3 Months of Minimalism | How far I have come and what my future hopes are
You wake up in the morning but you are still tired, the time is 6am.
Drowsy, you stumble into the kitchen for a glass of water.
You’re staring out of the window whilst drinking your water wondering why you had another lousy night of sleep and what you need to do during the rest of the day.
Then you’re distracted by your smartphone, flicking through your unread notifications and catching up on last night’s missed news, the next thing you know you’re browsing through all your social media, you glance at the time, an hour has passed, it’s 7am — where did that hour go?
Slightly panicked your mind tries to figure out what you need to do next to make up for that lost time, your eyes wonder down the the unwashed items in the sink from last night, you’ll do them now. A notification beeps on your phone but you ignore it as you go to the fridge wondering what you’ll make for breakfast. As the fridge door opens and your eyes adjust to the soft glowing light, you stare and stare fixated on all the stuff in the fridge you don’t want to eat! Eventually you take out the milk and decide to have a bowl of cornflakes, how original!
You sit down to enjoy your “nutritious” and “delicious” breakfast but before you even take a bite you decide enough time has passed that it is ok to check that ignored notification, you deserve it after all, you ignored it for 5 minutes! You take a spoonful of cornflakes to your mouth, it’s all soggy, you went to check a notification and somehow that lead to another 15 minutes of scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, breakfast is not as appetising as it was 15 minutes ago.
In a moment of self control you decide to cast your phone away and be more productive, nearly 2 hours have passed since you woke up and nothing has been accomplished. In order to regain the lost time, you throw in a load of clothes in the washing machine and turn it on, but it has hardly dented the mountain of dirty laundry. Now that’s happening, you enter the war-zone living room and pick up the kid’s toys that impede your path and you throw them in the kid’s storage bins and shelves, randomly. You open the curtains and the bright sunshine light dazzles you for a moment and in the moment of fuzziness you wonder again: where has all the time gone and why have I note achieved anything productive or creative so far this morning, why I am wasting time.
Your attention is distracted by the cry of your 6 month old baby and you rush past the remaining living room mess to get upstairs before the yells of the baby wakes the 2 year old! You don’t want to deal with two crying children at the same time and you’re already flustered by doing the laundry and feeble attempt to tidy up, it’s still early morning and you’re already a mess!
Your brave attempts have failed, both of your children are awake and being fussy, you snap at your wife when she asks you where the milk powder is, you look around aimlessly and the washing machine beeps to notify you that the quick wash cycle is complete, that means another 45 minutes have passed — your heart sinks as you realise the number of uncompleted tasks that have increased yet nothing in the last two hours has helped.
You spend the next 12 hours chasing the day, doing the daily chores, “putting out fires”, feeding and playing with kids, running errands and of course checking your phone a dozen times…or more!
That is a small snapshot of my life 3 months ago, hectic, unproductive, messy and unfocused. But in the 3 months that have passed I have embraced minimalism and things have improved somewhat. I am not advocating minimalism as the answer that is why as the title suggests, there are some things I hope minimalism can do for me.
The following are the initial changes I personally have noticed as I started my minimalism journey and embracing some of its concepts and ideas:
Less mess
A personal preference of mine is to always be clean, tidy and organised but since sharing my space with my wife and two children over the last 4 years or so this has not been in my control. I have had to respect others preference for stuff and where stuff live. So I started with decluttering my own personal possessions starting with donating unwanted clothes, moving on to clearing away digital files and photos from my phones and laptops (many things moved to the cloud). I haven’t tried to involve my family or convert my loved ones to minimalism yet because in a sense I am myself just getting started therefore I have continued to slowly tackle mess in other shared areas this has been kitchen cabinets (was amazed to gain an empty shelf after clearing away a lot of expired foodstuff) and cabinet drawers that previously had random things stuffed inside them, they are now organised into: stationery draw, equipment instruction manuals and warranty, photo albums, and important documentation. When the appropriate time comes I hope my wife will help me and more importantly help herself to rid herself and our home of the tons of unwanted, unworn, outdated clothes and shoes, just imagine the freed up wardrobe space, shelves and cabinets!
I secretly organise my daughter’s hundreds of children's books alphabetically after categorically sorting them by characters or themes (a little OCD/extreme I guess).
Routine
To try and tackle the problem of not getting the essential tasks done ASAP I decided it was best to set a routine from the moment I woke up. So I’d be drinking water and stretching as soon as I was out of bed and brushed my teeth, and since I was in the kitchen I’d wash and clear up any remaining mess from the night before and then make a cup of tea and a bowl of porridge to sit down with as I jotted down a few notes in my journal and plan my day. If there is laundry to be done I get a load going straight away and then either meditate (for 5 minutes as that’s how long I can go for) or water the plants. The aim here is to get me set for the rest of the day before being engulfed by all the other things that come with having children and a family. Other things I will routinely try to fit into my day where appropriate is a 15 minute workout and an hour of learning to code.
Minimimal distractions
Constantly checking my phone (even when there are no buzzes or beeps or notifications) or “twitch” (term borrowed from breakthetwitch.com and Anthony’s great work) was probably a habit from my previous job in construction where we would have 10–20 WhatsApp groups for sharing information which meant we were constantly staring into our glowing rectangles! Now that I have quit my job I decided to deliberately stop this very bad habit and to minimize the distractions that would not only waste time but stop me from doing the essential things. I quit Instagram and deleted the Facebook app (I quit Facebook over a year ago), deleted all news apps, turned off all notifications except to allow them from the phone, messages and emails (I unsubscribed from close to 30 newsletters, blogs and utility companies so I have very few emails anyway). I hid away apps such as Netflix (note to self: must cancel subscription), newsfeeds and photos from the homescreen and buried them through several folder layers to make it more of a chore to access. At first it was difficult to control the urge to check the phone when I was bored or sitting on the toilet but over time as I became accustomed to the fact that my phone was becoming less important I lost the urge to pick it up and be immersed in pointless social media and the constant feed of bad news, I mainly read
articles now!Other distractions that I have managed to contain include not watching TV anymore, deleting apps and bookmarks from my laptop and clearing away all files and icons on the desktop. I try to keep every table top and surface clear of any items until required to receive the items (i.e. laptop, books, magazines, food, journal etc.) this way I am not inclined to be distracted by something that has caught my eye or feel the urge to tidy up when just walking into the kitchen for a drink.
But by far the most extreme is sacrificing an hour of sleep. I often try to get up an hour earlier than normal to get things done before the ensuing chaos when the wife and children are up, this hour is my time to focus on my reading and writing that helps my personal development, I say I try because often than not my sleep is interrupted by both children crying in the middle of the night.
More time
I guess after the initial momentum from tidying and decluttering, once things were tidier and had found new appropriate homes it became easier to find things and tidying became less frequent, this produced more time.
When you declutter digitally too you find your phone or computers become slightly faster and hence I gained a few more seconds or microseconds! But it was reducing the amount of time nonsensically checking my phone when I was bored or had a spare 5 minutes that saved the most time because as we all know 5 minutes on your phone is always actually closer to 30 minutes!
Once you routinely do things on a daily basis (habit is the term I’m looking for) you often don’t need to think about it and things get done and without losing time in the morning you won’t feel like you are chasing the time back again throughout the rest of the day, and once you get things done you naturally feel the sense of more time (give yourself a gold ⭐️ ).
Productivity
The ideas and concepts of minimalism as I have just described are just that, steps you can take when you embrace minimalism, but the main benefit I gained from minimalism is that of productivity. When I described how poorly my mornings went before minimalism it is clear to see not only was my physical environment a mess but so too was my mind and self management. You often hear it from others who have embraced minimalism and reaped its rewards but it is true, less is more. With less mess, less tidying up and less distractions, I could focus my attention on the things that were a drain on my system and a drain on my time. In such a short period of time I have been able to gain a simple routine, minimise distractions and in the process been more productive because I have not drawn into looking at my phone I have instead read more books which has compelled me to write more. And by being less occupied by finding things or constantly tidying up I have spent that time playing more with my children or looked into making better financial investments (only time will tell if they are better).
Clarity
Minimalism is different for everyone and each one of us minimalists take up minimalism for different reasons and its ideas are flexible enough that I feel it is suitable for almost everyone and more so in this modern era. I personally took up minimalism after I came across it because I was stuck in a rut not knowing where my life was headed when I quit my most recent job and decided that construction and civil engineering was no longer right for me, I was lost. I immersed myself in self help books and blogs, minimalism appealed to me because I disliked mess and disorder and preferred simplicity, things became easier for me when I could suddenly put a word or a name to the direction I wanted to head in, albeit I didn't know what I wanted but I could just sense that taking this dive into minimalism felt right and appropriate at this stage in my life where I need to find what was important to me whilst saving money (no job) and spending more time with my family (two preschool children).
I found I was clearer on where I wanted to go but didn't need to know the destination, the most exciting part is that I have only started and simplifying down to the basics feels right, especially for an introvert like me!
What I hope minimalism can do for me looking forward:
A new career
I put this at the top of my list of hopes because I feel pressured not only by my parents but in a way by society, I need to get a job or is it I need to bring money in? But however you look at it, since quitting my job 9 months ago I haven’t found another sustainable income stream therefore in order to support my family I need to make some money. My hope is that minimalism can help, I’m hoping with some of the extra time I have gained I can experiment with different things or build up my skills to try out in different industries, I’ve been finding an hour or so each day learning to code, there are so many different languages, sectors and opportunities I need to declutter all the information I am constantly bombarded with in my time learning and researching. Let’s hope I can pinpoint an area that interests me the most, I may even find my passion but my real aim is to work more from home to spend more time with my family.
Better health and fitness
My hope here is quite simple, I don’t have a terrible diet (i.e. cheeseburgers, pizzas and chips every day) but I can definitely cut down on sugary foods like chocolate, unhealthy foods like biscuits and processed foods and caffeine. Another hope here is that I can fit in more exercise into my daily routine, I’m definitely not skinny but neither am I in shape, I tried fitting in push ups and sit ups every day and then 3 times a week I’d do some weights at home…but I lost momentum in the last week when we spent two days away from home celebrating my daughter’s third birthday, excuses I know.
Creativity
I hope that as I progress on this minimalism journey I can create more with some of the time freed up by less time spent tidying and worrying. Instead this time can be used to write more, I know for certain my writing and expressing myself in these Medium articles can be much improved, I want to start either a blog or a vlog about my minimalism story…maybe it can help with my income situation, only time will tell. But with less I can create more (I hope!).
Destination
I’ve taken the plunge, I’ve taken the first steps, into minimalism and it feels right, it feels right to own less, to simplify, to focus on the essentials and to not be distracted by the noisy world. Honestly although I am recalling some parts of my 3 month journey so far, much of it has been a blur, the first few months have been a process of trial and error, amazement and confusion at times. Although I’ve said I didn’t need to know the destination, in honesty I hope that this minimalism journey leads to happiness, fulfilment and financial freedom. Can owning less possessions, being less distracted, having less concerns and less clutter really lead to a life of more time, more focus, more freedom and more purpose?
I hope my minimalism journey will be an inspiring one.
