Live Simple

This is an ebook focused on reducing complexity in your life, and simplifying the whole affair. The author describes it thus:

Are you facing the need or desire to simplify your life? You might be newly laid off, retired, or a student, homemaker, or entrepreneur who has to make do with less. This ebook can help you restructure your life. Or perhaps you have decided that your current profession, although well paying, is unfulfilling. In this case, you could simplify your life so that you could pursue your more desired, but perhaps much lower paying, way of life.

In my life, sometimes I feel that things just seem too complicated. They're not of course, I've just let things slide, or transform themselves into something that I've lost sight of, or a perspective on. For instance, my house is a three-bedroomed house that I inhabit alone. The spare room is my computer room/study. In it I store all of my computer stuff, my 'worky' books, and also a filing cabinet that contains all my bank statements, official documents (birth certificate, passport, medical card etc), and payslips etc. When I get regular statements and bills through the post, because they are all paid by Direct Debit, generally, I don't have to worry about them. I occasionally look through them (not religiously though), and then once opened, they need storing in the filing cabinet. What I tend to do is place them on the in-tray that I have sat on top of the filing cabinet. Slowly, the room gets more untidy, and the top of the filing cabinet may contain several months worth of unfiled documents.

So other things happen in my life; you know you need to fill in your tax return, you need to renew you car tax etc. Both these things require presenting docmuents proving you're insured to drive your car, or that you earned a certain amount the previous tax year. But you leave it and you leave it, and by the time you need these documents, the room is pretty untidy, and finding these sheets of paper is a chore. So, in the case of the tax return, you leave it and leave it. The room gets more untidy, you leave it a little longer. And so on. Suddenly, I've progressively let my garage get cluttered too, so finding anything is a chore. My recycling has built up too, a few little DIY jobs are now several little DIY jobs, and I see no headway in any of these things.

I don't feel that I'm snowed under, but it doesn't help me to feel in control of things, because in a minor way, I'm not. But in a boom-bust sort of way, I tend to address these things thrice annually, when they drive me nuts.

The book can help with this sort of stuff. It gives you a set of simple steps tht you can follow to help address these things in a sensible order. It is all common sense, and therefore something we can all work out for ourselves. But we don't do it often enough. On the subject of self-help books, I am normally the first to be fairly cynical, because they're always way too obvious. But some people struggle with these things more than others. While I cite a small example that I deal with in my own way, some people would be made literally nuts by all this. The millions of days lost to British industry through stress is often because poeple feel they have too much going on to feel in control. This could be the book for them.