Instead of productivity hacking, try purging

For more peace and simplicity, don’t try to change your entrenched habits. Purge.

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I am a minimalist, and this has been our living room for the past 7 days.

Magna-tiles, corn cobs, 3 iPads (!), books, jackets, receipts, used Kleenex, a box of things to return to my neighbor, and checks and cash totaling $725, just laying around.

I want to blame this on my husband and 4-year-old — one supposedly doesn’t see mess and the other’s imagination revels in it. But a lot of that crap is mine.

I’m not a bad minimalist. I am, however, a natural-born lazy slob, and that’s why the room looks like this. For the past 20 years, my living space looks something like this at least once a week. Clothes on the bedroom floor, food left on the counter, and notes and blog drafts floating around my office.

I spent years of effort trying to fix myself, experimenting with all the tricks and hacks the internet could supply to put away my clothes and clean the kitchen every night.

Ya know what, though? Behavior change is hard — generally, too hard, with too little payout for my liking. No matter how many books on productivity hacks or habit change I read, it still takes me the energy of a thousand toddlers to overcome decades of ingrained behavior and keep new habits going for more than a week.

Don’t try to change your entrenched habits. Purge instead.

What actually works for an incorrigible slob-minimalist hybrid like me? Purging. Just getting rid of stuff. Purging is a discrete, short-lived event. You can devote energy to it for a few days (possibly weeks if you’re just starting) and get satisfaction from the job well done. Then, it pays dividends for months, in the form of less mess and less effort needed to put things away.

Inevitably, stuff creeps back in if you’re imperfect or live with a delightfully imaginative boy who maintains a corn cob collection to feed his baby lion, Simba.

But every time you start from a better place than before. Even when your kid brings in more corn cobs, glitter-covered mini pumpkins, and new worm friends, you’re still dealing with less than you would have otherwise. Instead of cleaning up piles of toys and treasures in each room of the house every night, over time you’re down to one pile of toys and 3 books.

Better yet, you’re not using precious energy battling your natural habits and tendencies.

Purge anything and everywhere.

This doesn’t only work for clutter in your house. It works for your commitments, your schedule, your business, your marketing, your meal prep, your writing. Anything. Wherever you’re looking for behavior change — like being better at marketing your small business or cooking 5 nights a week — wherever you’re wishing you could be better, make more effort, or sneak in extra time, the answer is to do less or have less.

If you want to be better at marketing your small business, do less marketing. Focus on a couple (literally 2–3) marketing strategies, tops. Ignore everything else until those come easily.

If you want to cook more consistently, keep only 7 go-to recipes. Make them over and over, until you can whip one of those meals together any afternoon, even when you’re so close to laying down on the kitchen counter for a nap.

If you want to send emails to your list regularly, aim for fewer emails and less content. Pick one tiny topic to share with your subscribers, write up the email, and hit send.

The extra benefit of purging.

Better than all the other benefits, purging frees up time for the real things, the things you want to do but can’t seem to productivity-hack into your life — a walk in the evening, watching Colbert with a mug of Ginger Love tea, baking pumpkin muffins with cream cheese frosting just because you want them, and weekends without any work. (This alone is worth all the clothes I have ever donated. In fact, I would give away every stitch of clothing down to my birthday suit to never work a weekend again.)

So if productivity hacking and habit changes aren’t working for you, try purging instead.

Quick and dirty steps to start minimizing your home. 

1. Start with a high-impact area, like your living room or kitchen. Pick 5 items that seem to just get moved around and take up more time than they’re worth.

2. Place them in a box and put it high on a closet shelf so it’s a pain to access.

3. Put a note on your calendar for 2 weeks from now to assess. Was your living area a little cleaner? How did you deal without those items?

4. If life was just a tiny bit easier, it’s worth doing again. Find 5 more items, stick them in the box, and reassess in 2 weeks.

5. When you feel confident that life is easier and better without those items, donate the items and start a new box. You’re on your way to a cleaner, easier home without changing any habits.

Ultimately, the best gauge for minimalism is whether you’re feeling more peace, more simplicity, or more satisfaction with your business or life as you go. As long as you’re checking one of those boxes, stick with it.