How I’m Making 6 Changes in 2010

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter

Have you seen Leo Babauta’s new project, 6 Changes?

6 Changes is a brilliant no-nonsense antidote to the often failed new years resolution.

On the blog, Leo lays out in his signature uncomplicated prose his new simple philosophy towards habit change. Pick 6 habits you want to incorporate to your life in the next year, then dedicate 8 weeks to building each habit. This gives you roughly 2 months to develop each habit in a year, and by the end of the year you’ve made 6 changes in your life.

Well, it’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Leo’s work. His approach to life often aligns perfectly with my own.

For those who aren’t familiar with Leo’s other blog, Zen Habits, I suggest you check it out. It’s a brilliant blog on how to simplify your life and achieve your goals.

You might have noticed that I’m giving away two copies of his ebook A Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life on January 31st to two dedicated readers who sign up for free email updates.

If you haven’t checked out Leo’s book on being minimalist, I highly recommend it.

I’m taking 6 Changes for a test drive after New Years.

I have some very important habits I need to adopt for next year to be successful, and I hope Leo’s philosophy for change can help achieve my goals.

Maybe you’re interested in joining me?

The six changes I’m going to make in 2010.

  • Wake up at 6am in the morning daily
  • Eat locally grown food
  • Move to Seattle
  • Pay off my student loans
  • Train to be a yoga teacher
  • Cultivate this blog until it’s primary source of income

Now I realize some of these might seem like big changes to expect to achieve in a year, but as Leo suggests in his blog, it’s important not to focus on the end point. I’ll focus on the small details, and just focus on one habit for two months at a time.

I did some pretty crazy things in 2009, so I expect with a little help from Leo’s 6 Changes philosophy, I can hope to achieve my 2010 goals as well.

Last year I adopted these habits:

  • Reduced my possessions to 100 things
  • Quit my day job
  • Adopted a location independent lifestyle
  • Began doing yoga most days of the week
  • Started Far Beyond The Stars and began publishing articles three days a week

None of that was easy, but I realized that if I took simple steps towards achieving those goals, I could realistically expect to complete the goals in a year.

You can make these changes too, but first you have to make the decision to change your life.

My first change for 2010: becoming an early riser.

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8 Ways to Say Goodbye (to your stuff)

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter

I know how hard it can be to make the decision to give up material possessions.

There is always this little voice in the back of your head saying ‘I might need this someday!’

I had to give up a couple of things, when I was reducing the stuff I owned to less than 100 things when I moved to Portland earlier this year.

That little voice has a point, everything ‘could’ be useful someday. However, I’ve known people with rooms filled with stuff that they ‘could use someday’, but they never do.

Do you have rooms like this? Most of us have a closet like this, some of us have a box like this.

The problem with this mentality is that when you save everything ‘just in case’ these objects end up gradually taking more and more time away from you.

When you continue to gather stuff that you’re not using in this moment, you end up spending time cleaning, sorting, and organizing. I’ve known people who spend every free hour of their life, when they’re not eating or working, sorting through stuff they ‘might use someday.’

If you are living like this I really believe you should take action to change your life situation around now.

Some people can even convince themselves that this daily organizational duty is not a burden. I can understand that view, possessions can have a powerful control over the mind. You’ve invested your money these things, you’ve invested your time in creating a wonderful world for your things to live in. It’s only natural for a feeling of obligation to your things to spring up in your mind.

You have to fight it that sense of obligation to your things. Don’t be a prisoner to your possessions.

The time to make a change and overcome your slavery to the material world is now.

Here are a few simple methods that I’ve developed for people to learn to say goodbye to the objects that they love, but don’t use anymore.

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Don’t Listen to Anyone

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter

Many people I meet have a story about someone they know who failed.

People love to tell me these stories.

Maybe you’ve heard them too?

There’s the one about the girl who moved across the country and couldn’t find a job and ‘now it’s so hard for her’.

Or that one boy who decided he was going to be a musician and went to New York and he works retail and ‘it’s so hard for him’.

Everyone knows someone like this. They keep this person’s story ready to go, and take aim at your dreams with him or her as evidence. ‘Look at this person, they couldn’t do it, you can’t either’.

Then there’s the story about some mythical creature that ‘puts in the long hours for their company, and now they’re set for life.’

No one seems to know anyone like this, and yet they’re all so sure this is a reality.

Where are these ‘set for life’ people? I want to meet one please. Have one of them send me a post card.

Everyone I know who is doing well right now has their own established remarkable reputation.

The most common variety of person I encounter is settled for life. They gave up long ago, and now they drag out that story every time I tell them I’m moving again to pre-prove that I can’t do it …again.

Here’s my view of reality: you can do anything you want to, as long as you’re willing to sacrifice your ability to undermine yourself.

There are no failures, only the people who choose to use other brave people as defense against their own settled mediocrity.

Don’t listen to anyone’s fail stories. They just keep them in their back pocket to defend their decision to be scared, to stay put, to not change.

You can move anywhere and do anything if you’re willing to trade secure normality for knowing that you’re doing something awesome.

Where are you going next year?





5 Simple Methods to Be More Minimalist in 15 Minutes

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter

I recently spoke to a reader who was thoroughly overwhelmed with the idea of embracing minimalism. While he was well aware of the high level of clutter in his life, trying to wrap his head around how to solve the problem was it’s own problem entirely.

For someone like this, I think the advise of thinking about ‘the end’, when you have less than 100 things, is just too overwhelming. Don’t. Think about small changes that can lead to that goal.

It’s so important to remember that becoming a minimalist is about small changes in habit. These are decisive steps that you take in a mindful way.

The decision to take fifteen minutes to clear your kitchen table, is one way that you can manifest a more minimalist lifestyle.

We don’t reach the freedom of being minimalist by throwing our all of our possessions a way at once. This would hurt us too much, it would cause us to suffer. We would miss all of those things that we had and then we didn’t.

Think about simple, and achievable, ways that your can bring about this lifestyle. Making a small regular change is so much more effective than a huge impossible change.

Here are five ways to apply minimalism to your life in a small way.

1, Pass on buying a beverage. If you’re out to eat, it’s customary to purchase some sort of drink to go with your lunch. Consider skipping the drink and just having a glass of water. You’ll have a few dollars, and water is very good for you.

2, Clear your desk. Take fifteen minutes and just clear the surface your desk of all objects. Consider each object, ask yourself if it is important. Of it is, find it a home, perhaps in a drawer. If it is not important, consider getting rid of the object. Once your desk is clean you’ll be more productive.

3, Walk slower. Everyone rushes everywhere. This takes away valuable time which we need to do thinking, to contemplate our lives, to think of new ideas. Slow down, if you worry that you’ll be late, leave a few minutes earlier and take your time. You’ll be calmer and more useful when you reach your destination.

4, Sort through one drawer. Almost everyone has a drawer that fill with stuff they don’t want to think about. Consider confronting this drawer and the objects in it. Take each object out and consider whether you need it or not. If you do, find it a home. If you don’t, consider getting rid of it. Once the drawer is gone, it’ll be natural to start on another when you have more spare time.

5, Cook a meal at home. Take one regular meal that you eat out and cook that meal at home. It’s very hard to over eat or eat unhealthily at home, consider fixing one meal in your own kitchen. Beginning to cook at home may be a challenge, but you’ll slowly build a lasting habit that will create a lifetime of healthier and less expensive living.

These are all small, and yet startlingly effective ways to apply minimalist philosophy to your life. I hope you’ll try one tomorrow, if not, perhaps next week. Don’t do everything all at once, just try one and see if it feels good. If it does, consider adopting it as a regular habit.

If this story helped you, consider sharing it with a friend. Thank you so much for reading.





How to Liberate Your Email with Inbox Sub-Zero

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter

One of the most important changes you can make in your life, to reclaim your time and get important things done, is to adopt Inbox Zero is a regular habit when dealing with your email.

For those who don’t know, Inbox Zero is a system that was invented by productivity guru Merlin Mann a couple of years back. Now he’s working on a book by the same name, which I’m incredibly excited about.

I won’t go into the fundamental details here, because those are Merlin’s domain.

Check out Merlin Mann’s guide to Inbox Zero.

Here’s the basics for Inbox Zero, just in case you don’t have time to read Merlin’s stuff right now, or you just need a refresher coarse.

Information overload is ruining your email productivity.

With information overload being what it is these days, it’s incredibly important to be able to know in a single glance what emails you have to deal with, when you sit down to do email.

You just want the emails in your inbox to be emails you need to deal with now. The rest need to go.

I’ve been a huge believer in Inbox Zero for a number of years. I’ve worked out an extremely minimalist email system that reduces the number of emails I receive to around 5-10 a day.

By taking control of my Inbox I can spend more time writing and less time answering emails that don’t benefit me. I’d like to share this system with you.

Are you harboring an inbox with 500+ email messages that you need to reply to? Or worse, do you just leave any message you’ve replied to in your inbox?

If you approach email this way, you have to mentally sort through 500 messages every time you look at your email. This is a very ineffective approach. Inbox Sub-Zero will save you from wasting hours of time on email, I promise.

It’s 2010 people, let’s get a grasp on this stuff.

I’ve taken Merlin’s ideas one step further: I don’t want any useless emails entering my email box at all.

Every unimportant email needs to go, because it’s probably harming my ability to do important work like writing this blog, creating stories for other people’s blogs, and doing freelance work for important people.

I assume that 80% of the emails I receive are probably not worth reading, and I create filters so I never have to see these emails again.

In honor of how cold it is outside right now, I call this philosophy Inbox Sub-Zero.

Inbox Sub-Zero hinges on Gmail’s filter and archive functions, so if you don’t have gmail this will be a little harder to achieve. I’m just going to assume you have gmail, but if you’re unwilling to make the switch you can probably adapt these ideas to other email clients, they just won’t be as effective.

The fundamentals of Inbox Sub-Zero:

  1. Every email that I receive must create value for you.
  2. Unsubscribe to anything unimportant.
  3. Filter everything that is questionable.
  4. Read, act, and archive remaining emails immediately.

Simple enough?

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