in my work. My wife on the other hand needs total silence to concentrate. Figure out what works for you and set the mood for productivity.

Single Task

I know I’ve been told a thousand times that I can’t multi task because I’m a man. I actually believe that nobody can successfully multi task. If your attention is fragmented between tasks, you can’t give any single one of those tasks 100% of your energy. I’m a firm believer in single tasking & it got me through my Masters degree.

I turn off emails. Emails coming in are the ultimate distraction. As mentioned, I also turn off the phone or put it in another room. A single notification or ring tone can ruin your concentration.

If I’m writing in WordPress, I only have a single tab open & no other apps (with the exception of my music). If I’m cleaning the house, I mute my phone and leave it on charge. No matter what task you are doing, if you want to improve your productivity you need to embrace single tasking.

Wake up early

I used to be a late riser. Working from home meant I could work any hours I liked as long as the work got done. I would wake up at 10am and not start working until lunchtime.

I now wake up early every day and have most of my emails done by 7am. I also find that I’m done with real work by lunch time and have the rest of the day to work on personal projects & spending time with my friends & family. It also means I fit in more exercise & spend time relaxing and thinking of new ideas.

Stop Thinking & Start Doing

The key to being more productive is to just start doing the things you want to do. I’m now learning dutch with Duolingo. I’m also cycle riding once a day for an hour (timed) to get in much better physical shape. My wife & I walk for at least an hour every day. I’m doing background research for my PhD in my spare time. I’m writing more on this blog & over on my personal website. I’m still running my family e-commerce business each day. I’m still on my minimalism challenge. I’ve reduced my TV watching to an hour or less each evening. I’m getting ready to move to Amsterdam. I live in one of the most breathtaking parts of the UK (on the south coast of Cornwall in a picturesque place). I’m making my entire living from home.

I’ve always had grand plans, but until I started making time to work towards them & laying down the habits & skills to achieve them, they only existed in my head. I now live the life I want to live & continue to work towards my goals.

Changing your approach to productivity can change your relationship with time. I now have more free time while still getting more done with my days. I think productivity is an often forgotten part of minimalism. By minimising distractions & minimising the hours of work you need to do each day, we have more time to dedicate to ourselves & our families. It’s surprising what you can get done when you focus & avoid the distractions.

I’d love to add to this post, so if you have any productivity hacks, get in touch or leave a comment.

Fast forward to 2018 & smart phones are ubiquitous with daily life. Maps, music, games, video, fitness trackers, social media. The list of apps is endless. The major problem I’ve found with this is compulsive use, some would call addiction.

I noticed my own use spiraling out of control when I found myself checking the phone as soon as I woke up in the morning. I’d also check the phone just before I went to sleep. I’d break silences with it, I’d use it in queues at the shops. It was a crutch & a hideaway. A distraction from real life.

I started to curb my own usage 2 years ago. First I deleted a lot of the apps from my iPhone. I then installed the Forest app, to plant trees & stop me using the phone for long periods. This helped vastly with my compulsion to pick it up at any moment.

At first I felt like I was depriving myself of something. Almost as if I was missing out on everything. I felt anxious and angry. I was addicted.

Now we are in 2018 & my smart phone habits are ahead of most people around me. I’ll happily leave the house without my phone. I’ve turned off all notifications and sounds. Those who send me text messages will know it can take hours or days to reply. I no longer let the phone dictate when I will pick it up.

Another great help has been my Bamboo dock. I leave the phone in the dock on charge in my kitchen when I’m home. Unless I’m intentionally using it, it stays docked. Simply not having it in a pocket or within reach has changed my usage dramatically.

Over the last few months I’ve taken it a step further. After reading research by Mozilla and other researchers, I decided to switch my iPhone to grey scale. This is strictly speaking an accessibility feature for disabled users. But by removing the colours I’ve found my iPhone to be less appealing, and the calls to action of colours, such as red notification bubbles, have all but disappeared. It is much less stimulating without the bright colours. Now, nothing within an app stands out. Instagram in black and white is much nicer to look at & much less addictive.

I’ve set it up so that by triple tapping my iPhone home button, I can switch between grey scale and colour, so if I really need colour I can activate it. But on the whole, I leave it black and white.

I was skeptical about this at first, but after reading work & watching interviews of design ethicists, it seemed genuinely beneficial.

I can now have my phone in hand, check something & then put it down. I don’t get distracted by apps. I don’t have any compulsive use. I can physically sit empty-handed in a coffee shop & watch the world go by. I’m sure the other customers (smart phones in hand) think I’m a weirdo, but I now notice my surroundings. I remember the things I see, the smells, the smiles!

The scariest thing about putting your phone down is realizing how addicted we all are. Look around any coffee shop, any restaurant or bar. People who should be socializing are looking at a glowing screen. Instead of enjoying food, or even taking a quick photo, they are spending their time with others crafting Instagram posts. Take the photo, post it later!

I’ve witnessed parents ignoring children. Families on holiday ignoring each other. People at music concerts tweeting when the bands are on. Life is much richer when we view it with our eyes & not through a lens. The worst thing I saw was a child wet herself in central Manchester. The little girl was pleading with her mother, but after being ignored by her mother who was too wrapped up in a smart phone, she wet herself in public. It was heartbreaking to witness and forced me instantly to address my usage.

I’m not saying that smart phones are inherently bad. They are a great resource when we use them intentionally. But when we mindless scroll & thumb away at them, distracted by nothing in particular, we miss out on real life.

If you would like to try the grey scale trick on iPhone you can change the accessibility settings as follows. Head to the following page in your settings :-

Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations > Colour Filters

You can then select the grey scale option. This will make your iPhone look a little like an old-fashioned black & white TV.

If you would like to enable the triple click toggle to allow a triple click of the home button to swap between colour & grey scale, go to the following menu :-

Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility shortcut (bottom)

Once on this page, tick colour filters as your accessibility shortcut. Now a triple click of your home button will swap between grey scale and colour screen options.

It is also possible to do this on Android, but the instructions vary depending on model, so search for your specific android version for instructions.

Intentional smart phone usage can enrich our lives, but compulsive behaviors can be really damaging. We have the biggest tool for distraction sat right in our pockets, we need to be in control of our usage and not let it become our world. It is amazing to absorb yourself in a moment. Just listening & watching can be a great way to unwind. Sitting on the internet, bombarded with distractions can be fun sometimes, but not every waking moment.

I will do a full write up soon of the other methods I mentioned for cutting down smart phone usage, But I think grey scale will give you the biggest bang for your buck, along with turning off sounds and notifications for all apps except phone and messages.

If you have any hints & tips for curbing compulsive smart phone usage I’d love to hear them. leave a comment.

Over the years I’ve read a plethora of books on minimalism, but I haven’t dedicated much time to organisation. I changed that this month by reading Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

I also finally got around to reading Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye, Things: On Minimalist Living. This is perhaps the best book I’ve read about minimalism & it really inspired me. It’s by a japanese author and the translation is just perfect.

After reading these two books I decided to revisit Marie Kondo’s work and the Kon Mari method, by reading her illustrated book Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying. – This is a more practical book for organising yourself & your things & really helped me to carry out a lot of the things Marie Kondo discussed in the previous Life Changing Magic book.

The last book I read in this batch of books was Nagisa Tatsumi’s The Art of Discarding: How to get rid of clutter and find joy. This book deals in-depth with discarding things & explains the psychology behind our compulsions to hoard belongings. After reading this book & Fumio Sasaki’s I found myself going through my already fairly minimal house & discarding even more of the things that I don’t tend to use. This includes out of date technology which hasn’t been repurposed, old clothes & books I have read and have no intention of going back to read in the future.

So lets take a more in-depth look at each book.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: A simple, effective way to banish clutter forever by Marie Kondo

This book by Marie Kondo is a life changer, but I’ve got to say it’s the kind of book you will either love or hate. A lot of the language used & the approach to organising & sorting is quite spiritual. Not religious, but spiritual like yoga or meditation. The main premise is to approach everything you own & ask if it sparks joy in you & if you truly love it. Marie might put people off by suggesting we all say goodbye & thank you to the things we dispose of. We are to thank them for being good to us and providing us with comfort or use. For treating us well. I’m a scientific person, but I can appreciate the approach & while I didn’t start thanking my belongings, I did seek to only keep the things which I really love or really need.

Marie Kondo has been organising all of her life, she has made a career out of helping her clients sort their homes. This book is written by a japanese author so some of the topics discussed have a very japanese feel (such as measuring the size of your home with tatami mats), but I found this cultural parallel fascinating & it was partly the reason I enjoyed the book so much.

One of the major things from this book that I took on board was the folding of clothes. I used Marie’s method of piling all of my clothes in the middle of the room & sorting through them item by item, deciding which items to keep, which to give away and which to discard. This reduced my clothing by around 80% and I’m now down to two drawers in a chest of drawers. I feel much lighter for it.

Goodbye, Things: On Minimalist Living by Fumio Sasaki

This is perhaps the best Minimalism book I’ve read. I know that’s a bold statement, but Fumio really gets across in his book what we all feel starting out. Fumio was overworked, surrounded by stuff in his Tokyo apartment, unhealthy & miserable. Long story short, Fumio stumbled upon minimalism and changed his entire life, segwaying into being a minimalism guru along the way. He now lives with a tiny amount of possessions, a sleeping mat, three shirts and a few other essentials. His book takes you on his entire journey & I’m happy that it included pictures which really give you an idea of the before & after of Fumio’s life. I was fascinated by this book. Again, it has a japanese take on Minimalism but I love learning about different cultures. In a city like Tokyo, where space comes at a premium, minimalism makes perfect sense & Fumio manages to convey the benefits in the most polite & calm way. I honestly felt a sense of calm just reading this book.

Since finishing Fumio Sasaki’s book I’ve continued to downsize & sold a lot of things on eBay. I’m also finding that I no longer bring things home from visits to the city & my online shopping is almost non-existent. Having worked so hard to minimise to this point, I’m really conscious of undoing the hard work, which is an added bonus as it saves me a small fortune.

Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying by Marie Kondo

This book is a continuation of the book I mentioned earlier by Marie Kondo (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying). I’d recommend you read the first book & if you decide to carry out any of the KonMari methods discussed you can use this book as your illustrated guide. The first book discusses the broad techniques Marie Kondo uses to help her clients get organised, this book goes in-depth into implementing those methods, including pictures. This is vital if you decided to carry out methods such as the konMari clothing folding techniques.

This book is much more practical and more of a text-book or reference book to keep consulting as you start your minimalism and KonMari. It has really helped me become more organised & I highly recommend both books in this series.

The Art of Discarding: How to get rid of clutter and find joy by Nagisa Tatsumi

As you can tell, this is yet another book I’ve read by a japanese author. The minimalism movement has always been quite big in Japan, probably due to the space constraints of highly populated cities. The Art Of Discarding deals a lot with the psychology of possessions and also the psychological problems which can develop when we become overwhelmed with stuff. The book offers practical advice to help you change your buying habits & to help you dispose of the clutter and excess in your life. This book covers a broad range of topics from simplifying your wardrobe to letting go of excess in all aspects of your life. Well worth a read.

So there we have it, a quick round-up of some of the best Minimalism & organisational books I’ve read over the last few months. Let me know if you have read any of them & also if you have any other books to recommend.

One of the first things I do after the Christmas period is to address my belongings. My family & friends have really got into a rhythm with what to buy me each year, so I don’t tend to get anything which throws me off my minimalist lifestyle, but I do get some really handy gifts. I tend to get new underwear, toiletries, a new aftershave and a couple of books to read.

I’ve asked my family to buy me the same kind of things each year, generally consumables. By getting a few sets of underwear each year I can go through my drawers and get rid of the tired looking items. I have a strict one in one out system now, which I find helps me to keep on top of my belongings. I also find that I personally feel better because I’m only replacing something that is worn out & due for a refresh.

With the toiletries, I tend to get enough deodorant, razor blades & aftershave to last me the entire year, until next christmas. So I start off the year with a few extra items than absolutely necessary, but they do get used up before I receive a fresh batch & I can live with storing a couple of essentials in the bathroom cabinet.

Christmas time used to be really hard for me as an aspiring minimalist. I’m super appreciative of all the gifts I receive & they are by no means bad gifts, but when you are trying to reduce the amount of stuff you hang on to, it can prove challenging. I used to get a lot of novelty items, fun presents which made you laugh & smile on the day, but then went into a drawer never to be seen again. After speaking with friends & family I have managed to save them money  by asking not to buy those items & requested only items I really need. I have a small Amazon wish list to which I add specific things I need & each family member also has set things they now tend to buy me. I find this works best & it makes their life easier if they do decide to give me a gift.

January is also a great time to address your wardrobe. For a few years now my wife and I have shared a single clothes rail. It wasnt always like that, we used to have a walk in wardrobe back in 2012 (walk in closet) and we had hundreds of different items of clothes collected over two lifetimes.

When we first started getting onto minimalism, sorting out the clothes was really hard. Many items had sentimental value, even though we knew we would never wear them again. Since minimising our wardrobe to a single rail, we have found it really easy to stay on top of clothing. Again we have a one in one out rule & with limited space we find we stick to it. If an item wears out we can replace it without feeling guilty & all the remaining items of clothing we have are the ones we wear daily.

I would recommend starting with your wardrobe if you are new to minimalism. It’s a good way to get used to letting things go & it is one of the best examples of how minimalism can make life easier. Just by selecting a daily outfit, you will feel lighter & less burdened by choice.

This year I also decided to address my smartphone & social media accounts. I had far too many time-consuming apps & so many twitter accounts which I followed that it was becoming less useful to me. I wrote about that earlier this week, but the general gist is that by reducing apps & information consumption on your smart phone, you can save a crazy amount of time & regain a lot of focus. With the time I’ve regained I intend to learn Dutch & play more guitar.

Another thing I like to do each new year is to address my finances. I am still paying down student debt on credit cards & I always shift my remaining debt to a 0% card in January. That way I’m always only paying off the debt & not the interest payments. I’m not sure how the banks feel about that, essentially giving me a free loan, but I find minimalism can be applied easily to finances if you treat the digital pounds just the same way you would treat physical clutter. To me, debt is clutter, it’s a burden & it has the ability to cripple you with worry & also to trap you in a situation. I intend to move to Amsterdam & debt is one thing I will not be taking with me.

You can also take this time to check all of your current bills, direct debits & subscriptions. See if you can reduce bills such as your phone or internet, cancel any subscriptions you no longer need & give all of your finances a health check. It’s surprising what a £5 a month subscription costs each year if you no longer read that magazine or watch Netflix.

Moving on to books. I no longer have many physical books. I used to have a massive collection of books in paperback and hardback format however I bought an eReader last year (kindle) and started to get most of my books in a digital format. I still buy the odd second-hand book or text-book, I don’t tend to buy new books as there are an abundance of used books out there for a fraction of the cost. I found moving to ebooks freed up a lot of my belongings. I’ve moved house before with perhaps 30 boxes of books. They are heavy & cumbersome. I now have most of my books on the kindle which can fit in my coat pocket. My kindle library is around 140 books strong. This is all part of a lifestyle I’m crafting to make it easier for me to pick up & go when I like. To a new house, to a new country. I’m no stranger to putting things in storage and moving around for a while. I like the freedom & it’s one of the things that attracted me to Minimalism in the first place.

If you have books, sort through them & give to charity any you have read & won’t reference, or those you have no intention of reading. If you do this every few months you can regain a lot of space, shed a lot of weight & if you give them to a charity shop you can help a good cause in the process (not to mention people can get great books for a fraction of retail & it saves them from landfill).

January is always a quiet month for me work wise. My business customers are coming to terms with a new year & the serious overspend of the previous months. I used to get quite low in January, but I’ve now come to terms with the fact that it is quiet & treat it more as a holiday. It’s the perfect time for me to sort and organise. I normally take a drawer at a time & sort it out. I do this often, but it’s surprising what you find in them. Old bank statements which should have been filed, batteries long since flat, packaging & junk. Minimalism for most is an ongoing process, and I’m still finding things I missed the first, second or tenth time I sorted out a drawer.

If you are new, start small. Choose a drawer a day and sort into three piles, keep, donate/sell & rubbish. Then organise your keep things back into a home, somewhere you know where they will be when you need them. The donate/sell pile should be dealt with ASAP to make sure you don’t start taking things back out, as should the rubbish pile. It’s a great way to start out organising by taking small steps. Decluttering takes time & patience.

I no longer buy CD’s or DVD’s as I tend to rent, stream or buy digital versions. I used to have a large collection of media but I donated and sold the whole lot when I started minimising. I do buy the odd Xbox game on a disc, but I buy these second-hand from shops in the UK like CEX and Game. This way I make a huge saving & I’m reusing media. Once I’ve finished I pass them on to friends or put them up on ebay for a nominal amount. I’d rather someone else benefit from them when I finished, just as I have. It’s a nice process to be involved with.

There are loads of things you can do to get started on your decluttering & simplifying journey. These are just a few to get you started. Please do let me know in the comments if you have any other suggestions or personal preferences for starting a minimalists new year.

I’ve had a smartphone since 2008 when I bought the iPhone 3G at launch. Back then, smart phones where pretty basic & the app store had only just launched. In 2008 there wasn’t even an official twitter client, so I used Twitterific. It was a much simpler time, apps & digital companies where concentrating on providing services & not so much on holding our concentration for ad pounds (dollars).

Twitter in 2008 was also a great place to be. Not many brands had discovered it & large swathes of the population hadn’t. It was a friendly & positive place to hang out. It wasn’t political or racial. Abuse wasn’t really a thing & it was a progressive platform. Also this was before the introduction of the retweet button. Back then you would just type “RT @someusername – copy & paste their tweet”. This was wonderful as people would only share genuinely interesting tweets. Now, people & brands click the retweet button so often it makes my feed almost pointless.

Anyway, back to smartphones. The progression of the smartphone & the ubiquity of its use led to a boom in app development. Notifications came along, in app purchases came along, ad supported apps & games…. you get the picture. In 2017 it would seem that Smartphones are no longer devices we enjoy, they are actually in charge of us. They bing & bong for our attention, they sleep by our beds, they feed pictures & videos of people we have never met into our subconscious. Constantly bombarded with images of the wealthy & the beautiful it’s easy to feel inferior. This ubiquity & constant access to our consciousness has been a boon for advertisers & marketers.

Instagram is synonymous with smartphone use. You can only upload to the platform officially via a smartphone or tablet. It also doesn’t surprise me that Facebook acquired the platform. Instagrammers can be paid obscene amounts by brands & tourist boards to show us the finer things in life & promote even more anxious & depressive thoughts. It a marketers dream platform.

I really believe that Social Media is causing serious issues with everything from mental health to political fallout, and the biggest driver for this change has been the smartphone. I believe it so strongly that I’m looking to do a PhD into the effects on society in the not too distant future.

It’s not only social media vying for our attention on our smartphones. We have games, we have music apps, messaging apps, car buying apps, airbnb, spotify, ibooks, Netflix, Amazon, podcasts. Before I sat down to write this post I had 100 apps installed on my phone. All of them take a little bit of my attention. If I’m out to lunch, I will check my phone, meeting friends or at a gig I’ll check my phone. In fact there are very few times I won’t feel compelled to pick it up and check a few apps.

I think we can all relate to this, but it is ruining my relationships & productivity, so it’s time to make a change. Last year I started by leaving my iPhone at home more often. If I went for a walk with my wife, it was left at home, if we went out for coffee, I left it at home or turned it off. Everytime, I felt more present & less stressed. I also started leaving my phone in one place in the house when I’m home. It sits on charge in my kitchen at all times. I can now watch a movie without distraction & really concentrate on what I’m doing. I’m able to sit a read a lot more, I’ve more time to write.

I have considered ditching the smartphone altogether, but there are certain features which genuinely do help. Google Maps is a must as we travel a lot, Facetime is also my main way to chat to family who live 600 miles away & it’s more intimate than a phone call. I also use Skype & Whatsapp to stay in touch with good friends who live all over the world, for free. I wouldn’t be without those now as I feel they genuinely add value to my life. Also, It’s nice to have a decent camera in my pocket & not carry around a separate Canon camera.

So far these are the things I’ve done to improve my personal usage:-

• Pick a spot in the house & designate it as a smartphone spot. Leave your phone plugged in there unless you really need it – Stops compulsive checking
• Uninstall time wasting apps – I can use AirBNB on a laptop when I’m actually needing accommodation
• If you use twitter, turn off retweets. Each time you see a retweet in your timeline, click through to that user and disable their retweets. Reclaim your timeline & time.
• Ditch Pinterest – Only use it as & when you need inspiration.
• Uninstall news apps – They are the biggest time waster for me.
• Uninstall iBooks/Kindle app & movie/tv catchup apps – Read proper books or use a kindle and enjoy the experience. Also helps avoid notifications & distractions. Movies should be enjoyed on a bigger screen. Don’t ruin it.
• Start leaving your smartphone at home or turning it off when you are doing things, it will transform your relationships.
• Turn off notifications for everything but messaging apps/text apps.
• Remove games. You will turn to them at times when you should just enjoy watching the world go by, such as when a friend goes to the bathroom during coffee.
• Reduce your data plan – I’ve gone down to 500MB a month. Makes me conscious of using data on the go & reduced my usage. Also saves money.

Looking at the points above there are probably some I’ve missed. The general idea is to reclaim your time & focus. With so much information day & night it’s hard to maintain focus on the things that matter. From our own projects to our friends & family. They are all neglected when you are a smartphone slave.

I was one of the worst offenders when it came to reading news on my iPhone. Apple introduced the News app & it’s algorithmically trained to show you more of the news you read, so you are constantly bombarded with relevant stories. It’s a rabbit hole you just keep falling down. Between Brexit in the UK and the US elections I became addicted to reading news stories. It seemed like a terrible time in our history but it wasn’t made any better by the constant commentary of the News apps. At the beginning of December I decided to uninstall all news apps on my phone and limit my news reading to 10 minutes a day with my morning coffee. I would go as far as saying it has been life changing. I’m much less stressed & my head isn’t spinning with information & opinion.

People often ask me about my Facebook usage. I still have an account, but I don’t actively use the platform. I don’t trust it & I’m not so keen on a company making so much money & paying so little tax simply by using our data, which we provide for free. I haven’t had the facebook app installed on my iPhone for a few years and don’t tend to login often. If Facebook is an issue for you, uninstall the app and install the messenger. That way you can have real time conversations with all of your contacts, without all the algorithm & marketing nonsense.

In the list of points I laid out I mentioned reducing my mobile data package. I’ve never had a mobile phone contract, I prefer to buy my handset outright & go with a really cheap sim only provider. For years I’ve been with GiffGaff which allows me to change my package whenever I like. I currently use their goodybags which allow me to choose a payment amount in return for data, texts & minutes. All very boring but I’m now only paying £7.50 a month for 250 minutes (I mostly use facetime & skype anyway), unlimited SMS texts and 500MB of data.

I’ve found by reducing the data available to me, I’ve change my habits. I no longer stream music over 4G, I use my iPod which plays flawlessly, without dropouts & without notifications & distractions. Even more headspace. It also means I don’t instagram on the go, I take a photo and upload on Wifi. I don’t watch news bulletins or cat videos, I literally text & do the odd google search or map lookup. I don’t want to run out of data early in the month so my whole usage has adjusted in a positive way.

There are numerous other reasons to reduce smartphone use, from the effects of blue light on our sleep patterns to the privacy implications. I decided to focus on the issues affecting me but yours may be different.

As of now I’m down to 40 apps on my iPhone including the generic ones such as email, browser, maps, weather and messages. I’m going to keep culling apps over the coming weeks.

I hope you have found this post useful & you start to implement some of the points discussed. A smartphone can be a brilliant device, but it can also steal all of your time, attention & focus while eroding your most important relationships. I found it caused a lot of anxiety & stress & made me feel inferior on a daily basis. Also, as a minimalist, it was hard to be marketed at day & night across so many platforms which I saw as crucial to my daily life. They really aren’t.

This is a first edit so will be subject to change as I progress with this. Also, if you have any tips please do let me know below. I’m no expert & I’m figuring this out as I go, so anything I’ve missed please do comment.

Beyond the physical act of sitting & paying the bill, I also have to be conscious of the date & remember on the 15th of each month to pay the bill. This is absurd & it is one of the last parts of my financial minimalism journey.

This morning I took an extra 10 minutes to sit on the website & set up a monthly direct debit. I have now freed myself from the tyranny of the monthly water bill. I still need to set up another direct debit for my council tax bill & I’ve decided to do that later this evening.

My Financial Minimalism Journey to date

Things used to be a lot worse than this before I started my Minimalism & simple living journey. When I started I had so many bills & so many due dates. I had a student loan to pay each month, a student overdraft to clear, 5 separate credit cards all carrying an outstanding balance & all of my utilities had to be paid manually on receipt of a bill.

Luckily I didn’t have a car payment to make as I’ve tended to buy cars for cash since 2008 when I handed back my lease car, but I did have car insurance and breakdown cover to pay. I also had excessive debt to try to clear & a massive rent bill which I would pay via a bank transfer each month. Paying by bank transfer meant I had to login each month & manually transfer cash to my land lord. Not cool.

The problem I had was a lack of fluid cash in the bank to commit to direct debits. With so many commitments and around 15 separate payment dates each month, I needed to pay them manually just in case I didn’t have enough money to cover the bill. That way I could manage the bill, wait for a reminder or red-letter & hopefully buy time to pay off the outstanding bills. This was largely due to overcommitment.

Managing so many payments when you owe a lot of money is hard work. It requires a lot of thinking time & financial planning. It also introduces a lot of stress.

In 2012 I finally committed to living a more minimal & simple life. I sold the flash cars, handed back the keys to my house, sold a ton of stuff & moved in with family to get the finances under control.

Using money from the sale of the car, I instantly cleared an overdraft and one of my credit cards. I then started redirecting those payments to other cards to snowball them and bring them down more quickly. Over 18 months I managed to clear off all but one credit card, pay off all student debts & even get into healthy credit in my current account. Minimalism helped as not buying stuff quickly leads to you saving money. Also, when a married couple share a single room in a family members house, you quickly learn what your most valuable possessions are. It was like a crash course in minimalism & we became badass mobile people in days.

We had a small storage unit for all of our remaining house possessions & just enough stuff in the bedroom to live our daily lives. The funny thing is, when we moved in 2015 to our current house, we had the task of unboxing everything that had been in storage for so long. If I’m honest, apart from the very odd item, we had forgotten owning most of the stuff.

It was an instant realisation that we had lived for 18 months without any of this crap & lived good lives. We had travelled extensively. We could pack up everything we had into our small car and travel anywhere in the UK. At the drop of a hat we could pack up and go and stay with friends, or stay with family in Scotland. We shared a single set of drawers for the entire period & had more than enough clothing.

Packing for foreign travel was a cinch. We could share one bag, or take two small backpacks. When you remove your stuff, you realise that most of it is just useless crap or distracting rubbish.

Anyway, back to finances. Following this period as we neared the end of our 18 month pay off period I was left with no debt besides two credit cards. The balance was low enough that i could transfer one balance onto another card & be left with a single card. I actually did a double balance transfer. I transferred the balance from card A to card B leaving card A empty. I waited less than a month to be offered a balance transfer offer on the empty card A. They offered me 6% interest for the life of the balance, which made it more manageable and more like a loan. I then transferred the total balance from Card B back to Card A so all of my debt was on one card & at 6% for the life of that balance.

I had managed something I thought was impossible 18 months earlier. I only had one single payment to make each month. From 15+ payments to remember to pay each month to a single payment. Granted I no longer had rent to pay & would soon add that back into the mix, but one item, The pressure lifted was insane. I felt like a new person. The ultimate goal is zero debt & zero finance, & I’m working towards that goal daily

I instantly setup a direct debit for this remaining credit card payment & I haven’t given it a second thought since.

I’ve carried this financial minimalism with me since. When we moved house I used cash for everything. No credit or finance, just savings. When I needed to insure the house, I paid the entire premium cash up front. Better to pay all at once & save on interest payments. This also means I know exactly what’s coming out of my bank each month. The same went for car insurance, which I now pay annually for a significant saving. The same also goes for car tax, which I pay for a year at a time.

I setup direct debits for my rent, Internet & mobile phone, my credit card is still paid automatically each month. In fact the only things I still have to pay manually are my Council Tax & Water bill. That will be sorted by the end of the day on the 15th August 2016, I promise.

Financial minimalism is something that not many people write about. But it does work. You can take it even further like I have and cut out any unnecessary payments. I cancelled all subscription payments, I no longer have pay TV channels, I cancelled my Xbox live as I never use it. Thinking about it, the only things I do pay are the essential utilities (my internet is essential, right?). I don’t pay for any luxuries, subscription services or anything with a monthly commitment.

I like knowing that not many bills come out of my account monthly, it’s less to think about & surprisingly it is exponentially easier to manage your finances. Having a load of separate things to pay each month is no different from having loads of stuff. It’s distracting, it consumes far too much of our energy and thoughts. It’s just bad.

if you treat your financial commitments with the same minimalistic principles you apply to your stuff you will see a huge pay off. I’d go as far to say that financial minimalism is even more important than minimalism with your possessions. Finances can haunt people, they keep people awake at night.

One handy side effect of adopting minimalism is that you will find you have loads of stuff you no longer need or want. sell that stuff & you can go some way to paying off your debts. I’d guess that the sale of my stuff cleared around 35% off my debts overnight. That’s a great starting point.

I find that I feel much more content since addressing my finances & applying minimalism to them. They are easier to manage and easier to forget about. Address your smallest debts first. I know that is contrary to everything people tell you, but owing 1 person is much better than owing 5 or 10 people. The sooner you can shed creditors the better.

My aim now is to clear that last card, plan a trip to New Zealand to visit one of my best friends & to move to Amsterdam within 12 months. I’m now in a place to do all of those thanks to some major changes to the way I view possessions & finances.

Have you tried financial minimalism? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I’m sure some people will be saying “easy for him to say, I owe loads of money & make very little”- trust me, I sacrificed a lot to pay off a huge amount of money & I earn a very modest wage from self-employed work, much less than I would in a ‘Real Job’. Anyone can do this & I implore you to give it a go. If you have tried it, please leave your tips & advice in the comments section.

If you are new here, be sure to checkout my Introduction to Minimalism posts

When I started my minimalism journey I completely overlooked my digital life. I just thought that having files on a computer took up very little physical storage space. Surely that means digital files aren’t an issue?

I was wrong. When I started to look into digital clutter I found the problem went far beyond files. I’ve categorised forms of digital clutter into several key areas:-

• Files such as Word documents and PDF’s (work)
• Files such as photos and videos (personal)
• Photos & videos used for work
• Music in the form of my MP3 collection
• TV Shows & films
• General trash such as saved memes and random junk files
• Out of date or no longer used programs & apps
• Duplicate content duplicated across devices
• Digital services & accounts such as social media and website accounts
• Email newsletter subscriptions
• Smartphone apps & notifications

The list will vary for everyone. You may find some are more of an issue than others, but it’s important to identify your digital clutter. Start with one group & clear one at a time.

De-cluttering email inboxes

Perhaps the easiest one to deal with is your inbox. I know a lot of people advocate inbox zero, but I’ve found it doesn’t work for me. My inbox has business emails, personal emails, academic emails and promotional mail. Some are ongoing discussions, others are kept as a record of a conversation. If you only use a personal email account you can try inbox zero. If you use Gmail, you can try the Inbox app for that.

My first task was to go through each & every email in my inbox and delete any useless mail. I had mail going back as far as 2008, so I decided to purge anything before 2012 without even checking. I then started going through emails and deleting all old promotional emails, out of date or irrelevant email and junk mail.

I didn’t unsubscribe from anything at this point. When I had finished I had gone from 14,000 emails in my mailboxes to less than 200. Any emails that I was keeping where archived in a local folder on my iMac mail account to get them off the server.

Over the coming weeks I watched for promotional email coming in and unsubscribed from almost all of those emails. I also dealt with enquiries in batches and deleted completed email conversations which didn’t need archiving. This became a habit because I didn’t want to have to sort through bulk emails in the future.

My inbox is now much more manageable & the amount of email I receive is probably about 80% less since unsubscribing from promotions.

Files & folders

Having spent years in university my digital file clutter was quite bad. Being a computer geek I’ve always had a good naming & folder structure, but the sheer volume was crazy. I had work from 10 years ago which is well out of date & I haven’t re-read since it was first assessed. These files where all placed into a folder & zipped into a single archive just in case I ever need reference. This essentially turned thousands of files into a single archive. if I don’t access that archive within the next 12 months I’ll probably delete it altogether.

I also had lots of web development files & website/server backups, along with a lot of reading material in the form of PDFs which I’d forgotten I’d stored. I kept a few of the more useful ones but I probably deleted over 10,000 articles and files I had saved up. I only kept the most recent backups and deleted a load of in progress and unused web development files.

In total I probably deleted or archived over 20,000 files. Most of which I never access. My documents folder is now pretty empty and mostly consists of a few backups and current work. Most of my written work is saved on my various blogs for the world to see, so I really don’t need to hold onto the drafts and planning materials.

Photos & videos

My photo & video collection was vast. For years I’ve used iPhoto on OSX to manage my photos. We got a digital camera as soon as they came out. That camera was less than 1 megapixel & only held 16 photos. Before that we took a lot of photos on film & had huge tins of photographs. As cameras & storage progressed we took more & more photos & never felt the need to curate them.

With the introduction of smartphones, we started taking pictures of everything & saving random pictures from the internet to text or tweet to friends. The big issue came when Apple introduced photostream. Photostream essentially syncs all of our photos across all devices. We have two ipads, two desktops & two iPhones all syncing to the same photostream. Our photo collections ballooned & within a few years it was out of control.

When I started curating our photo collection in iPhoto, we had over 35,000 images. We also had around 300 videos of varying quality, mostly stupid quick films shot to share online.

To address our photo addiction I first downloaded an application called iPhoto Duplicate Cleaner. This app searches your library for duplicates & similar photos. After running the duplicate cleaner & automatically removing over 4000 duplicates it was time to start manually deleting photos. This meant deleting countless selfies, pictures of food & drink and general low quality images. Our photo collection is an ongoing project but it is now down to around 10,000 images. We keep returning to this to whittle them down even more.

Unused apps and programs

This one is fairly easy. Open up your smart phone, tablet or computer & take a look at the installed apps or programs. Start by deleting anything you haven’t used in a while or don’t remember installing. Next delete anything which is rarely used.

Finally, the hard one is to delete anything which takes up too much of your time & attention. For me, that meant deleting Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook & a plethora of other social media apps. I was finding they took up too much of my time, so I now try to only use Instagram & Twitter on the go. By limiting myself to a single social media platform for photos and for discussion, I find I spend far less time looking down at my phone. I’m also less likely to flick between the apps refreshing feeds for no reason.

These distractions on your smart phone can kill productivity & can also make you miss out on large chunks of your day. I also found that smartphones give me major attention deficit. I flit between apps and don’t complete any meaningful tasks.

I will do a full post on Smartphones in a later post.

I reckon this one will be hard for most people today. Smartphones have become the norm, but with an infinite source of information in your pocket, sometimes you miss out on all the things your senses can pick up from your surroundings. I challenge you to slim down your installed apps & even turn off your phone next time you go out with a friend or loved one. It is life changing.

I have smart phone free time daily now. I leave it outside of the bedroom at night and always put it on charge in the kitchen when I’m at home. If I go out walking I leave it switched off at home or in the glove box of my car. If you want to take photos while you walk, take a camera. It saves you getting distracted by the rest of the online world when you should be in a world of your own. Don’t instagram a picture of your walk while you are doing it, save that for later & just enjoy that moment.

Finally, turn off notifications. The only notifications I have left active are those for texts & calls. I have disabled the vibrate function on my iPhone so now the silence switch truly does mean silent. By not having constant interruptions, you will regain so much more productivity & you will become more present & connected with those around you. I challenge you to try it.

Old social media accounts & website accounts

This one will need you to do some thinking. I decided to close down unused social media, forum & website accounts. The first accounts I closed where Deviant Art, Myspace, Google plus along with various old forum accounts, three old email accounts, my old dropbox account and various online shop accounts.

It may be hard to remember where you have accounts, so keep an eye out for emails from these companies. If you do get one, login & close the account. Some accounts are really easy to delete such as Dropbox & deviant art. Others, such as online shops, may need you to email them requesting account closure.

This is great from a clutter point of view. Less to worry about & one less username & password to remember. I’m in the process of streamlining my online presence. As mentioned earlier, I primarily use Twitter & Instagram now. My Google Plus account was deleted, my Facebook account has been wiped clean and other accounts have been closed.

A second benefit of closing accounts comes from a security standpoint. The less sites that save your details, the less chance of your details being leaked or released following a database hack. My Skype account was recently hacked & I suspect that happened because of the Talk Talk data breach. I had an old account with TalkTalk that hadn’t been deleted & I used the same email address & password for both, purely by accident. So cleaning up accounts can also save you headaches. Bonus!

I could write at great length about digital clutter. My journey into minimalism initially ignored digital clutter, but as soon as I started looking into my own clutter it was obvious that this area is important & often overlooked. Digital Clutter has the same effect on our brains as physical clutter. It can be overwhelming and can kill productivity & creativity. For most, digital de cluttering will be a massive undertaking, but I really do urge you to address it. Just do a little bit every day.

Have you addressed your digital clutter? Share any tips or advice in the comments section below.

Renting can be quite expensive, but it also has benefits. If we want to move, we just give notice. No need to wait until a house sells before we move. It also means we are not responsible for the building & maintenance of major things like plumbing, heating and electrical work.

One major downside is the insecurity. We tend to move every 18 months & the last few moves haven’t been local. We have gone from living in Manchester to Scotland and now we live in Cornwall. Moving so often definitely makes you appreciate minimalism. The ability to pack up easily and move great distances is definitely helped by living a more minimal life. However there is always room for improvement.

One item I have struggled to downsize is my book collection. Unfortunately, this is also one of the worst things to hold onto when you move house a lot. The sheer weight & bulk of my book collection has hindered our recent moves & on the last move 12 months ago I decided to address the book collection.

My wife switched to reading on a Kindle e reader around 5 years ago. Since we moved to Cornwall & I nearly ruined my back carrying boxes of books I have been slowly moving over to an E reader too. At first I didn’t want to invest in any new kit so I resorted to the Amazon Kindle app on my old iPad. This worked OK for the past 12 months & has allowed me to start digitising my bulkiest books, but the iPad is less than ideal for reading. I find the backlight hurts my eyes after reading for a long period & the screen isn’t the best resolution for text. I also find the weight of the iPad to be an issue. If you read for extended periods it does get heavy.

Another major issue with reading on the iPad is glare. Trying to read on the go was proving very difficult in any outdoor conditions. I couldn’t see the screen in the garden or on the beach.

Last month I treated myself to a Kindle for my birthday. Other e readers are available & I’ve heard great things about the Kobo, but my wife has been using a kindle for years & we use Calibre to manage our ebook collections so I decided to stick with what I know. Also, as the all new Kindle had just been released, I got a brand new kindle of the previous generation at a discount for only £49.99.

It’s only when comparing the kindle to a section of my book collection you can really understand the significance of minimising & space saving with an ebook reader. I’ve taken a few pictures of my new kindle next to a stack of my books. This is only a small segment of my collection, but most of the books present are now also on my kindle. The kindle in the picture has 62 books on it. All in that small form factor. Truly portable.

I probably have around 400 hard back and text books. I’m in the process of re-reading, sorting & donating the books I no longer need. I’ve also been buying books in digital formats for the past 12 months. I only expect to keep a few of my most treasured physical books & can’t really envisage a need to buy any more physical books with the exception of a few text books with diagrams. I may just use a lending library for those.

The kindle really is a great device. I find it comfortable to read on for extended periods & the fact that I can carry a whole collection of books on such a small device means I can really read anywhere I choose. I used to carry two or three books with me in my backpack. I would read them at coffee shops or whenever I had a few minutes to spare. I’ve found that switching to an ebook reader has encouraged me to read even more than I did before.

There are certain ethical issues with ebook readers. Some people feel that they are an invasion of privacy, some people like to buy certain books using cash for privacy reasons & I can 100% agree with that. But for the majority of reading they are very well suited for modern life. There is also the issue of DRM and being able to pass them on/sell them but I find the portability outweighs those issues for me & there are plenty of DRM free outlets & resources available. Also, selling books isn’t really feasible now due to the weight & cost of postage. I’ve only ever sold two of my text books.

There is also the issue of vanity. I used to feel as though my book collection somehow validated my intelligence. It was a physical display of my education & my culture for everyone to witness when they came to visit. Let’s just say that was a misplaced vanity & I’d rather recommend books to friends than display them year round in the hope that they spot one when they visit. I think vanity & sentimentality play a big part in all of the collections we keep. It applies to all forms of media.

I’ve already digitised my music collection & my movie collection. I have posts on both of these subjects coming up soon. The book collection was the next logical step for me and due to the bulk/weight of books I’m glad I committed to switching. If you travel a lot or move house often, this could be a great way for you to lighten the load & free yourself up. It may also allow you to take a smaller house or apartment as you won’t need loads of space to store you books.

Have you switched over to an ebook reader? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

For a long time I was following that pattern. The first few times I moved house as an adult I only needed the space in a car to transfer my belongings, as time went on that car became a few car trips, then small transit vans and finally large removal vans. At the same time, the size of my property was also increasing. We started out in a tiny 1 bedroom top floor apartment which was owned by family, sparsely furnished and housing only our most important possessions (which at the time where are only possessions).

Our next apartment was even smaller, it was essentially two rooms in a converted Victorian house in Manchester, which had both been split in two, giving us a small living room & galley kitchen downstairs, a small spiral staircase in the living room went up to a small bedroom and tiny bathroom. We physically couldn’t fit much into that space & as a result we had the bare essential items. We didn’t feel deprived & the rent was so cheap. Our bikes were locked in the communal hallway & as the rent was so cheap, we really did exactly what we wanted with our lives.

Fast forward a few years and we progressed to a bigger 1 bedroom apartment, then onwards to a 2 bedroom house, then to a 3 bedroom house before finally moving into a 4 bedroom town house with garage and driveway. We haven’t had children and our core belongings haven’t changed. We still value our computers, cooking equipment, books and media centre, but the space had allowed us to accrue a load of extras. We had extra seating in the living room in the form of massive armchairs & sofas (for guests). We had a huge dining table to seat 6 people (we are still a family of 2). A garage full of rarely used tools, a spare bedroom, another bedroom used as a dressing room. Another bedroom used as a study and 3 bathrooms. Things where completely out of control. We where earning more money than when we lived in that first 1 bedroom apartment but we had next to no disposable income, the rent was almost triple & we had run up debts.

At this time a very close friend of mine was emigrating to New Zealand. He had been travelling for around a year and had seen a lot of Europe and ended up over in Australia & NZ. While in New Zealand he had made some good contacts & did some voluntary work at a maker space. He had decided to take up an offer of employment at the maker space in Wellington & with a bit of planning was ready to go. I was really sad to see him go, we have been close friends forever but this move was a positive step for him & the lessons learned helped me inadvertently.

On the morning he was leaving, I offered to take him to the train station to start his long journey to a new life on the other side of the globe. When picking him up I was shocked & intrigued by the fact he only had his travelling backpack & a small hold all. I don’t know why, but I expected this move to be like all of my moves. Surely all of his stuff was being shipped over. That wasn’t the case, he was literally starting a new life with only the things he could carry.

For some reason that really resonated with me.

I guess we both had similar upbringings & we both seem to have an issue with being tied to anything for too long. Be that work, a location or a routine. We always seem to change things up & make drastic moves or changes. He has always been a bit of a minimalist. Never owning much stuff, never buying into the latest crap. He even held off buying a mobile phone for years & always seemed to have money. Probably, because while we were busy buying rubbish, he was saving.

Suddenly I realised that if he could start a new life with only his most important & personal items, I could slim down my life to a much more manageable level & start to downsize property & belongings. It didn’t take long.

Within a few months I’d given notice on our 4 bedroom house, sold my fancy car, sold off a ton of the extras we had acquired, donated most of my clothing & started culling every aspect of my life. Within a few months everything was sold, the house was gone & we filled a small 80sqft storage unit with our entire life. We moved in with family for a year to clear off the debts we had run up over 10 years of ‘maximum-ism’. Each day we paid off a bit of debt & regained some of our old spirit. After a year, we had paid off almost £18K & bought a tiny 11 year old Fiat Panda car. It was the start of a new chapter in our life.

The next step was to move to a new property. We found a lovely church conversion in Cornwall which was 350 miles away from where we lived. Within a month we had moved in. It’s a modest two bedroom property. One bedroom is our work office and the smaller room is our actual bedroom. It has one bathroom, one living room & a kitchen.

We are still on our Minimalism journey. Just last week I bought a kindle so I could start to give away my physical book collection & move to a much lighter digital library. All of my music is digitised & we only use streaming services for movies now so no DVD’s. I do most of my work (including writing these posts) on an old Thinkpad X200 laptop I got on eBay for £50. Before it would have been the latest & greatest Macbook. This U-turn was life changing & in part I need to thank my friend for showing me the true value of stuff in your life & how it can hold you back. If he could make a new life in a new country without all the trappings of his old life, so can I.

Minimalism is definitely something I would recommend if you have itchy feet & constantly like to be on the move. My boredom threshold is quite low & routine while useful, tends to stifle me. I like to change things up constantly. Becoming minimalist allows me to do this with much more ease. When we moved down to Cornwall I still felt like we had too many belongings. We filled a van & the panda to get down here. It’s definitely a work in progress & I would expect that most minimalists are in constant review of their belongings. We are still sorting & downsizing & we aim to pay off all remaining debts & move to Amsterdam in the next 12 months. Following in the footsteps of my friend, we may not move with just a backpack and hold all, but it certainly won’t be any more than what we can fit in the car. This prospect really excites me.

The friend in question is still one of my closest, we talk often on Skype & Whatsapp & I’m hoping as my downsizing & simple living continues, I’ll be able to afford the air fare to go & see him in his new surroundings. We haven’t seen each other since that morning at the Train Station & it would be great to see inside each others lives again. To meet his new friends & family. The day is fast approaching when that will become reality. He also currently works at a micro brewery in Wellington, so that can only mean good times, right?

If you are new to Minimalism, feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below. If you are experienced, why not share some of your best advice with new readers.

My wife & I sat down to watch the documentary last night. The great thing about buying on Vimeo is that you can download a 1080p version of the documentary (HD) and watch it on any device you choose as it’s DRM free. This meant that I could watch on my media centre without worrying about having the Vimeo app installed & also means I can copy it to my laptop or tablet for watching on the go. A real bonus for me.

The documentary itself follows Ryan’s & Joshua’s book tour across the USA. They interview various bloggers, scientists and minimalists along the way & they really do highlight the benefits of living a more minimal lifestyle. I can totally relate to a lot of the issues raised in the documentary. My upbringing was very similar to Joshua’s & I feel a need to constantly reassess my life & check that everything is going in the right direction. I also have a real issue with wasting time & not wasting my day doing something that is meaningless.

I’ve already adopted a lot of minimalist values in my life. I only buy high quality items & I limit the items I own to ensure they meet multiple needs & add value to my life. It’s certainly an ongoing process and I find reading blogs & watching documentaries like this enable me to stay on track and address issues I’m having based on others experiences.

The documentary suggests that there is a real movement of people rejecting the modern norms of mass consumerism & debt. In their year of travel the boys start off giving talks to a few people in small halls & end up doing TV interviews and selling out talking venues & book shops. There is one scene in a Barnes & Noble store where people are literally standing on the bookshelves to listen. It’s nice to see that other people are adopting this lifestyle & with that brings more experiences and ideas.

I like it when Joshua mentioned someone he had met who kept a library of books & derived real joy from his book collection. Joshua’s answer to that was that it’s OK to keep things that bring you real value, but most things we bring into our home are faddy and don’t contribute anything to our lives in the long run.

Books used to be something I couldn’t part with, but I’ve slowly been converting my book addiction over to ebooks. I got the Amazon app for my iPad and just yesterday I took delivery of my first Kindle. My wife has had a kindle for years, she tends to read a lot of novels & never feels the need to hang onto them when she has finished. I, on the other hand tend to read a lot of non fiction, technical & text books. I find real value in having these available for reference, but I’ve actually found that having digital versions of these allows me to carry them everywhere with me on a single small device & makes me much lighter as a human being who tends to move house a lot (books weigh an absolute ton when moving house). The biggest benefit I’ve found however is the ability to search within the text of ebooks. It’s a game changer.

Anyway, back to the documentary. So far I’ve watched the documentary itself, which if you are even remotely interested in simple living or minimalism, you should watch. I’ve also watched the 40 minute full interview with Leo Babauta of Zen Habits which is well worth a watch. I’m nowhere near as far into this journey as Leo, but I do relate to what he said about thinking of himself 10 years ago & giving that person advice. It definitely helps me to see how far I’ve come & the work I’ve still got to do. I’ll be working through the other bonus features this week.

For £13 you get the documentary which is 1 hour and 18 minutes and you also get over 6 hours of interviews. This is an absolute bargain. Go watch it now! Other people included in the documentary are Joshua Becker, Tammy Strobel of Tiny House fame, Colin Beavan (the Low Impact Man – another great documentary) & Patrick Rhone along with some neuroscientists, sociologists and other scientists.

Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things from The Minimalists on Vimeo.