Hi Lissanne,
Thanks for your newsletters, really finding them useful. I have actually gone through most of your book and have put some of the suggestions in place. But i would like to ask you called yourself a hoarder in the beginning of the book, what made you change. Being also a hoarder I find it hard to “let-go” of stuff. I am tackling paper at the moment and scanning stuff to try and avoid build up, however it is taking forever…..going through magazines and tearing pages i like and chucking out the magazine, but i still find myself looking at my stuff and thinking, whoa this is still too much! This is partly due to having too many hobbies and therefore i have mags and articles for yoga, property, handyman, home, spirituality etc…..but what i am interested in is how you changed your thinking and decide this is what i will keep and this is what i will get rid of. After seeing a few other houses during open for inspection and most of them seem to be minimalists to me, they just don’t have much stuff. Really curious how the mental thing works from altering your mental view of clutter.
thanks in advance.
Lucy
Hi Lucy
Great question! My answer has several parts.
Changing my thinking was mostly due to having to move house a number of times and physically lugging stuff about… Man, that is hard work. I think I also started thinking more about what “need” really was in my world, and that had an impact.
(this process was a good ten year period – from late teens to late 20′s)
Finally, I decided to travel, and I bought a one-way ticket to London and sold pretty much everything: car, furniture, loved bits and bobs. I really edited down to the PRECIOUS items, and I made good decisions as I still have those items today!!
Hope this helps… and btw, it doesn’t have to take ten years! 
The old tearsheets (cutting stuff out from mags) is a tough habit to break, but it can be done.
For you Lucy, I would start thinking about the behaviours you currently have: our time needs to be spent on what MATTERS so if tearing, scanning, saving etc really matters, keep it up. I still have a small selection of tearsheets for creative projects, home renovation etc but I can tell you honestly, hand on heart, it’s still too much. I don’t refer to them as much as I think I will, all this kind of ‘hoarding’ (and I use that term loosely] in my life takes up precious space in our small apartment, and seriously wastes my time. It’s hard to think we might ‘miss out’ by not saving that nice picture, article or recipe, but let’s remember we use just 3% of the paper/information we keep. Part of the solution is also to make sure you REVIEW what you’re keeping periodically, once or twice a year (min) is ideal. You will realise how little these things matter when you REVIEW.
Also, don’t be misled by those ‘minimalist’ houses, particularly when a home is ‘staged’ for sage: there is often a lot that’s been scoop and dumped behind closed doors!
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