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I haven’t read Marie Kondo’s book or watched her show because her method would not work for me.  I’ve written in the past about how decluttering brings out my inner Gollum.  I cannot consider whether or not something sparks joy because I am too busy trying to silence my brain from screaming, “Mine!”

But I recently discovered Julie Morgenstern, who marries time management and decluttering into one mindset, and THAT is a philosophy I can get behind.

Return stuff to the same place every single time and you’ll never waste time searching the house for it.  Put your important items, the items that always travel with you out of the house, in a single space, so you can grab and go.  Think of it as extra time you get added to your day.

Don’t think of decluttering as the same thing as organizing.  You declutter one category at a time, such as all of your books or all of your clothes.  You organize one space at a time, such as a drawer or a closet or a room.  You can’t really declutter and organize at the same time.

Don’t have more items on your to-do list than can be completed in the time that you have, even if all of those things really need to get done.  (1) They probably don’t.  (2) Even if they do, you’re not getting to all of them.  So place them in different days and tackle just the ones on today’s list.  Everything will actually get done rather than haphazardly leaving one or two things behind on the list every day.

And give people undivided attention in fifteen minute bursts.  Better to spend fifteen minutes with all devices closed, focused on the person in front of you, than to spend an hour one day and nothing the next.  Consistently giving small amounts of undivided attention is better than giving huge amounts of attention unevenly.

And that’s just what I was able to glean from the beginning of this article.  My plan is to dive into one of her books next week.

Let’s just kick this off by saying that (1) we’re not rich and (2) we don’t have a cleaning service.  But we ARE watching Downton Abbey right now AND I read this old post and wondered what a housekeeper would say about our lives.  It’s one thing to write or even photograph your life and put it online.  It’s another thing to have someone move through your home, observing every square inch.

On one hand, that housekeeper only knows the version she imagines by looking at clues.  On the other hand, you can pick up a lot of details if you’re opening and closing drawers, reading receipts, noticing which objects move and which stay in the same place, week after week.

And then there was this:

A week or two after she told me about the pregnancy, I noticed spots of blood by the toilet. She told me about the miscarriage when I left. I acted as if I didn’t already know. She slouched. I wasn’t sure what to say.

What story does my house tell?  A person who keeps a broken laundry basket but neatly recopies lists if they grow too messy.  The labeled meals in the freezer.  The bar of chocolate, several years expired, that I can’t seem to toss when we clean out the pantry.  The lack of televisions.  The multiple vacuum cleaners.  The stacks of books.  The wooden ducks.

All of it tells a story; though would everyone tell themselves the same story by walking through the same house?

Lifehacker had a fantastic article that we just used with one of the kids to help them make a decision.  It’s the two questions you need to be able to answer affirmatively to find out if you’re ready to grow.  Because I think everyone would answer that they’d like to be the prettiest flower in the garden; tall, vibrant, noticed.  But not everyone wants to go through the pain of becoming that flower — the uncertainty of the seed sprouting, the long days waiting for water, the pruning.

Growth is painful.  It takes time.  It takes energy.  And there’s nothing wrong with taking a good, hard look at the goal and saying, “not ready right now to put in the work.”

The two questions:

1. Do you want to do better? (We changed this to “do you want the achievement?”)
2. Are you willing to feel uncomfortable or frustrated or disappointed as you do the work to reach your goal?

I think we get so bogged down looking at the goal and focusing on the goal that our eye glosses over everything that lies in the path between here and there.  This part of the article rang true:

Bregman is saying to confront what it means to do something new first and ask yourself if you’re really willing to do it. Saying yes is no guarantee you will succeed, of course, but in the tough moments you can remember that you believed it was worth it. Then push through.

Stating something’s worth can make the difference between pushing forward or stopping the work.

So what do you want to do better?  And what are you willing to feel frustration over?

I love rocky, barren islands.  I’m okay with patches of grass and a few spindly trees, but you know that scene in the first Harry Potter movie where the family goes to hide out in the ramshackle island house so the Hogwarts letters can’t find them?  THAT would be like my ideal vacation home space.  A close second would be Vardø, Norway.

Listen to this description:

Once the cod capital of the Arctic, Vardø, population 1,875, perches like a fish-scented mirage on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county. While the Visit Vardø website makes the town look like Williamsburg with puffins and Aurora Borealis, it isn’t. There are only four ways to Vardø — none are good, and all originate at Kirkenes, a shithole in the way that only towns that are waystations to other places can be.

Heaven.

It’s Wolf Island.  It is known for its snowball fights.  (Wait, scratch that, I don’t like snowball fights.)  They have puffins!  It’s light almost 24 hours per day in the summer.  (Which I know means that it’s dark almost 24 hours per day in the winter.)

The kids will be sad that they turned down my request for Newfoundland because they left the door open and now my heart is set on Vardø.

I received a Google Home at a conference.  It currently lives — unplugged — in a closet.  I am aware that it can only do its job, providing me with billions of facts in seconds, if I attach it to an outlet.  That is not going to happen.

I have no problem with my current level of convenience.  I have a machine that will wash my dishes if I place them inside.  A machine that washes and dries my clothes.  I even have a tiny machine that can boil a cup of water in a minute or so, helping me make tea.  All of these machines require a human present for at least one step.  I see zero reason to gain something new to manage just to have the ability to set something to run from afar.

Part of it is privacy concerns.  Part of it is just not wanting one more thing to think about.  Articles like that highlight the fact that home-based machines are still a far-cry from Jetson levels of convenience.  Though it’s interesting that George Jetson never wondered aloud to Jane about the vast quantities of data their futuristic home was sending along to massive corporations…

I don’t want a smart home.  Though I feel like I keep getting nudged in that direction whenever we need to replace an object.  Why won’t the companies allow me to live a simple life?  And why won’t the damn kids stop playing on my lawn?

Do you have smart products in your home?