How To Start Your New Year: 3 Easy Tips To Simplify Your Life + Home
Kristin Giesselmann
Truth time. I hate the pressure of starting the New Year off “right” and I’m a natural born goal setter and go-getter. There’s pressure to have goals, set intentions, do more, be more, do better. I’d like to take a counterintuitive approach in sharing 3 tips with you that will reduce your overwhelm day to day and simplify your life and home. We are setting no goals here, just offering ways to simplify your life. Deal? Ok, let’s get started.
Creating peace in my office niche has both to do with how the physical space looks/feels + with what’s lurking in my email inbox. Both need + deserve attention to be maintained.
1. Unsubscribe to Emails
Now I want you to be ruthless in this email unsubscribe purge effort for 10-15 minutes.The plan is to start unsubscribing from emails you don’t read or doesn’t add value to your life.
Make it happen: Look for marketing emails to stores you don’t shop at, emails you never signed up for (it happens), blog or email subscriptions to content that no longer interest you. Also consider changing the frequency setting to once a month to stores/shops you love but don’t want to hear from them as often.
Benefits: You’ll scroll less and have less emails to manage. By creating more boundaries in your email inbox, the more time you’ll save and the less overwhelmed you’ll be by your inbox.
Bonus tip: Do this a few times a year to keep your inbox wrangled (I like to do it at the change of a season since it’s easy to remember) . Deleting unwanted emails is a separate effort. If you struggle with this, schedule a reoccurring appointment on your calendar once a week for a short burst of concentrated effort to simplify your inbox.
Having the beds made in the kids’ room is crucial so the room doesn’t feel incredibly small as a shared space. When the beds are made, they tend to put their clothes away quicker and keep the room cleaner overall to maintain the fresh feeling they walked into. Since my kids are still young, this is often a joint effort and modeling this skill is the first step.
2. Make Your Bed Everyday
Don’t come at me like I’m a crazy person, OK? The benefits far outweigh the 2 minutes of bed-making, trust me.
Make it happen: Carve out 2 minutes in the morning, before you leave the house or dig into your workday, and make your bed. If you find that it is taking more than 2 minutes to make your bed, you need to do a bed audit. Remove all the unnecessary extras (excessive throw pillows or blankets) and keep only on the bed what is useful, beautiful and cozy.
Benefits: You set an invisible intention for the day that you value your space, your time and your home. Your room will instantly look more streamlined, spacious and cleaner. This clean visual cue (a made a bed) is a mood booster cue anytime you walk past or in your bedroom.
Bonus tip: One of my favorite ways to streamline and modernize the look of your bed (minus a big price tag) is to place a long lumbar pillow on top of your sleep pillows. It adds a moment of design, elevates the look of the bed, and is useful for your back if you like to sit up in bed and read at night.
3. Clear Off Your Kitchen Counters
I don’t care if you love to cook, don’t love to cook, have a large kitchen, have a tiny kitchen. I want you to take 5ish minutes before you turning in for the night to wrangle as much chaos in your kitchen so the next morning you don’t walk into an immediate to do list. Deal?
Make it happen: set a timer for 5ish minutes and hit the kitchen highlights. Put dishes away. Load the dishwasher. Clean things out of the sink. Put anything away sitting out on the counters that doesn’t need to be out. Wipe the counters down. Put things back where they belong.
Benefits: When you walk into your kitchen the next morning, it’s such a relief to walk into a fresh, clean space versus an immediate to-do list. Remember the saying “clear counters = a clear mind”? It’s a real thing. When there’s less visual clutter there’s less stress and overwhelm. Not to mention it will simplify your food prep throughout the day, saving you time and sanity.
Bonus tip: Create a predictable system/routine for washing dishes, whether it is handwashing or running the dishwasher. Know when it’s easier to run it and carve out a few minutes to put clean dishes away. I also want to encourage you to ditch your dish drying racks for good. They take up a ton of countertop space and encourage poor habits (like letting dishes just sit there without every being put away for days on end). Opt for a dish towel instead and hang it up after you put the clean dishes away. You’ll thank me later for all the extra counter space you’ll have back in your kitchen! You’re welcome!
When we take a few moments to simplify small bits in our day to day, the benefits continue long after. They also encourage us to value the spaces we have, what we own, and take better care of ourselves with just a few small shifts in our day.
I can’t wait to hear how these tips impact your entire day (please share below)!
If you have more in your home you’d like to simplify, check these handy tools in the shop: