It’s funny how things work differently for different people, though. Twitter was making my life more complicated than necessary because in order to read things that interested me, I had to go through a lot of tweets and @replies that I didn’t care about. Since most of what’s posted there that I wanted to check is also published in blogs, I just replaced it with Google Reader, where I can quickly go over the post titles and filter what I should read.

Phone calls are much more disruptive to my routine than emails, so very few people have my phone number, and for emergencies, my contacts know to use Awayfind.com to send me a message, which I can read from my iPod Touch, using an emergencies-only email address.

Normal emails are read only 3 times a day, and I never have more than 20 emails to respond per day, being good at not subscribing to anything via email and using a good spam filter. This is one area of my life that I can say I have been able to put entirely under control!

blessings,
Keena

Side note: Loving the new changes you’ve made to the new lay out.

Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer
condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and
honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of
many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life. It
means an ordering and guiding of our energy and our desires,
a partial restraint in some directions in order to secure
greater abundance of life in other directions. It involves a
deliberate organization of life for a purpose.

You can download it free from:
http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/PendleHill.html

So many of these ideas aren’t new. We have just forgotten them.

I love your blog, thanks so much for everything.I first read about your blog in an newspaper article while on board Malaysian airlines.I am addicted now, cant have a day pass by without daily doze of zen habits.

I’m trying to pare down, not let myself get distracted by my non-main priorities. I’m trying to convince myself to focus on embroidery and bookbinding craft-wise, and let go of the looms and spindles and knitting machines. But then I think, “Ill just be utilitarian about my other crafts: I will only sew and knit useful things instead of art things,” but it still takes just as much time to learn how to do these things well. I have, in the name of simplicity, decided that I want to sew all of my own clothes rather than shopping, because I loathe clothes shopping and I am so picky that it may very well take just as long as sewing. I think that someday sewing might take less time (I intend to use the same patterns over and over), but not at first. I think I want to kind of do bulk cooking and freezing, so I have good food but without spending all my time after work each night cooking. In trying to live ethically and sustainably, I am researching all my toiletry defaults and choose new, more ethical, ones.

I’m 25, live with my parents, recently graduated college, and started my first full-time job. I wonder if some of these things will get more simple later on. I will have new, ethical default toiletries. I will be able to do bulk cooking without it being eaten by family members who won’t do some bulk cooking of their own that I can eat. I will be proficient and more efficient at sewing the patterns I have been using.

I am sort of thinking aloud. Am I weird in a way that makes simplicity harder? Are these things that everyone has already figured out but never seem to talk about? If anyone wants to mentor or demonstrate how to simplify on someone else, I volunteer.