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#1
July 2nd, 2009, 12:05 AM
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It's All Too Much
My wife and I finished reading It's All Too Much by Peter Walsh. I guess it falls somewhere between a self-help book and a DIY organization manual. Walsh hosted a show on TLC called Clean Sweep (which I never saw) where he'd go to people's horribly messy houses and help them clean up.
The book examines why people have clutter in their lives, homes, office, etc and how to deal with it in a realistic and positive way. It explores the impact of your personal space on other facets of your life and relationships. It also provides a very approachable step-by-step guideline for how not only to clean a messy cluttered space but - more importantly - how to keep it clean. He also stresses limits and discipline in using your space and in consumerism. His simplified message is: You've only got so much space, and you're either living in it, or your not. Each space needs a function and should contain the things that serve the function and nothing that doesn't. Some of the book is a little more "New Age Feel-Goodery" type stuff than I would usually tolerate, but most of it is very sound practical advice. There's no feng shui or anything, but he talks a LOT about how much of an impact your space has on the rest of your life. I mean, I get that his books about cleaning up my house, but my messy desk isn't responsible for EVERYTHING that goes wrong in my life. My wife and I have been going through his plan and so far have had some great sucess. We moved the television out of the bedroom, culled the kids toys down by almost half (!) and we'll be having a garage sale in a few weeks. We're unloading and donating just tons and tons of stuff. It's been unexpectedly liberating to clear spaces out and not immediately fill them with other things. By defining the spaces in our house and organizing them with those functions in mind the house just makes sense like it never did before. The book suffers from the common problem many self-help books have in that most of the examples and testimonials in the book are so extreme and so outlandish as to make them unrelatable. That being said, I consider it more of a problem with the genre on the whole, not the specific writer or the subject matter. 
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#2
July 2nd, 2009, 12:09 AM
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Re: It's All Too Much
Very nice. I hadn't heard of this guy (or that book) before, but I'll reccommend it to my wife. We've been doing some similar things based off of ideas from her favorite blog, Zen Habits. It also goes into more emotional-type clutter; it is all great stuff.
http://www.zenhabits.net http://zenhabits.net/2009/06/all-the...d-in-one-post/ I'm selling a bunch of Heroscape stuff to pay for personal emergencies, please see my trade thread post: http://www.heroscapers.com/community...postcount=6803
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#3
July 2nd, 2009, 08:44 AM
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Re: It's All Too Much
Quote:
"Chewie should move 6, lumbering or not. He's got long-ass legs"-
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#4
July 2nd, 2009, 08:56 AM
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Re: It's All Too Much
They ran a marathon of Clean House recently and I think it's on every day within the 5:30-6:30pm hours. My wife loves it... I'm disgusted by it (same idea as clean sweep I think).
I have no doubt that they make the homes a bit more messy before they turn the cameras on, for effect, but even if the homes they go into are only half as bad as before the cameras get there, its still ridiculous. I don't call the show Clean House, I call it Pigs USA. I thought I was bad when it came to letting go of some items that have been sitting and rotting for years, these people are outright insane... it really must be a psychological thing. In the end it did something good for me, made me go through a ton of old stuff I had and either tossed or donated it. -insert signature here-
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#5
July 2nd, 2009, 07:24 PM
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Re: It's All Too Much
Quote:
 I saw you out in the street last night!
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#7
July 2nd, 2009, 10:13 PM
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Re: It's All Too Much
Quote:
It's been interesting to put the book's principles into practice the past few weeks. I've been able to take a step back from my personal belongings and decide what I really need and want, and what things are just hanging around. It's been especially interesting for me and my wife to go back and forth asking each other "Why do you want to keep that?" I've often just "felt" like I needed to have something or hang onto an old relic from the past, even if it just gets tossed in a box in the garage. But we're stopping all that now and we've decided to jettison all the things that are weighing us down.
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#8
July 2nd, 2009, 11:06 PM
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Re: It's All Too Much
What I find interesting about letting things go is that after they're gone with no chance of recovery, you really don't miss them... at all.
I used to have 15 years worth of Sports Illustrated Magazines, along with 5-10 years of several others (Baseball Weekly, Sporting News, Beckett Baseball, etc...). All stuff from when I was a teen and through college. They just sat collecting dust for years. My wife wanted to toss them, and I would always say no, or change the subject. Last summer I stopped and really took a look at the amount of space they were taking up and how I wasn't doing anything with them. It really was ridiculous. So I decided to go through everything and keep a couple issues that were near and dear (mostly stuff related to the Red Sox), and gave away a bunch to friends who were fans of certain players or teams that were on the covers. That made up about 5% of the collection. Another 10% went up on ebay (I actually made some decent money) and the rest went to the recycling truck, it was an absolute wall of paper that was sitting on the curb. After they were gone, that was it, nothing happened... funny how you can get attached to stuff like that. -insert signature here-
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