So I was reading Real Simple the other day. After my initial crush on the design—so clean, so white, wise and simple font choice—I found myself disappointed. Unlike ReadyMade (whose design and subject matter is cool enough to have actually gotten me party invites from girls on the Metro) it doesn’t really feel committed to its project. Some of the advice was good, but a lot of it seemed overly complex or odd (the 10 uses for olive oil would have made my house a sticky mess). And the recipes looked damn hard.

But I myself have been on a drive to simplify my life. Moving to my new place in November helped a lot, though I’m still fighting with the detritus of my previous lives. And now my new life is getting complicated. So it’s going slowly, and I keep backsliding…but it’s beginning to work…I think.

So here are some of the practices I’ve come up with. I'm not doing this to be vain—though today is my 27th birthday: Worship me, mortals!—but as a confessional...since these practices necessarily reveal much of what is poor and slipshod about me. Plus I'm also really interested in your practices.

Note that many of them have to do with my forgetfulness, sloth, and packrat tendencies (this is the part of the post where I apologize again to Forrest for having had to put up with me). Note that I also don’t count the things I’m doing to improve my life, since many of those things (exercise regularly, write more, contribute to the ‘Werkz, buy t-shirts at funky artist coöps, and use umlauts in the style of The New Yorker) complicate my life even as they improve it.

So, my personal rules:

Grooming & Style

• Shave every day if possible. You look better and not doing so doubles your time the next day.
• Clothes (dirty and clean) go where they belong immediately. (I’m actually worse about putting away the latter—I do laundry then fail to put the folded clothes back on shelves/in the closet).
• Try, try, try like hell to make your bed before you leave for work.
• When you get your hair cut, schedule the next appointment. (I know for girls—and even most guys—this is a no-brainer. But as a former teacher—“Can I come in today? Yes, 2:30 is fine”—it came as a rude shock to me how hard it was to get a haircut on a 9-5 schedule.

Food & Shopping

• Buy milk every time you go to the grocery store.
• Buy stamps every time you think of buying stamps. Because you won’t remember to buy them when you need them.
• Buy 6 days of lunch food for work, not 5. So when you forget next week you get a day of grace.
• Use the dishwasher. (I mention this because my roommates for some reason hate the dishwasher, one of the most glorious inventions Man has ever created. They handwash. Freaks.)

Bookkeeping & Maintenance

• Attempt to have a one-touch policy on mail. In other words, if you pick up a bill from the mail pile, you open it, you pay it, and you file the papers immediately.
• If you read a magazine cover-to-cover, actually read it cover to cover, so you know it’s read and done. (Exception: I save the fiction for last in The New Yorker.)
• Throw away magazines you’ve read. If a review or something caught your eye, cut it out. (A clipping takes up less space, and less space is simpler).
• Put magazines you’ve read but you don’t want to throw in a place were you will never, ever be tempted to touch them again until you’ve read the rest of the magazines you need to read.
• Index, bag, board, and box your comics immediately.
• Index and catalog your CDs immediately. (I’m currently out of shelf space and I get a lot of compilations, so this is a huge problem for me right now.)

Leisure

• If you have a regular show, check the listing (I’m assuming cable and/or Internet access here) early in the day (say, while you’re working out) so you don’t schedule time for something that’s being rerun or preëmpted.
• Only one “serious” read (novel, short story collection, etc.) and one “frivolous” read (comics, Terry Pratchett novels, D&D books—shut up, I like them) at a time.
• The Internet is an evil timewaster and complicater, which is why it is great at work and to be shied away from at home.

Yours?

And sometimes, simple isn’t really.