I don’t know about your calendar, but ours is on fire again. The pandemic isn’t quite over, but the days upon days of staying home are no longer our normal. Even in the busiest of days, it’s always my goal to keep life as simple as possible so we can make time for all the corn maze adventures, basketball games, Patch the Pirate LIVE concerts, Disney on Ice, swim practices, school, etc.
Recently we found out our home owners insurance was being cancelled because our heating system was too old. Did I have time to shop around for new insurance? Not really! It’s one of those things you have to do as an adult that is BORING, but necessary. The silver lining to that story is we were able to bundle our home and auto and have a lower rate with a new company.
In addition to home owners insurance, there are plenty of great services can help to simplify particular features of your life that might otherwise become quite stressful. You could, for example, count on a good home warranty to reduce a lot of the stress and mayhem that would likely accompany a situation where some of your property was damaged or stolen.
We know we are on borrowed time until our original heating unit decides to be done. You know, the one that caused our insurance company to drop us. But having a home warranty reduces so much stress when things do decide to break. It would be just our luck to have something break when we were hosting our monthly teen gathering. Having a plan to get us running again quickly gives me peace of mind.
Here are a handful of principles that might prove helpful when it comes to simplifying your own life. So we can have time for all the fun stuff.
Avoid creating extra steps to accomplishing a task
When it comes to many of the sort of tasks that you may find yourself dealing with on a daily basis, there will tend to be both more or less direct ways of getting those tasks done.
For perfectionists, in particular, there is often the temptation to throw in all sorts of steps to overcomplicate a given process, or for that matter a decision, in order to try and ensure that it is as perfect and well organized as possible.
The thing is, this kind of perfectionism tends to lead to effects that are significantly more detrimental than positive, and it can easily lead to procrastination and difficulty with actually getting things done, and it can also mean that you end up becoming overwhelmed by the unnecessary complexity that you generate when dealing with various everyday matters.
It’s a good idea to avoid creating extra steps to accomplishing a task, particularly when you are looking for ways to simplify your life as a whole and to remove various sources of stress that might otherwise be wearing you down.
Try to be as direct and to the point as you can when dealing with personal projects, work assignments, and chores alike, and aim to strike the right balance between emphasizing simplicity on the one hand, and making sure to address all the fundamental points on the other hand.
Keep organized with good habits, to maintain a state of equilibrium
Successfully managing to simplify your life will tend to depend to a significant degree on getting the right habits and routines in place, in order to establish a proper degree of balance and equilibrium.
If you don’t have a fairly consistent and positive daily routine in place, your life will naturally tend to end up seeming a lot more complex and frustrating, because you won’t be able to settle into your familiar routines when you are tired or in doubt, but will instead have to consistently think things through in detail, and exert far greater levels of willpower, on a regular basis.
Figuring out the kinds of habits that help you to stay at your best, and to avoid having to deal with excess complexity in your everyday life, can be very powerful – and using a good habit tracker app or system can help to make this process a lot more streamlined and engaging.
If, for example, you have a habit of always finishing work at a certain time, going to bed at a certain time, and waking up at a certain time, your days will tend to have a lot more structure and balance than they otherwise would if those natural “boundaries” were not in place, and if you were more prone to just improvising, day by day.
Realize that there are limits to how much you can do
A major part of “simplification” actually tends to come down to having a clear sense of what your priorities are, and recognizing the basic fact that there are simply limits to how much you can actually get done during any particular period of time.
In other words, when you are looking to simplify your life, you should identify ways to cut out as many of the tasks and activities as you can, that are not priorities for you, and that are not particularly meaningful to you.
Even if you end up adding more practices and pastimes to your routine somewhere down the line, it’s a very good idea to begin as simply as possible — by just making sure that a handful of important details are dealt with on a regular basis — so that you don’t have the same likelihood of become overwhelmed by trying to juggle a huge number of things that could have been left off of your to do list without any harm done.
Minimize multitasking
Although a lot of people pride themselves on being good at multitasking, what researchers have found is that multitasking actually generates excessive stress, and a sense of overwhelm, while simultaneously leading to reduced performance at all of the tasks that are being juggled at once.
If you have a habit of trying to work on a couple of different projects at the same time, or trying to listen to the TV while surfing the web, you can be sure that this will contribute to you feeling more overwhelmed and off-balance than you would otherwise feel.
Simply practicing the habit of doing one thing at a time may help to give you more clarity and focus, while simultaneously reducing your stress levels, and helping you to feel more positive about things as well.
In this way, you can simplify your life by simplifying how you approach each task that you are dealing with at a given time.
