It s All Too Much: Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff 
Customer Ratings: - Not as good as it could be. The first few pages are the author justifying his book by telling you how wonderful he is. Then theres about 20 pages of really good stuff about understanding why you have so much clutter, the approaches to take to resolve this, and also about understanding the effect all the clutter has. Then theres the predictable room-by-room stuff that anyone could write if they sat and thought about it. Lots of the examples are tedious and would not relate to a UK reader. Lots about how to get rid of stuff, not much about how to live a richer life without it. Five stars for the 20 good pages, 2 stars for the rest, so 3 stars in all.
- A good pep talk but not a lot of new material. Peter Walsh believes that the #1 reason that people hand onto stuff is because they are putting too much importance on what they have rather than on who they are. They start to believe that the more they own, the better off they are. He says that the key is to visualise the life you want to live and what your ideal home environment would be. Once you ve done that, it s less a question of getting rid of things that you want and more about making living spaces work for you in the way that you want them to.
The middle part of the book focuses on organising and de-cluttering room by room. For the most part his advice is fairly straightforward, but there were some useful ideas that I picked up. As examples:
- Everytime you use a recipe book, mark the page with a Post-It. At the end of 18 months, get rid of the books with no Post-Its.
- Empty the contents of your kitchen utensil drawer into a cardboard box. For one month, only put a utensil back in the drawer if you take it out of the box to use it. At the end of the month, seriously consider discardng anything still in the drawer.
- Rather than hanging onto all of your children s artworks, jointly choose the best of the best to frame or store. The rest can be photographed and then discarded.
This is a quick read and a good pep talk about getting reducing clutter in your home, although ultimately I didn t feel there was enough here that I hadn t thought or read before. If you need a step by step guide to reducing clutter in your home, it s not a bad place to start. But for me, a better book was the oddly titled Clear your clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston. - new approach to decluttering. I ve read a lot of decluttering books to motivate me to get of my junk and some have been really helpful for a time. However, they ve all concentrated on the stuff . Peter Walsh approaches the problem from the other side, on how you would like your house to look and the purpose/functions of each room (if it wasn t full of stuff!). Importantly he also points out that different family members can see a different purpose for the same room and so see different things belonging there.
Taking the concentration off of your stuff seems to make it so much easier to let go of it. I have pretty painlessly got rid of bags of stuff that I ve had real trouble letting go of before. My house seems so much lighter!
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It s All Too Much: Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff (ID: 0743292650)
