Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Are You Happier Than A Bread Box?
I’ll admit, when I first heard Gretchen Rubin on the radio talking about her book The Happiness Project, I rolled my eyes. Why is a healthy, well-educated, affluent woman living in one of the country’s wealthiest zip codes unhappy? Still, I kept hearing about her “happiness project” and I was intrigued. So, one day, having finished my book on the subway earlier in the day and facing a bookless return trip, I went ahead and bought it.
I was an instant fan. Of course, it didn’t hurt that seven pages in she starts a major reorganization project, surmising that if her environment were more serene, she would be happier. Smart cookie. Miss Rubin has great names for her piles of clutter: nostalgic clutter, conservation clutter, bargain clutter, freebie clutter, crutch clutter, aspirational clutter. In the first month of her endeavor, she seemed to grasp—and distill into pithy phrases—classic organizational pitfalls that I have seen and fought for years.
One of Miss Rubin’s bits of wisdom that I know to be true is finding time. She used to think she needed a big chunk of time to sit down and write, but realizes that there are multiple 15-minute periods a day that she wastes. I had this realization myself when my children started going to school closer to home: I found that I could squeeze in an extra twenty minutes at home before pickup to take care of at least one or two pressing tasks. Just that sliver of an hour is a wonderful serving of time. Of course, your desk must be in good enough shape to find that one task, and get to it. Organization begets organization.
The Happiness Project is full of the stuff your mother told you, and that the Perfect Daughter would second: Go to bed earlier, make your bed first thing in the morning, be kind. This book is about little disciplines (which goes back to September’s newsletter) that add up. When we think about happiness, we don’t think that discipline is going to get us there, yet when I meet truly unhappy people, I often notice the chaos in their lives. Conversely, I have also witnessed and admired the serenity of those who have a simple routine that they have been following for years.
I know that the organized life is made up of a thousand little disciplines that don’t happen overnight. In The Power of Less, author Leo Babauta posits that while we are capable of change, we can only change one thing at a time and it takes about 30 days to build into a new habit. Miss Rubin gave herself a different set of tasks every month, all toward her goal of being happier. (Of course, the trick is always keeping all the balls in the air. Sure, you can give up bread for a month, but coffee too? Crazy!) Yet it can really work. I, always trying to improve, have used this daily awareness regime to instill a few behaviors that are now second nature to me (taking vitamins religiously and carrying my reusable shopping bag everywhere, to name just two).
Thus, here is my prescription for 2012: Choose one small thing—making your bed, hanging up your clothes or opening your mail every night in the same spot. Make it your focus for the next 30 days. If you miss a day, restart your 30-day count. If you really put your energy into that single behavior, you will not only make a new habit, you will remove one little stress from your life. And that, my friends, will make you happier. Gradually.