We know we should incorporate activities like reading and exercising into our lives, and we often do so without investigating why exactly. Same with minimalism. We know we shouldn’t buy too many things or have so much stuff around. We should ensure our spaces are more organized. But why, exactly? 

A mindfulness practice. A yoga practice. We create practices to move beyond habits and routines. There is something more holistic about them, as they encompass something deeper in ourselves. A practice is an area we want to develop into a fully integrated life pursuit. While minimalism is viewed as an action taken once and (hopefully) maintained, minimalism can be a practice. 

Be them digital, refrigerator-hung, or in a hand-held planner, calendars organize our time. Yes, time is relative, but we’ve globally agreed that the days pass, appointments have set times, and we mostly use the Gregorian calendar to organize ourselves.

Minimalism is often viewed as the pursuit of getting rid of things. But minimalism is about creating something new and improved: an environment that is most livable to you.

We keep items in our homes that we don’t use. It’s hard to avoid this. Not everything must be kept in the perfect place and in constant use. Life is always in transition. A bit of intentional storage of specific items makes sense. But this is the exception, not the rule. 

When considering minimalism, we differentiate what should be kept and what shouldn’t using two categories. One is defined by what we want and one is what we need. The goal is to focus on what you need versus what you want as a way to minimize purchasing and retaining unnecessary items.

People tend to focus on a single object or idea while deviating from others that may be equally or more valuable. Within the study of behavioral economics, this is referred to as an attentional bias. And it’s essential to understand within the context of minimalism.

There was a time when information was hard to come by. You were lucky to grow up in a family that owned a set of encyclopedias. Articles were viewed on microfiche. Books were purchased at brick-and-mortar stores. You might even speak to an elder in your community for wise words.

A minimalist home is composed of the stuff that resides in it and where it is placed. A minimalist lifestyle encompasses more than our stuff: our relationships, our calendars, our to-do lists, etc. It considers our time allocation based on priorities and our emotional bandwidth. But we often don’t think about the pace of our lives. 

Minimalism is viewed as a process of subtraction. So we often start in the middle of the minimalism process, which involves purging our lives of unnecessary items. But the beginning of the process starts somewhere else. 

One of my clients has a lot of bikinis.

She came to me overwhelmed about her financials and ominous trips to the mailbox, with bills awaiting. After surmounting that hill, we moved on to lighter subjects. With newfound confidence, she was ready to tackle clothes. 

I was asked to scan a QR code at the doctor's office today. It brought me to a website where I had to enter personal information and take pictures of my ID and insurance card to upload. While I hope they allow for the old-fashioned process, more and more, I'm asked to use my smartphone for functionality I wasn't looking for when I purchased it.

Layaway, credit cards, and loans are all mechanisms to acquire items now that you can’t (or have chosen not to) pay for in full. Credit has been around for thousands of years, though its mechanisms change due to technology and cultural evolution.

You can get addicted to anything, including exercise, knitting, reading, and even organizing. These are elusive addictions because they involve doing something we deeply enjoy or have positive benefits. The reasons propelling overactivity may be problematic, or the result of the addiction may be troublesome.

Do you exercise? Regularly? And if you do, why? And how does this relate to your eating habits? If you investigate your relationship to exercise and eating, you’ll find a correlation between that and the practice of minimalism.

I came to minimalist lifestyle coaching from a nonprofit career in sustainable buildings and neighborhoods. Resiliency is an approach to addressing global climate change, the most prominent issue in my work. Helping the planet and its built infrastructure become resilient requires action today to lower the impact of climate change tomorrow. My focus on global resiliency highlighted how we lack resiliency at the individual level.

We build our abodes and collect the stuff that occupies them to make us feel safe and secure. We build our lives to have a semblance of okayness. We develop our lifestyles and homes with only a modicum of intention.

My mindset is minimalism. I see any item handed in my direction as a potential problem I want to avoid. I can organize any room in my mind. I keep my to-do list crisp. I regularly scan my apartment for things to release.

Minimalism is a question. It prompts you to look at yourself and your lifestyle from a different lens. Minimalism isn’t an all-encompassing, singular question we answer. It’s a framework of questions that involves reconsidering daily decisions you don’t realize you’re making.

I’ve worked with many clients who aren’t sentimental. They have little attachment to memory-infused possessions or family history in general.