100 things challenge to become a zen minimalist master
My good friend Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and Mnmlist blogs posted a 100 things challenge - meaning he's committed to have only 100 personal possessions in his home. Later he scratched that and went with 50 things. That's a minimalist to an extreme, I thought. And then I looked around my home office...
My home office is as Zen as it can get... or so I thought
If you've followed my blog for a while you can see I've been designing all my home offices with zen in mind but the problem started showing up in the closets... as I had too many gadgets and cables piled up in many places.
So I challenged myself to start with my home office and wanted to go down to 100 things (including furniture)
After one day of hard-work I went down to 99 things and 23 books.
It was a hard day - I had to throw away many cables, swtiches and office appliences. I had many cool gadgets I was never using so I photographed them all and put them in a separate box. Now whenever someone visits me at home and he (or she) is a geek, I tell them I have this great gadget box and if they want something, I welcome them to just take it. Putting it all on eBay would be time wasted and I get a reward someone receives a gadget gift from me upon their visit to my house.
The idea goes beyond 100 things - it's about conscious choice of what we really need.
As Leo Babauta confirms it, it's not about the 100 things - it's about training your mindset to let go of keeping stuff for the sake of keeping it. To learn what you really need, to evaluate each subsequent purchase (like: "I have all I need, I don't have to buy this shiny new gadget, even though it's from Apple and it's amazing").
Give it a try - you won't regret it. You'll get to know yourself better.
After this hard lesson I went to my favorite electronics store to see if I can really make it... and then to the Apple store... and surprise, surprise - I had no urge to buy anything. I knew I didn't need anything and I just was comfortable window-shopping without taking out my credit card. I'm still a geek and an "inspector gadget"... but now I know which gadgets I really need and which are totally useless... and my office is closer to zen and looks even cleaner than before.
1st battle is won - now it's time to look at my clothes...
Now that I've trained my mindset I'm going to check my wardrobe and throw lots of stuff out. I want to have 100 things there as well (maybe I'll count "socks" as one category, but we'll see) - I'll report back on this blog how it's all coming along. Wish me luck!
Have you ever tried becoming a minimalist zen master? What can you throw away today?
I'm Michael Sliwinski and I'm an entrepreneur who's also the...
.. Founder of Nozbe.com - a time and project management web application
.. Editor of Productive! Magazine - a global PDF publication on productivity
.. and a blogger as well as a producer of a weekly 2-minute Productive! show.
.. Founder of Nozbe.com - a time and project management web application
.. Editor of Productive! Magazine - a global PDF publication on productivity
.. and a blogger as well as a producer of a weekly 2-minute Productive! show.
10 comments
Jul 09, 2011
Glenn said...
I've done something very similar. Funny you should mention clothes as the next step, as that's what I did. I pulled out anything I didn't wear often and donated it all to friends or charity. My rule now is that I only add something new when I eliminate something old so I won't accumulate stuff again.
Jul 09, 2011
Michael Sliwinski said...
I wanted to first keep to 100 things in my home office and later move on to clothes. I will have to give away lots of them I think, but it's good like that :-) Thanks for your encouragement Glenn. Minimalists, unite :-)
Jul 10, 2011
Robert Pańkowski said...
Same thing here, I actually started from my clothes and it went fairly well. What helped me a lot was to hang a 6-month-mark hanger to verify which clothes I'm actually wearing.
Jul 10, 2011
Michael Sliwinski said...
Just did some calculations on the amount of clothes I have and it all definitely needs revising. I'll blog about it soon. Thanks for your comment Robert!
Jul 11, 2011
Michael Sliwinski said...
Kindle with books would count as 1 :-) and that's the beauty of it. My wife just started migration process to Kindle and I'm also hoping to get rid of most of my books :-) I think if you buy too many books on Kindle it's also not very "minimalistic" but still, you don't have so many books around your room, so it's good.
Jul 11, 2011
Paul Montwill said...
I have heard about 100 Things concept just after I sold my DVDs on an online auction. I just couldn't stand the clutter anymore. And I am going for Kindle soon as I want to release another two shelves full of books. It is amazing that on one hand new technology make our life faster but it also allow us to minimize our possessions -with a laptop or a tablet we can sell our hi-fi, books, CDs, DVD etc.
Good luck with your strategy, Michael!
Jul 11, 2011
Michael Sliwinski said...
Technology helps us get rid of the clutter and helps us minimize the amount of physical things we own: movie discs, photo albums, books... etc. and I love it! Thanks for the best wishes, Paul, it's still hard to be brave enough to go minimalistic :-)
Jul 22, 2011
Wiktor Schmidt said...
With my recent move I was forced to eliminate not only most of the stuff/clutter but also most of the paper. I can say now for sure that I can pack ALL the stuff I need to live in two IKEA boxes. It feels pretty cool :)
Jul 24, 2011
Michael Sliwinski said...
Move to a new place (better yet - new country) facilitates these decisions as this is an actual "cost of stuff" that you need to take under consideration. Great work Wiktor! Keep it up and don't let the clutter rule you again! :-)
