Noisy Deadlines

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less By Greg McKeown

• Kindle Edition, 274 pages
• Publication Date: April 15, 2014
• Read from October 30 to 31, 2015

This book was a fast read for me. The good thing is that it made me feel less anxious and less stressed. It reminded me that I have the power to choose what I want to do with my time and my life. And that I don't need to let others dictate/influence my schedule and my to-do list. Because as Greg McKeown advises us in the book:

“Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.” ― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

It has taught me that the most important question to ask is: “What is really essential to me?”. The rest can simply be thrown away. But that's no simple task because we usually hang on to a pletora of things without knowing which of them are truly essential. He has a nice definition o the term Essentialism:

“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”
― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

I am going through a big change right now!

I will be moving abroad next month (in 23 days to be exact) and I’ve been evaluating my possessions and minimizing since 2015. By then, I just wanted to live more intentionally and get rid of excess stuff. I wanted to travel light, with only a carry-on. I wanted to have a capsule wardrobe so that I needn’t waste time deciding what to wear in the morning.

These are all normal things everybody desires when they discover intentional living or minimalism.

I’ve read more than a dozen books about this topic since 2015.

I've read countless blog posts and articles about living with less, wasting less and choosing to own only the essential.

I started meditating in the mornings.

I started practicing yoga.

I've sold almost all my physical books, I've sold all my CD's, I donated clothes, shoes, towels, magazines, pens, notebooks.

I've scanned all the print photos I still had with me and recycled them. It was a huge pile!

I did the Minimalism Game for two consecutive months and got rid of 902 items in 59 days (February and March, 2017).

And I wondered if that was enough. Deep inside I felt that I wasn’t touching the surface of being really intentional. I felt all the benefits though. I am a much happier person. I have less anxiety, less stress. I remember to breath deeply in the middle of the day. I can focus.

Now, due to our future big move overseas, I started to sell and donate things that I thought were essential to me. As I am getting rid of furniture, electronics and even domestic appliances I am realizing that these things are not so essential after all.

This month I am selling big things. An office cabinet. A drawer cabinet. A sofa-bed that was “just in case we had visitors”. A kitchen mixer. A blender. A high quality office chair. All these items were in my daily routine (except the sofa-bed, which was really a “Just In Case”). They were essential to me! But after not having them at my disposal, I noticed I can live without them. It's not that bad!

In February, 2017 I decided to play the Minimalism Game. I wanted to use it as a tool to declutter some of my stuff. I had a loose plan of the categories of things I wanted to address. So, I gave it a go!

The first month was a success, as you can check out here, here and here.

The sweet thing about the game is that it gives us momentum. It breaks the inertial state. And it provides a sense of progression. You start slow, with one item, and you comfortably go adding one more item to the previous amount until you reach day 15. Then things start to get more challenging. But you’ve prepared for it, you’ve been training and so you put your fears aside and continue on the quest for more items to let go.

When I finished the first month, which were 28 days, I looked at my stuff and saw that there were more items to purge. I was not done with my plan. It was natural for me to go for a second round.

The second month of purging: March, 2017

My plan was to declutter the following categories of stuff:

• CD’s — data/backups;
• Clothes;
• Shoes;
• Old Printed Photos (needed scanning);
• Kitchen utensils;
• Certificates;
• Business cards;
• Old Medical Exams.

This month (February, 2017) I decided to start the Minimalism Game. It’s an idea by The Minimalists (awesome blog!), you can read more about it here. This is the last post about it, from Day 19 to Day 28. You can also read Part 1 and Part 2.

So, my February Minimalism Game is now complete! That means I had a daily task of looking at my possessions and deciding which ones no longer were adding value to my life…

…That means I trashed, donated or recycled 406 items!

The habit of critically analyzing my stuff got easier day by day. I started to wonder why I held on to each particular object and weighted its importance and usefulness to me. The weird thing is that I remember each one of the 406 items. I have memories about them. I know where they came from. Some of them traveled 1,105 kilometers with me when I left my hometown and moved to Brasilia in 2007. But, oh, well, they are just stuff! They have served me once but now they are just stuff.

Most of the items were paperwork. I have spent some hours of February digitizing stuff too because there were some documents I wanted to keep a digital copy. I finally dealt with a memory box I carried with me since college that contained old postcards and letters (Day 21). I kept the digital images of the important letters to me, the hard copies were recycled. And the box is gone too because it wasn’t useful to me anymore.

This month (February, 2017) I decided to start the Minimalism Game. It’s an idea by The Minimalists (awesome blog!), you can read more about it here. This is the second post about it, from Day 10 to Day 18. You can read the first part here.

The “Gamification” Effect

This is when the game starts to become challenging. After day 10 the selection of items is not so fast anymore. You see, I didn’t have a box already full of stuff previously collected to donate/trash/sell. Each day I go through my stuff and select which items will go away that day.

And since I didn’t have previously collected items, I started to plan ahead my game every week. I know which areas I can go through the next day and I even separate the next number of stuff so that I can deal with it the next morning. And this “gamification” keeps me working! It’s less likely I will find an excuse and let the decluttering for an undetermined day in the future.

When I reached Day 18, I started to think that I wouldn’t get to the end. But there is always one more pile of paper, some books here and there and CD’s. I discovered a drawer full of CD’s. I knew I had them, but I didn’t remember how many. I used to back up my data on CD’s before having external hard drives. I had old PC games I no longer play. I had CD’s with MP3’s before there were streaming services. I had old electronics! I had installation CD’s and manuals of a computer I no longer own! So many obsolete things!!

So far, I got rid of 176 items :)

This month I decided to start the Minimalism Game. It’s an idea by The Minimalists (awesome blog!), you can read more about it here. It’s very simple: you choose someone to join you, to create accountability. Then on Day One you get rid of one thing, one day two, two things, so on and so forth, until day 30, when you get rid of 30 things in one day.

The game is meant to create momentum while decluttering and eliminating the feeling of overwhelm when you want to tackle a great number of stuff. You can either donate, sell, or trash the excess stuff. By the end of the 30 days, if you keep it up, you’ll have 465 less things in your life.

In my case, since February has 28 days, I’ll have 406 items!

This will be a three part post!

Why have I started it?

I’ve been into a minimal mindset since 2013. It’s a long process, and I started to get rid of unwanted or forgotten clothes and shoes at first. I realized I was hanging on to too many items that didn’t correspond to my life style anymore. I had shoes I never wore. I had old clothes that were setting in my closet forgotten. First, I’ve decluttered my wardrobe. Then my CD’s, my books and my kitchen utensils. But I still had other areas of focus I wanted to tackle. I have office supplies, old electronics, mementos and miscellaneous stuff I want to go through. So, I thought the Minimalism Game could give me the right amount of incentive to start up this process.

I don’t like to fail. Whenever I fail at something I feel like I will never accomplish anything in my life. My mind is filled with negative self talk. It is a feeling that brings me down and makes me unproductive. But why is that? Why is it so important to never fail? And what is failure, anyway?

If we go to the dictionary, failure is defined as “lack of success” or “a state of inability to perform a normal function”. So, failure is like the opposite of success and everybody wants to be successful, right? Yeah, we are taught to crave perfection and we are bombarded with this message all the time.

But I think we need to practice failure. I want to be able to say, without shame or fear, that “I am good at failing”. We all learn from our mistakes, right?

Why do I dislike failure?

The idea of failure makes me insecure. If I have a plan and suddenly that plan has to be canceled or postponed I loose confidence on my planning. I know planning is not made to be static but I enjoy certainty. And that’s why I run away from failure: my need of security makes me not want to fail.

I also have a fear of discomfort. Leaving our comfort zones requires courage and the ability to accept change and, consequently, failure.

I do not like being vulnerable. I do not like to expose myself. And maybe that is only a reflection of my introvert self. I have a loud mind and small failures can become huge disasters inside my head.

The path to practice failure

So, my mind does not accept failure lightly. It is hard for me to give space to imperfection. I feel like I struggle to be imperfect.

When I say “imperfect” I do not mean something bad or unacceptable, just something real and authentic. The media nowadays sells us a notion of perfection that is artificial. We do not need the perfect car, or the perfect house, or the perfect appearance to be happy.

But after acknowledging that I want to change my perfectionist mindset, I have started to practice failure and be okay with it. I am learning to enjoy imperfect experiences. I am letting go of my “perfectionist” self.

Our notion of “perfection” can vary. A perfect weekend for me may not be the same for you. Perfection does not exist in reality, right? It is just a matter of what is your reference. And when we start to believe that the reference for perfection is what the media sells us, then we start to crave the impossible. And I want out of this vicious cycle!