By Leo Babauta

While some of you have been following Zen Habits since its early days (beginning of 2007), many of you are fairly new readers.

To help you through the fairly overwhelming archives, I’ve compiled a beginner’s guide. Kind of a Quick Start guide.

First, a note: Please don’t try to go through this all at once. There are days and days worth of reading here. I’ve just organized that so that you can go to the stuff you want to learn about first.

Take it in small chunks.

Where do you start when you have a thousand posts to read through? You start with the best, or at least the most popular.

So here they are:

  1. 10 Benefits of Rising Early, and How to Do It

  2. 20 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life

  3. Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas to Simplify Your Life

  4. The Cheapskate Guide: 50 Tips for Frugal Living

  5. A Guide to Creating a Minimalist Home

  6. 10 Tasty, Easy and Healthy Breakfast Ideas

  7. 50 Ways to Be Romantic on the Cheap

  8. 30 Things to Do to Keep From Getting Bored Out of Your Skull at Work

  9. Get Off Your Butt: 16 Ways to Get Motivated When You’re in a Slump

  10. Handbook for Life: 52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity

  11. Top 20 Motivation Hacks - An Overview

Or you can go through a few compiled guides I’ve hand picked for some of the more popular categories:

  1. Everything You Wanted to Know About Simplifying Your Life, and Way More

  2. The Unsurpassable Productivity List: A Handy Guide to Getting Important Things Done

  3. All The Best Tips on Getting In Shape, In One Handy List

  4. The Golden Money List: Hundreds of Tips for Turning Your Financial Life Around

By now, you might want to know more about Leo, the guy who writes this blog … well, here’s more than you ever wanted to know: