But wait... there's less!

I saw this poster on a train after a previous Christmas: While you may have an unwanted gift or two, they may be great gifts - just for someone else. Consider re-gifting to someone you think will appreciate it. 1 in 4 Aussies do this . Or sell it online. The Gumtree website experiences a 30% jump in posts just after Christmas. For some gifts, giving them to charity is also an option. It's unfortunate that many gifts are a waste of the giver's time / money. But it would be more of a waste to throw them out - and have them end up in landfill - or to have them gather dust at home (which is kind of the same thing).

What do you do when the extended family gets together for Christmas. Does everyone buy everyone presents? Do you just get presents for the kids? We did the Christmas Draw. Christmas Draw When a family gets large, buying everyone a gift gets expensive. To be frank, the amount of thought that goes into each gift shrinks. Enter the Christmas Draw. Each person drew a relative's name from a hat. All gifts were from "The Family" so you didn't know who got it for you. Everyone had a meaningful gift to open but it wasn't super-materialistic or super-expensive. But what to get? Over the years, it became trickier. Especially if you only saw your niece / uncle / cousin once or twice a year. Gift cards became increasingly popular when the buyer had no ideas. One Christmas at least 3 people opened a gift card for a particular hardware chain. At least one person both gave and received one of these. Stats show that 30% of these cards are never used - they're lost or expir

Garage Sale Trail was a fun event. Personally, we sold about 20-30 items at our sale. But of course there's still plenty of stuff left over. The people at GST publishled this handy list of ways to further downsize . There's some good tips: Have a garage sale Sell it online (we find Gumtree to be a good site) Put it in storage (that does cost, but not as much as an extra bedroom to store everything) Donate it to a charity shop or on Givit . Give it away to family, friends, facebook or freecycle. Recycle it Upcycle it Repair it There's plenty of ways to have less clutter in our lives.

Affluenza , n. a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.[1] Affluenza, n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses. 2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by the pursuit of the American Dream. 3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth. Ok, it's made up word, but the concept is real. So what's the cure. One idea is Buy Nothing New Month . It really is as simple as it sounds. For one month we make do with what we have, second-hand items and things we borrow or make. At first it may sound challenging to break our consumer habits, so the website has some tips for us . Obviously you can do this at any time you choose, but if you want to do it this October, why not sign the pledge ? Some people really like it. Sal decided to do it for a whole year. Twice .

I caught up with a good friend recently. He asked me about tiny houses . Apparently I'd mentioned it a bit the last time we talked. It's not so much about the tiny house itself. I do like seeing them, and the tiny house TV shows, but it's more about the lifestyle. Part of that is just having fewer possessions. Especially after moving house this year , it seems pointless to have things we never use. We spend more time moving them than using them. But my friend probably summed it up better than I did. He's talking to his young daughters about money - explaining how that things cost money and that's why daddy goes to work. That's a key part of it for me. Having an enormous house and lots of possessions means more time spent at the office and less time enjoying life with those we love. One of the people on the tiny house TV show summed it up even quicker. "Less house. More fun." PS. A guy I used to work with calculated that he spent more time with

Streetbank is designed to allow neighbours to borrow things from each other. It's so much better than buying a bunch of things you rarely (or never) use again. It's also a great way to give away items you no longer need to someone else who would appreciate them. The obvious side benefit of all of this is that you also get to meet your neighbours. Recently some students made some short films to promote the Streetbank idea . The Skate Escape looks at it from the perspective of unused items. The Ribbons film looks more at the community aspect. Share is a shorter film, and reminds us that sharing is something we teach our kids from a very young age.

Recently I've been clearing out some of my excess stuff. Some of it is useful (and is for sale ). Some of it is going to the recycle bin. I have found some old stuff and thought "What was I keeping this?" or "Why did I even get this?". I think some of the answers are in this video. Sometimes we do things not because it helps us live a better life, not because it makes any sense, but merely because other people are do it. I think that's part of my mindset now - trying to avoid some of the things we do just because everyone else does them, and sticking to the things that actually improve the quality of life.

"Less is More" is one of the catch-cries of downsizing. Often the fewer things we have the more we value them. So it's a great title for a book that's basically a manual for how to de-clutter your home. The introductory chapter of Less is More: How to De-clutter Your Life gives some great insights into why we find it so hard to reduce our stuff. Here are 5 of them - the last one is one of the biggest for me. 1. The cost of holding on. We were raised by our parents and grandparents and in their day items were expensive and space was cheap. It made sense in those days to hold onto stuff just in case you ever needed it. But today housing is expensive and items are cheap. It's hard to change a habit, but now we save much more by downsizing. 2. Keeping it in the family. For some reason we prefer to give things to those close to us. Again this was viable in the days of big families and lots of children to receive hand-me-downs. But these days we have smaller fa

One of the tangible benefits of downsizing is the money from selling the things you no longer want/need. We've just hit $1,000 - yippee! I made a note of each item we sold. Only 4 of them were over $30. So it's not like we had big valuable items. It's just lots of medium and small things. Some for as little as $1. We weren't using them, so to us they were just taking up space. But to someone else they were valuable items. We did a garage sale early on. It took up about a day, including preparation, and we made $24. It's a nice way to meet a few neighbours, but we didn't do much downsizing. That's when we went online. We have a bunch of stuff listed on gumtree. It's like an ongoing garage sale but much less work. People can browse at any time of the day or night. All we do is chat online if they're interested - and collect the cash when they come by. (Which has also saved a few trips to the ATM). It's a quadruple win. Less clutter. Cash

The TV show Adam Ruins Everything took a look at the workplace - and the 40 hour work week. It confirms my thoughts that the 40-hour work week (or at least it's relevance today) is a figment of our imagination. Very enlightening. Watch it now . The first 7 minutes are the most relevant. There were some astonishing stats coming out of it. For example, we spend only 45% of the work week doing our actual job (not including meetings etc). That's about 18 hours per week. Interestingly, that's what experts predicted. With rises in productivity, the 1950s brought talk of a 4-day work week. By 2030 they reckoned we might work just 15 hours per week. But instead we work longer hours. That results in more mistakes and safety mishaps. It also reduces brain function. We might think that it's being productive but Adam points to countries that have as much prosperity as America while working much shorter hours. A classic case of 'less is more'. PS. for the basis of

In a list of 15 stats that show Americans are drowning in stuff , I got stuck on number one. There are 300,000 items in the average American home Can that possibly be? At first I thought there was an accidental extra zero. The LA times article the number comes from says "from paper clips to ironing boards" so i guess that counts absolutely everything. Every lego piece, every crayon, every sock and every spoon. Even taking that into account, 0.3 million items seems an awful lot. I'm tempted to do a count (or at least a detailed estimate) to see how we compare. How many do you think you own?

The Project had this short but revealing story on a study of work hours. Turns out that the perfect amount of working hours per week is 25. Working about this amount increases your brain function, your productivity, your free time and your happiness. What was interesting was the talk afterwards by the hosts. Comments like "but who's going to pay the mortgage?" and "you get the same pay" indicated that the biggest obstacle is in our heads. Australians have the largest houses in the world. The only reason we get such big and expensive houses is to ' keep up with the Joneses '. But that doesn't actually make us happy. It doesn't make up working an extra 2 days each week. If we could free ourselves from traps like this, we could set up our lives around things that actually make us happy. Such as having 4-day weekends.

Today we're doing some cleaning up of the apartment, so this quote about clutter is quite pertinent. Clutter is the physical manifestation of unmade decisions fuelled by procrastination. Even as I look around the desk where I type this I can see examples of that. Perhaps that's why it feels good once we do get around to clearing the clutter. At tidy home (or office) with less mess is appealing - but perhaps it's mental as well as visual. The satisfaction of completing the things we want to do is such a good feeling. So much better than staring at physical reminders of half-finished (or not yet started) actions.

At the moment my wife is practising a song. She'll be performing it on piano at the upcoming wedding of a friend. She wants to do lots of practice so it can be just great for the day. But we don't own a piano. At this point the material world says "Well, go out and buy one". But these days there are many more options. After a couple of practices on a friend's piano we put out the call on Streetbank - a community site for people to share things with their neighbours. Within a day we had a couple of offers of a keyboard to borrow. It's a great solution as it was free for us, and made use of keyboards that were just sitting around unused. One was so unused that the owner said he would test if it still worked before he lent it to us. I'm told that Aristotle once said that joy was in use not in ownership. I think this is a good example of that philosophy in action. Although sometimes I question if it's "joy" to hear the same song pract

It's been a while between posts here - mainly because we've been moving house. It's been a real motivator for downsizing. Packing each and every item we owned, really makes me wish there were fewer of them. Moving everything from the old apartment to the new one made me envious of those people who live in a "tiny house on wheels". For them moving house simply means towing it to a new location. No packing required. The whole process has reaffirmed our commitment to owning less stuff. So we're going to be intentional about downsizing. It will be an ongoing activity. My environmental heart couldn't stomach a spontaneous dumping of things into the garbage, but it's also more fun this way. Selling things online brings in some handy pocket money. Giving items away is also a great community activity, whether it is to friends and family, to charity or to people in the neighbourhood. I'm looking forward to it as a lifestyle rather than a task to do.