Too Many Choices - Clutter Beware - Part Two

This world offers 

too many choices!

We have too many choices - about everything -  and all it offers is confusion and poor decisions. 

I have found this to be true in several areas of life - buying cars, over-flowing closets, homeschooling, recipes, friendships, and especially our kid's rooms!

It seems the more options we have, the worse our decision-making ability works! 

Can you relate to this simple scenario?


Standing in the grocery store, looking at the spaghetti sauce rows; realizing you have 30 choices of sauce, and you waste 2 minutes trying to figure out which one you want.    It's seasoned tomato sauce, for goodness sake!  Just pick one!

Or trying to pick out detergent!  It should be simple, but it's not!  So, therefore, we spend minutes on the detergent aisle; trying to decide which one cleans better, smells better, and which one doesn't cost the price of a new dress. 

My closet is a bigger example:  I would go in there each day (depending on what my schedule looked like that day) and fret over what to wear.    The problem wasn't that I didn't have enough choices.   The problem was - I had too many!    Once I cleaned out the clutter and eliminated everything that didn't fit, didn't look good, didn't represent who I wanted to be, I was free! 

It was amazing how free I felt the next day as I stood in front of my smaller section of clothing, knowing that I now had fewer distractions, fewer choices, yet a clear picture of what could work together.

My son's room is another "choice" battleground and he's not happy with it and neither am I, although I'm the one who over-indulges my kids, so I guess it's my fault!

I asked him recently, if there were areas of his room that bothered him, and his answer was yes!   He feels cluttered in his room and he honestly doesn't utilize a fraction of the stuff that is still stuffed in his closet or under his bed.     So, this is our project for the week - to simplify and declutter his room, so he can actually start to appreciate what he has.

Homeschooling is littered with too many choices!  Too many good theories, too many good curriculum choices, too many vendors at the conference, too many methods, and the list goes on and on.   It is literally overwhelming to know where to begin in your first year of homeschooling.  Even after many years of sifting through all the catalogs and websites, I am continually confused on what the better choices are each year.


Believe it or not - even friendships can get tricky when you're trying to carry the load of too many!  I mean, you may be able to maintain over 1000 friends in cyber space, but in real life - it's a disaster waiting to happen!    You can only, faithfully, nurture a few good friendships in the way that a friend deserves to be nurtured.     An attempt to be a good friend to many, is stretching yourself in a direction that will eventually lead to burnout or shallow relationships.   I would rather have a few good friends that I can truly love with time and effort, than have many that are only on the surface.  

I think the friend analogy is a good example for all of the areas I've talked about today.  Whatever the area -  too much is not a good thing.   An over-abundance leads to neglect, whereas, having a reasonable amount of anything,  makes more sense and makes life a lot easier.

So, what can you pare down today?  Clothes, toys, books, pots and pans, kitchen gadgets, cookbooks, make-up, shoes, old sweatshirts?   What things in your life are neglected because you're not using them in the way they were created to be used?    Could someone else love what you're neglecting?    That is reason enough to pass it on!

Take the challenge and de-clutter something today (easy on the friends, though).   You will feel free-er than you've felt in a long time.

Let me know how you do!