simplify my life and material possessions

While in many ways books might seem like a good thing to start to try to inventory, I am starting to doubt if that is really the case. As more often than not the more I read about minimalist it seems as if books are often the final holdout that often gets excluded by definition. Such as with the 100 Things Challenge in the traditional form officially excludes books, especially upon the further reflections that buying books that one already owns in the form of ebooks for the sake of being able to get rid of the hard copy of key texts does not make much sense when it comes to money. While I still like the idea of working toward writing up a complete inventory of everything that I own as I work on decluttering, I need to find something much simplier to write up. Maybe teaware would be the next logical starting point for me given that I already have my tea stash up on Steepster to help me keep track of what tea I have on hand to reduce the change of teas going bad on me when I forget that I have them until its too late for those poor little leaves to have slowly faded away under a death of time as compared to a more delicious and quick death of being submerged in boiling water.

I decided to go ahead with the detailed inventory of everything that I own as part of my simplicity discipline worth looking into. So to start working on it with my books I just signed up for a Library Thing account. I have a feeling when it gets to the point of keep and inventory or get rid of, will make it easier to draw a line between books that are useful and books that I’m just holding onto that realistically have zero chance of being useful so they would be better off to give away to friends, donate to charity or look into selling to a used bookstore.

I got an idea of a way to work on simplifying my material possessions which is to simply work on creating a detailed inventory of everything that I own. I know it sounds extreme and time consuming but not only would it force me to sort through everything that I own it would also make me reevaluate how important or useful something really is given the choice of adding it to my organized list/inventory or getting rid of it (sell, give away, trash). Maybe a good starting point would be my books to see how it goes with the goal of having read every book or having it on a “want to read list”.

To my readers: Does this sound like a potentially useful idea that sounds practical to you? Do you have any suggestions or better ways that I could be approaching this goal?

I listened to a recording of a talk on time management last night where the speaker said that time management is a myth as we can only manage priorities and not time. And when it comes to priorities one needs to find out what they are good at and what they value instead of trying to live what others think you should be. Another point that stood out was not to try to be a well rounded Renaissance man because it does not live primarily out of one’s strength, just like any smart business will not enter a new market unless it believes that it has a competitive advantage over the others. So in that sense I resolve to better focus upon my strengths (and hobbies which I truly enjoy which I gain more from that I put in) in order to better streamline my life upon what matters most and what I can make the most impact upon.

Just spend around 30 minutes cleaning out my Facebook Friends list taking it from 197 to 115 people. If it was somebody who I did not talk with since I graduated from High School, College or Seminary and I did not view their profile as interesting enough to follow I dropped them. If I had to look at mutual friends to figure out where I was supposed to know that person from they also got dropped. Now it should not only make it easier for me to follow the updates of the people who I really want to follow without the don’t care ones filling up my home page but it also makes the term “friend” a bit more meaningful. In the days to come I plan on a more careful sorting to go over the more borderline people who I was not able to drop without having to stop and think about it unlike tonight which goes to show how out of control my friends list had become.