If you have to travel for business as much as I have been, and you’re concerned about your carbon footprint as much as I am, you begin to look how you conduct yourself on the road a little differently from everybody else.

When you travel you tend to leave a trail of disposable items behind, from food containers, to styrofoam cups, to magazines, to miniature bottles of shampoo. And then there’s the things you don’t see: The exhaust from your plane, or the energy consumed by your hotel room’s A/C while you’re not in the room.

It all adds up, and what’s worse is that we’re leaving an impact on a place that’s not our home. (Although, strictly speaking, the Earth is our home.)

Lately I’ve done so much traveling that I feel guilty every time I hop on a plane, take a taxi, or rent a car (because the businesses I have to go to are nowhere near urban centers).

So I started to ask: If we have to travel, what can we do to lessen our impact on the world?

Here are my thoughts, and tips:

Continue reading Minimizing Your Travel Footprint »

As I continue to recycle, donate, give away, eradicate, eliminate, and trash things, I’m getting closer to that point where I wonder how far I can truly go.

So I asked myself a question, as I tend to do when I’m talking to myself: What is the bare minimum list of physical things that I really, truly need?

The key word, once again, is “need”.

At the same time, though, the word “comfort” comes into my mind.

I think the trick is to redefine what us North Americans think of as “comfortable”, and truly challenge what I think I need, in my day-to-day life. Really, shouldn’t four walls and a roof be enough? (This is probably a post in and of itself.)

And so, allow me to pick apart my daily activities, and propose an approach for living minimally that might work for me. To simplify things, I’ll leave out transient, consumable objects like food, cleaning supplies, and toiletries.

Let’s start with the most cluttered area of my home, and go from there.

Continue reading Minimizing to my Maximum »

OK, so you’ve decided to clean out your basement, closet, spare bedroom, car, or some other space where stuff has collected.

Where do you begin? And how do you get yourself to actually go through with it?

Here are some things that worked for me:

Continue reading A Strategy for Minimizing Your Stuff »

Believe it or not, we’ve just completed the first three months of the year. Given this startling turn of events, I thought it would be a good time to reflect back on my New Year’s resolutions, and make sure that they’re still resolutions worth keeping for the next three months.

First, let’s take a look back at January, February, and March of Twenty Ten.

Continue reading The Next Three Months (Spring 2010) »

As I continue to minimize and strive towards a simpler lifestyle, I’ve been putting some thought into how I can control what new physical things come in to my life.

Here are my thoughts:

• First of all, really determine if the thing you’re looking to acquire is a really a want, or a need. You probably already know what category it falls into, so this shouldn’t take much thought.
• Put that thing on a 30-day waiting list. I read this trick somewhere, and I like it. If, after thirty days you still think you need the thing, then you probably do. In 30 days, your “wants” will hopefully disappear.
• Consider borrowing the things you want, first. This includes hitting up your friends for stuff, renting movies instead of buying them, and signing out books from the library. If you borrow something and evaluate that you have a need for your own, personal thing, then your purchase decision will be further justified. For whatever reason, I personally grew up feeling like I had to own everything. I frequently bartered with my brother for things that I could have otherwise borrowed; this behavior became part of who I was, well into adulthood. I eventually realized that this was just plain stupid.
• Picture what might happen if you had smaller containers for your things. Living in a smaller space really made me question the place for all of the stuff I owned. This forced me to make some tough decisions (at the time) about what to keep. While this opportunity doesn’t happen often, imagine if you had to move tomorrow. What could you get rid of today to make it easier on your future self?
• Keep a list of the things you buy, and how much you spent on them. (Don’t include regular expenditures, like food.) Review this list when you’re thinking about buying something, to see if those other things you bought that you thought you truly needed at the time are still proving to be a worthy investment.
• Get moral support. Talk to others who don’t have the thing you want. They may be able to convince you that you don’t need to have that thing that they don’t have, either.
• If you currently don’t think in terms of acquisitions as costing you money, start to. Every purchase impacts your bottom line, which you could be putting aside for memorable experiences, or other, more worthy investments (your definition of “worthy investment” may vary).
• Perhaps more importantly, if you currently don’t think in terms of acquisitions as costing the environment, start to. Everything you buy is made from something, and packed in something else.
• Convince others to stop buying things for you that you don’t need, or give them meaningful alternatives. Here are my thoughts on that.

How do you keep yourself from buying things you don’t need?

There reached a point last year when I realized just how much extra, non-essential baggage I had in my life.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was born. I vowed to minimize: To sell, donate, or otherwise get rid of as much of the extraneous “stuff” in my life as I could.

I started with my storage locker: A collection of boxes and blue bins, together in a cage, mixed in with remnants of my past.

Continue reading Why Minimize? »

Here’s the thing: I like giving and receiving gifts as much as everybody else.

Gifts mean something. Gifts mean that somebody is thinking of you. Gifts mean that a person went out of their way to get that thing that they thought you would appreciate. Gifts make you feel good!

But, here’s the problem:

• Commercial interests dominate the times of the year when everybody’s expected to be buying things. This leads to undue pressure, and impulse buying decisions.
• Despite their best intentions, your gift giver usually ends up buying a thing that you just don’t need, because they truly don’t know what thing it is that you want.
• But, they don’t know what you want because you don’t know what you want. You make up things that you think you want, so you have some ideas of things to give to these people.
• And then you finally give or receive the thing, it doesn’t meet expectations, and is eventually forgotten about.
• Now this physical thing is hard to get rid of, because it has an emotional, or personal attachment. It becomes an object that just takes up room.

Awk-ward.

Personally, I want to give memorable, meaningful, and/or useful things that don’t take up room in people’s lives.

So, I did some thinking, asking, and searching. What might such things look like?

Here’s what I came up with:

Continue reading Minimal, Meaningful Gifts »

With all of the thinking about minimizing that I’ve been doing lately, I realized I hadn’t put any thought towards minimizing what I take with me when I travel.

That is, I hadn’t until the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s restrictions for us Canadians came into play.

Continue reading Traveling Light »

I just neutered my BlackBerry.

The light went on (or rather, off) when I finally realized that I didn’t have to use the BlackBerry to do what it was designed to do, namely automatically delivering me my mail.

Now, I use the Gmail app, which allows me to check email on my schedule, without the constant reminder that there’s new messages waiting for me every time I look at my phone. The other awesome side-benefit to this is that I’m looking at the exact same inbox I see on my computer, so they stay in sync. Before, I had an inbox to manage on the Berry that I later had to reconcile manually against Gmail, even though they were technically the same inbox!

Here are some other ways I have minimized the flow of information into my life, either by eliminating inboxes, by preventing what sort of stuff goes into them, or by reducing the number of distractions they cause:

Continue reading Minimizing Inputs »

Twenty ten is going to be a big year for me, if I have anything to say about it …and I do.

As of this particular moment in time, I resolve to:

Run

The problems I have with working out in gyms are the reliance on a place and equipment, and sheer boredom. Running, on the other hand, requires only a good pair of shoes, and opens up my neighborhood (and anywhere I travel to on business) to exploration.

To make this goal concrete,

• I’m aiming to complete a half-marathon later in the year. I’ve narrowed it down to one of two particular events in September and October. Training begins now, and equates to 40 minute workouts, three times a week.

Introspect

What inspires, drives, and motivates me? I’m already putting some real thought into answering this question.

But I believe that a real journey to find myself is truly in order:

• I’m going to travel, by myself, to Africa, in the Fall. If I could go earlier, I would, but I need up at least three weeks of vacation days based on the options I’m interested in.

Challenge

It’s always good to step outside that zone of comfort we live within, in life.

To begin to challenge myself,

• I’m going to talk to at least one stranger every day. The rule is that I have to be the one to initiate the conversation.
• I’m finally going to go skydiving, around July.

Minimize

One must continually challenge the need and place of everything in your life, and I intend to do just that.

My storage locker is packed to the brim, and various “stuff” dominates the nooks of my home. This will be an ongoing exercise, but,

• I plan to immediately start purging, as my schedule allows me to give away, donate, or dispose.

I’ve already started getting rid of a lot of the material crap in my life. But this is the year I fully intend on pushing myself to the point where I’ve minimized as much as possible.

Build

Creating things is just part of my nature. While I shall endeavor to regularly update this here blog, and contribute to ProductCamp, I need some new projects.

To start, I intend to:

• Launch PresentationCamp, hopefully early this year. An event like this requires the assistance of many others, but the onus, this time, will be on me to pull it all together. I look forward to the challenge.

…Set More Goals

While that about sums up my concrete goals at the moment, I fully intend on evolving and adding to this list over the coming months.

So, what are your resolutions for 2010?