Why we want a simplified life

I am Janet’s daughter Jessica. Recently, my husband Eric and I decided to take a close look at where our money went last year. We used mint.com to group transactions into categories (such as clothes, restaurants, and taxis).  I will write more about the results of this little experiment later, but for now, suffice it to say that we were shocked at how much we were spending. All of this got me thinking: why am I drawn to simplicity? The obvious answer is to save more so that we can retire early.  That’s part of it, but I think the real reason I feel so compelled to slash my spending and possessions is that I want to live a more deliberate life, a la Thoreau in his Walden days.  By reviewing last year’s spending, I realized that we were not making deliberate choices with our time or money. We had no overarching goal about […]

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When it Really CAN Wait: How to Manage Your Time at Work

Since my job is in digital marketing, it’s probably no surprise to hear that I get about 100 emails each day. Granted, only about 40 percent of those are legitimate (non-spam), but it’s still a lot. Add that in with inter-office messaging, verbal conversation, meetings, and phone calls, and it’s hard to actually get work done some days!   But effective time management is possible, and I want to share some tricks I’ve learned for how to manage your time at work. Prioritize. Some things are more timely and important to do before others – you can’t possibly do everything right away, and you shouldn’t. Every morning, I look at my task list and organize each item based on priority: Critical items like submitting payroll and drafting an important holiday promotion email campaign for a client take precedence, followed by the daily/weekly tasks that I know require more of my […]

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How to Live a Simpler Life: 3 Things to Stop Right Now

I’m always trying to find ways to simplify my life, just like you are. But since my days are so full, a lot of times the very thought of doing something to simplify, felt like one more thing I had to cram into my already full to-do list. But one day, in the middle of my frustration, a light bulb went off. What if, instead of DOING one more thing to simplify, I simply STOPPED doing certain things?

Suddenly, it was easy to see where my life was getting complicated, and then I could also see where I needed to stop doing certain things. Here are three examples, and they have made a huge difference.

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Simplifying Life: The Day My World Was Unplugged

There is one very important day in my path to living a simpler life. I don’t remember the date, but I do remember the day. Chances are, you have the same issues I did, and you don’t even know it. Allow me to explain… I was in my early 20s, married and didn’t have kids when I realized that I had more stresses in my life than the typical: Mortgage is due. Car is running funny. What should I wear? Things that I had never considered stressors, and in many cases I thought were actually positive things were causing me stress, and I didn’t even know it. I Was Completely Plugged In I was the go-to person about pop-culture. I looked forward to TV shows, I was plugged in and knew all of the latest references going around in the office. I knew which movies were coming out and when, […]

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