- Buy Experiences, Not Things Things have always made me unhappy. They bog me down. I prefer the lightness of experiences. They breeze in and out and through me. I don’t have to store them in a wardrobe. They don’t tumble down on my head when they’re stuffed into the top cupboard. They can just come for the ride and more
- What Steve Jobs’ perfectionism has taught me It truly is an oddity. It’s become a talking point among friends. A joke at first. I can’t buy a couch. And it’s come to hold up a mirror to a few fundamental sadnesses about life. Indeed, I’ve never owned a couch. I’ve inherited old ones when I’ve moved into the various rentals I’ve traipsed more
- My simple home: what I don’t own I’m going to take a step or two back. And explain the “simple” in the My Simple Home experiment. I’d like to be clear. You’ll notice the series is not called “My Minimalist Home”. Minimalism is a righteous aesthetic, but not always practical. All those ardent minimalists out there can be painful. And their all-in-one more
- Sunday life: in which Oprah’s declutter dude Peter Walsh visits my apartment This week I declutter my “sentimentals” and my “collectibles” What did we all do before we “decluttered”? We tidied. We picked up our crap, dusted under it, then put it back down again. We also used our crap. In my house we collected toothbrushes, icecream buckets and old singlets, which were used for cleaning our more
- Sunday life: why we should resist bottled water. Like, now. * this post has been updated This week I don’t drink bottled water (actually, I haven’t drunk the stuff for several years, but I’m kinda ensconced in this “look what I happened upon this week” theme…so let’s just ride it for now). Recently I aborted a liaison with a guy because he didn’t recycle. To more
- The most efficient apartment ever This is quite freaky: Architect Gary Chang has created a 24-rooms-in-one-32-square-metre apartment (translation: he’s taken a tiny apartment and converted it such that it functions as 24 different rooms….using sliding walls). Check this out: The New York Times describes it in more detail: The wall units, which are suspended from steel tracks bolted into the more
- declutterer: a vexing perve into lindsay lohan’s wardrobe Have you seen this? Somehow a reporter from Insider got to go into LL’s house and rummage through a wardrobe that’s taken over the apartment. There are not enough days left in that girl’s life to wear all those clothes. It’s actually gross. Not the clutter, but the mindless consumption of so much stuff. It more
- declutterbug #2: suicide machine (social network annihilation via a little red button) Check out this new online gizmo. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine allows you to wipe yourself from social networking. Forever. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine can strike you off Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. At the press of a button. As the site says, be as free as a real bird. A 2010 resolution, perhaps? To free more
- declutterbug #1: online reader gizmo that gets rid of the guff This is a new series I’m starting that will flag cool gadgets and tricks and things that make life simpler and less… stuff-y. Most of it will be free stuff. All of it will be elegantly simple. Sunday Life readers might have seen my column a month or two ago about Instapaper (a nifty filing more
- sunday life: in which I fly naked This week I declutter my background reading I can get disproportionately excited about new online devices. Like, a while back, I was frothing about Instapaper, a 2.0 equivalent of the Post It note. It works like this. You’re wasting time online and stumble upon an interesting blog post or New York Times article. You can’t more
