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Monday, January 28, 2008
Living Smaller
By Julie

My latest read is A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. I'm about halfway through it. The writing is not exemplary, which is too bad, since it does make some good arguments against our society's illogical bias towards over-organization. I'm still not fond of my crammed drawers or messy desks, both at home and at work, but I'm pretty sure spending more time alphabetizing, labeling, and container-izing is not going to solve anything. If anything has helped it's Scaling Down: Living Large in a Smaller Space, which I'd read last year. I came away from that book convinced that less really is more, and I've been slowly but surely making headway against my packrat tendencies.

The best weapon I've found so far is to avoid shopping and bringing more things into the house. Whenever I do go shopping, I tend to buy too many things, whether it's the jumbo bag of onions or yet another V-neck T that I do not need, just because it's on sale. When I give a shopping list to Kevin and ask him to go to the store, on the other hand, he tends to come home with only what was on the list. Judging by our credit card bills, this strategy has already kept a few hundred dollars worth of stuff out of our house this year, so I think it's one worth continuing. Since I do not actually like shopping, it won't even feel like I'm depriving myself of anything.

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4 Comments:
  • At 10:09 AM, Anonymous Michael said…

    Hi Julie,

    that's a good trick to involve hubby into household affairs: "Darling, please do the shopping, because I tend to spend too much money" :) :)
    But as I learned to know Kevin, he does not need some announcement like this as incentive.

    Greeting to everyone
    Michael

     
  • At 7:40 PM, Blogger Kevin said…

    Aww thanks, that's nice of you to say. We do try to share in pretty much everything - makes the chores more fun to do them together!

    It's nice to hear from you, hope all is well with you and your family.

     
  • At 5:24 PM, Blogger Rita said…

    Funny you should mention A Perfect Mess. That's been on my to-read list for a long time!! I'm interested in it telling me why my messy ways are best. :D (I haven't read it yet, but I know for sure already that I'm a fan of not overplanning travel...)

    :D
    r

     
  • At 6:36 PM, Blogger Julie said…

    Haha, I stopped reading about halfway through because I realized I wasn't going to discover the next penicillin. The other arguments in favor of mess were similarly outlandish.

     

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