Unclutter Your Life in One Week

I'm on an organisational spree at the moment. The new year always seems like a great time to get my life in order and to change my habits so that disorder does not return. I've never been good at keeping New Year's Resolutions (but who is, really?) so this is not a resolution - just a desire for change.

And even more than desire, a plan for change. I enjoy reading "life hack" blogs, as part of my ongoing journey towards organisation and better time management. I don't remember why/when I first started reading, but one of my regular haunts is Unclutterer.com. It's a combination of the age-old mantra "A place for everything and everything in its place" and the newer (or perhaps just renewed) emphasis on minimalism (also seen on blogs such as Zen Habits). The editor-in-chief of the blog, Erin Rooney Doland, has recently published a book called Unclutter Your Life in One Week, which provides a week-long game plan for removing clutter from home, office and life. It seemed like a good way to start getting myself organised for the new year (the second step will be David Allen's Getting Things Done - incidentally, Allen wrote the foreword for Unclutter Your Life).

A review I read of Unclutter Your Life on another of my favourite life-hack blogs, The Simple Dollar, provides a glowing recommendation. Trent describes it as " This is the single best book I’ve ever read on organizing your life." However, he does acknowledge that accomplishing all of the ideas in the book in one week is impossible. The value comes in the detailed advice as well as the progressive steps Erin outlines. Even if it can't be done in one week, following all these steps should lead to a less cluttered (and therefore, according to Erin, more "remarkable") life.

I've read through the whole book, and now I just have to try to apply the advice and the steps outlined. Each day has three tasks: one at home in the morning; one at work during the day; and another at home in the evening. I'm going to try to complete the whole process in one week, but I have cheated a little - I started, somewhat half-heartedly, last week. From my overview reading, there are two main frustrating things I've noticed:

1. To begin with, Erin has a rather odd view of work-life balance. For work life to be in perfect balance with personal life, a person should be at work the exact same amount of time as they have free time. Obviously, no one really wants to be at work 84 hours a week. So, Erin advocates "work-life symbiosis", which is "what you achieve when all aspects of your life exist together harmoniously" [7]. I would have thought that this is what most people mean by "work-life balance." But that's really just a small point.
2. The fact that it is impossible to complete this process thoroughly in one week is a little frustrating, given that the title is Unclutter Your Life in One Week. The problem is that the processes outlined would take far more time than allowed. For example, the task for Monday morning before work is to unclutter your wardrobe. As this involves getting all the items of clothing in one place for sorting, first "Wash everything in your dirty clothes hamper and pick up any items that maybe at the dry cleaner" [20]. While all the clothes are out of the wardrobe, this is a good time to "repaint, repair, dust, hang hooks, replace rods, or change your wardrobe storage in any way" [22]. How can that possibly be done Monday morning before work? Perhaps the seven days are not meant to be taken literally as seven twenty-four hour days, but instead refer to periods of time, or ages - convenient marking points for outlining a process. A literary device or metaphor. Hmm. Where have I seen that before?!

All in all, this seems like it will be a very useful book, and if it can motivate me to unclutter and organise my life, I'm not going to complain that it takes longer than a week! But I'll reserve my final judgment for the end of the process.