From time to time, I am going to offer blurbs about and links to resources that I have been using while writing this blog.  These will range from other blog posts to podcasts, films, or books that I have found to be helpful and would like to share with you.

None of these, by the way, are any sort of endorsement, sponsorship, or anything like that. It’s stuff I’ve actually read or watched that I wanted to pass on.

Books

The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store by Cait Flanders. So this is someone’s first-person journey of spending an entire year without buying anything unnecessary and its effect on her. I had downloaded it on a whim because Amazon was offering it up as a free or deeply discounted book at the time and found it to be a really solid read. I think what I got out of it the most was less tips and tricks to effectively stop buying things, but more of the details of someone’s struggles. The quick magazine articles and YouTubers make it seem so easy because they don’t have a lot of time to get everything across. Here, she takes that time and allows herself to be vulnerable.

The book is often on discount on Amazon in both Kindle and audiobook formats.

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett: Less of a self-help for hoarders and more of a achieving your life goals/paths to success book, the authors take the principles of Design Thinking and teach you how to apply it to your own life and career. This includes developing a long-term plan and sticking to it, making this another book where someone takes a deep dive into what we have to give up.

The book is available at list price but there is an audiobook that is often on an audible discount.

Give and Take by Adam Grant: This is another business book that looks at how people in the business world can be successful or breed success through the lens of being “givers” and “takers.” It’s definitely more geared toward those who study stuff for, say, an MBA, and is geared more toward the “White Collar” sector. But it’s more useful in many places than, say, a number of Malcolm Gladwell’s books.

And why am I putting it here? Because it looks at the relationships we have, and that’s incredibly important when you think of it. The Kindle and paperback editions tend to be list price, but there is a cheaper audiobook.  You can buy it here:

YouTube

Abundantly Minimal: I wrote a post about this particular YouTube channel and how it presents the idea of minimalism. You might not fully subscribe to the minimalist theory, but Sarah has a number of very good tips there for you.

Tidying Up with Marie Kondo: Yeah, I know it’s a bit tired by now because this show was the Netflix sensation of early 2019, but a lot of what she has on here is still relevant to what I’ve been writing about. Plus, you’ve got Hoarders without the disgusting stuff and a fair amount of voyeurism into people’s relationships (which are sometimes dysfunctional): https://www.netflix.com/title/80209379