Lately I have been reading too many books which promote living a simple life and becoming a minimalist on all levels of life. I have made some serious progress in the passed couple of months on succeeding toward a more simplistic lifestyle.

I want a life where I can come home after a month long travel to a simple, small and clean home. I want only what is necessary and nothing extra. Believe it or not, the more objects you have in your life including heaps of clothes, drawers of knick knacks and tubs of old toys from your childhood…. the more it weighs you down to break away and unleash your passion. For me, my passion is traveling. I want to travel across the world, complete my bucket list and live a wonderful life. With a simpler home life, I can come home from work, kick back and relax without worrying to clean my heaps of clothes, organize that old knick knack drawer or dust off old electronics.

In this blog, I want to update you on how I have created the life of a minimalist to help promote me to get up and live my life.

De-clutter My Online World 

• I sorted through my three e-mail accounts, eliminated one, deleted all old e-mails irrelevant to my life and then finally organized each e-mail into a separate folder
• Over the passed few years, I have subscribed to far too many lists and promotions. This tends to fill up my e-mail box rather quickly and makes for a lot more clutter. I spent a full day unsubscribing from all lists in my junk mail (I also continue to do so every time an e-mail comes in that I do not care for)
• Deleting my social media accounts that I don’t use anymore. Most of you may know that I run Give for Granted as a clothing line as well and use my social media for travel blogging and support northern Canadians living in poverty. In reality, this is my life. With this being said, I went ahead and deleted all my personal accounts or merged the two to make one. I now have one Twitter account, one Facebook account and one YouTube account. Simple and clean.
• While this step isn’t online, it is still a computer task that helps me feel a lot less cluttered – deleting all old documents, photos and videos that I did not like. I went through every folder and only kept old projects I was proud of, old photos I would use again and videos that made sense. Each folder was organized by year and season.

De-clutter my Home Life 

• Think about this for a second… out of the clothes, shoes and accessories that you own, most people will use about 20% of these on a regular basis – this is considered the 80/20 rule. If you can, get rid of 80% of your wardrobe while keeping only the clothes you use the most. I must admit, it wasn’t easy for me and I think I started by giving away 20% of my belongings, then 50% a couple months later and just recently reached my proud 80% point. I can now fit my entire wardrobe into two suitcases. 🙂
• Now onto the bedroom… the less drawers, the less clutter. Luckily a few years ago I purchased a bed frame where under the bed storage wasn’t an option. I got rid of my 6 drawer accessories bin and removed storage structures that just encouraged more junk.
• Next step, GARAGE SALE! I absolutely love garage sales. I also love online platforms for selling your old goods.
• Finally, if you haven’t sold the last bit of items online or at your garage sale, just pack it all up in one shot and donate it to the closest thrift store.

De-clutter my Work Life 

• The first thing I did was quit my job. This is definitely not recommended for everyone, I simply quit my job because the work I had to do for Granted Apparel was far too much to juggle both jobs.
• I purchased one great quality agenda and got rid of all the other notepads and dot jots I had laying around the house.
• I created a time for everything work related: Monday and Wednesday’s I submit blogs, Tuesday’s I submit a video blog, Thursday – Sunday I take photos, travel, update my e-mails and declutter some more!

These are all great tips that I used to help declutter my life and I am so excited that I have such a simple life now at home that I can leave for month long travels and come home to a no worries environment.

Leave your comments below, how have you created your minimalist life?? What do you do to remove stress from your life??

Looking for some more travel inspiration? Check out a couple more: Why You Should Travel Now, How to Create Your Own Blog, How to Break Out of Habit and Travel the World.