Customer Reviews

Clutter Busting: Letting Go of What's Holding You Back

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Brooks Palmer tells the reader more than once his purpose in writing his book is to inspire you to get rid of your clutter. I am writing this review to let the reader know the author's inspiration is not mere self-help inspiration based in some kind of Eastern wisdom but is wholly domestically practical, and the psychological aspects of his approach are pragmatic: it works!

I've been a big fan of Don Aslett and in particular his book "Clutter's Last Stand." In Aslett's book, the writing is as clear as a red fire truck and the advice is as strong as the blare of the fire truck's siren. You can readily see what needs to be thrown out and then you just do it.

With Palmer's book, the path is more indirect but no less powerful and no less clear. Palmer tells stories about his former clients and their issues with clutter. In one tale,the reader finds him accepting a client based on trading a full body massage for clutter advice; in another, he assists a young lady who works as a [...] model. His stories range from the middle-class yuppie who cannot throw out the expensive electronics he never uses stored in his garage to the weirdly intimate and bizarre clutter of women lost in past romances and previous identities. Through these often astonishing tales, the reader begins to identify hidden and often subconscious areas of clutter, some quite small and others quite embarrassingly obvious. One quickly discovers that no story is completely without some practical and beneficial relation to the reader and his or her clutter, no matter the gender, age or circumstance.

Three pieces of insight I found particularly worthwhile are (1) you need to get rid of stuff that you spent a lot of money on and are not using to avoid being continually reminded of how much money you wasted; (2) 75% of the stuff you own is worthless and unnecessary to you for your present happiness and peace of mind; (3) don't hesitate to get rid of your clutter as quickly as possible: garage sales are just a form of procrastination and many things may land back inside your place.

I threw out lots of stuff that I didn't need or want as a result of reading this book and gained new courage for tossing out items I'd hesitated over many times. I also learned new techniques in identifying what is really clutter that aren't on the list in Don Aslett's books.

I must say I wasn't expecting much out of the book. I knew I had a problem with organization and a tendency to acquire things that I quickly grew tired of. This book has changed the way I view my home, people around me, and life in general. It's premise that if something isn't adding value to your life may mean it's clutter is a critical revelation. The only negative is that you start noticing the clutter-rich behavior of those around you (read: your family) and I find myself asking them to get with the program.

In the end, in just two weeks I have rid myself of a truck full of old electronics, computers, and junk in a local e-waste recycler, 10 huge bags of recyclables, and 20 cardboard boxes. I have a lot to go and can't wait to get back to it.

I now feel great about the evolution of my home as a peaceful place to spend time with the family. I never knew what agitated me so much in the past, now I do.

Finally, I have stopped spending money on things that I now realize have no long-term value and would probably end up junk. The money on the book has paid for itself hundreds of times over already. This book has my highest recommendation!

I have read a lot of clutter books over the years and this one is clearly the best. The author does not start out with the typical "get 4 boxes for keep, charity, trash, recycle..." He also does not talk about plastic containers, except to promote the concept that once you declutter, you won't need them; plastic containers are just expensive trash cans. Rather he delves into the mental/emotional aspects of clutter. He enables the reader to view clutter as ...well... clutter. I found my perspective change from seeing an item I might need to keep, to seeing an item I realized was clutter and I could easily toss. After reading the first few chapters, I was able to fill an entire roll out container in a couple days. I am eager to do more and work 30-45 minutes each day on decluttering with the goal of filling the roll out container each week. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in decluttering. And to avoid adding more clutter, I got this book at the library.

If you are just going to start clutterBusting - this is the first book you should read. If you are clutterbusting challenged, like I found myself, this is the next book you should read. I saw myself in quite a few chapters, and felt as if the author was there with me, talking me through it all. An unexpected gift in reading the book, aside from my personally directed benefits, it helped increase my benevolence toward others that I know are clutterers. This book helped me increase my understanding of myself on many levels.

Keep in mind when purchasing - this isn't really about organizing yourself. It's about freeing yourself.

Definitely worth reading. You can pass it along when you are done if you are concerned about the clutter!

I really wanted to like this book. So many of the positive reviews had been very positive, that I really expected it to be better than The Clutter Cure: Three Steps to Letting Go of Stuff, Organizing Your Space, & Creating the Home of Your Dreams which I reviewed earlier this year.
First the good things. Palmer encourages us to use the same neuro-psychological drives that led us to acquire stuff in the first place to dispose of it: just as we can become an "impulse buyer", Palmer wants us to be an "impulse declutterer", telling us to always (yes, always) trust our immediate response to the question "is this clutter?" and not to allow more measured, rational consideration to over-rule our first decision. In doing this, he recognizes that those of us who act on impulse in one area of our lives should use their powerful drive to counter the problems it causes. This may work with impulse-driven people, but less with others.
Here are a couple of his tips: take things out of the cluttered room and sort them elsewhere; things stored under your bed are clutter - depend on it.
Palmer is excellent at analyzing the marketing ploys used by companies and their advertising people to prey on the human vulnerabilities that are emphasized in our culture (p 180).
And here is one of many gems scattered throughout the book: "If things actually made a big difference in your life, you wouldn't need very much. You'd buy something and feel great for a very long time. When you are honest with yourself, you realize you never get a lasting feeling from any item" (p 21).
I found Palmer's anecdotes concocted in a clumsy way and to be forced and unbelievable. This is particularly so when he applies his own superficial psychoanalysis to a client. For example "We are initially unaware of our clutter. My client had suppressed her feelings about her mom. But they showed up in other ways ..." (p 130).
Palmer also gives us before and after accounts that stretch our credibility and paint him as a miracle worker. An example from pages 141 and 143 is the woman with the cluttered e-mail inbox. "She looked frail and ill. ... She said, `I'd feel guilty deleting these.' I said, `It's good that you recognize this. Guilt is clutter. It doesn't propel you to action ... she looked awake and strong. She deleted the folders." Another example from page 150: "He came alive! He went from pale and sullen to vital and passionate." A third example from page 160: "With her defense mechanism disabled, the inner clutter started to release. She began to cry big sobs into a towel. It was quickly soaked [really?] ... My client told me she had never said this before. It felt like she had shed her skin. She looked reborn ..." We'd all like to be awake and strong vital and passionate and Palmer wants us to believe the transformation is easy and immediate under his guidance. If you are a sucker for this line of patter, you really need to deal with your naiveté; I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Thorndike Press Large Print Nonfiction Series)'; it will do far more to empower you than Brooks Palmer or any other self-help book.
If you find `affirmations' to be infantile wishful thinking, you will be irritated by this book: "... you start to live more spontaneously, and your natural joy comes through. [Do we ALL have this much "natural joy"?] Now is the time to be self-reliant. Now is the time to let go".
His encouragement is `over the top'. On page 146 he advises people cleaning up their computer files to "Stop and walk away from your computer. Stretch. Get another drink of water. You're doing great..." How does he know you are doing great? This stuff is just self-help nonsense.
Self-centredness and unbalanced individualism runs through the book. On page 4 " ... people love to be distracted by your life. It allows them to avoid taking care of their own. Only what you feel is important. You are the expert on your life ..." This is not the sort of advice that will support a genuinely happy marriage, where give and take, generosity, compromise and consideration for others is practised regularly.
This book is a strong contrast to The Clutter Cure; there is almost no overlap between the two. Palmer focuses on people who are burdened by pathological cluttering and whose lives are a mess for a range of reasons. It promises far more than it can deliver, and this is how it earns the 5-star reviews here. The book has clearly inspired some readers, but we need to get a report from them one year or two years on to hear from them how the clutter is going and whether the book lived up to its promise. The Clutter Cure is for people who are practical, who are not suffering psychological crises and just want to improve their homes, room by room, to enjoy their space without resorting to amateur psychoanalysis.

Most of my friends come over to my house and mention that it's always so neat. Everything has its place. Well, they're right. But according to Brooks Palmer, before I read this book, I had lots of clutter.

Let me explain -- most clutter books (and clutter "experts" and "organizers") would absolutely use my home as an "AFTER" picture. But this book doesn't suggest that clutter is stuff that isn't thrown into a Container Store box and put into a closet with little spaces for shoes, and different ones for batteries.

Clutter, according to veteran clutter buster Palmer, is anything that you don't love. Anything that doesn't serve you.

Yikes.

So that's, like, 70% of what was in my house. It was well arranged, nicely spaced -- crap -- that I kept around because I thought that if I didn't have it, the room/wall/bookshelf/desk would "look empty."

After reading his exercises, ideas about clutter and its root causes, and especially his captivating and engaging STORIES of many different kinds of clutter (and reasons for holding onto it)...I was able to ask myself one question of everything in my house, "Do I love this?" If I didn't, I quickly let it go.

It took maybe two days to get a house in which EVERYTHING is something I love and want. As a result, I can think more clearly...and, this is the best part...being in each room is an absolute delight.

Get this book, read it, and do it. You don't have to think you have a clutter problem to have a clutter problem...and you don't have to take forever to clear things out so new ideas, fresh energy, surging creativity and new people can come into your life!

I really liked this book because it changed my way of thinking. I'm a pretty organized person and don't think of myself as someone who collects much clutter. However a friend recommended the book and I decided to check it out.

What I like the most about the book is the philosophy that clutter - even if it doesn't look messy - can have negative effects. For example, he describes how many people will hold onto an item that they don't use because they paid a lot of moeny for it. He makes the point that keeping around makes you feel worse. It's a constant reminder of the money you wasted. Much easier to get rid of it and forget about it.

The book started me thinking - I'll bet that 80%+ of the items that I own haven't been used in a year. If I think about every individual item that's on a shelf, in a drawer, closet or cabinet, under the bed, in the garage, etc, the vast majority are things that I haven't used in a long time or that I'm keeping "just in case". Having all these extra items can create stress and make it harder to develop new ideas and new pursuits - or just make room for any new items that I actually need.

In the way that "Getting Things Done" by David Allen made me re-think how I organize my thoughts and to-do lists, Brooks Palmer's book made me re-think everything I own.

The goal of this book is to reconnect people with the true purpose of things.
Here's a quote from the book:
-- "Things are functional. Their job is to make your life easier or to increase your level of fun. Things become clutter when they no longer achieve either of these results."

It doesn't matter if these things are worn out or brand new. If they're no longer useful to you, then they're taking up precious physical and psychological space.
Instead of adding to your life, clutter ends up subtracting from it.
And it also contributes to why people don't enjoy their homes more, why they feel overwhelmed, why they can't get motivated and why they can't get organized.

The author explains that things are purchased from a place of hope...the hope being that this object will give meaning to your life, but it doesn't work. It never feels like enough and you end up needing more and more to get that high back.
To reverse this belief, he begins by creating a high level of discomfort from having too much stuff in your life...to the point where you can't wait to relieve yourself of this burden.
He explains how clutter creates friction between couples and how clutter keeps you stuck living in the past.
He also explains how advertising strongly influences us to purchase things we don't need.

Clutter competes for your attention and people try to handle this stress by putting it away in storage (the out of sight, out of mind mentality)...but he explains that it's not truly out of mind because, in the back of your mind, you still know the stuff is there...waiting to be dealt with.
The author compares stored away clutter to someone baking lasagna in the kitchen. Even though you're in the other room and can't see it, you can still smell it. It's presence still lingers, making it's presence known to you.

Another way people deal with clutter is by buying organizers...which the author calls "attractive trash cans". It's an attractive way to delude yourself into thinking you've handled the clutter, but really, you're just delaying getting rid of it.

So then, what's the wisest way to handle clutter? The author offers you the tools to show you how...in a gentle, but also firm way. He shares examples of people who've struggled to get rid of clutter and who came out of that experience feeling much lighter. He tells you how he addressed their fears of letting go without caving into those fears.

At the end of each chapter, there's a list of questions he wants you to ask yourself as well as exercises to follow...all designed to help you overcome your fears and symbolically start pulling those weeds from your garden.
In the end, you'll no longer be turning your home into a warehouse or a graveyard for memories.

I've read other books on clutter removal and this is the best by far. It's surprisingly profound for a book about stuff...though it can get a little hokey like when he claims some people experienced immediate miracles after decluttering.
But if you can get past that, I do agree that when you go "clutter busting", it's like pulling back the layers of stuff and getting down to the real you buried underneath.
From personal experience, getting rid of clutter has brought more clarity and insight into my life as well as renewed my energy.
It's such a freeing feeling when you learn to let go of things...because then you learn to let go in other areas as well.

Good marketing can make or break a book, and this book has been well primed by the media. However, I believe that what put Clutter Busting in the top ten NCReview Bookseller List is that it strikes a chord with so many people. How many of us still have too much stuff? How many of us feel bogged down, overwhelmed, or burned out from the things we have to clean, organize, or take care of in some fashion? Or maybe we're still hanging on to old habits or patterns we'd rather be done with? How many of us don't know how to take the first step toward letting go, or need a little motivation?

Author Brooks Palmer is clearly a pro-active, take-charge, get-it-done-now kind of guy--just the right qualities necessary for getting things done. Although always kind and sometimes humorous, he is frank and direct with this clients, defining clutter as "anything that no longer serves us" and asking them item by item: "Do you need this or can you let it go?" He is asking both literally and psycho-spiritually, of course. As the client's stories, objections, and fears arise in the process of letting go of "stuff," he helps them (and we readers) to release unhealthy emotional attachments, clearing the way for new clarity and peace of mind. This is how clearing out clutter becomes a sacred and self-honoring act--with almost instant gratification and release.

This is a lively and practical book loaded with true-life stories, anecdotes, exercises, and inspiration. Even if you don't need a dose of clutter busting, it's worth reading through, if only to reconnect with the wellspring of possibility that opens up for each of us when we remember to let go.

Review by Julie Clayton

It's rather embarrassing to admit to being a clutter book (or is that "anti-clutter book"?) maven, because we all know what that means. Oh, well. Although I suspect that for me this book isn't the last word on the topic, it is interesting and offers some fresh takes on a popular topic.

The first distinction of this book from others on the subject is its organization around ideas about clutter rather than around specific spaces or techniques. Where in other books chapter titles might be something prosaic such as "Kitchen" or "Having a Garage Sale", some chapter titles from this book are

* We Assume False Identities in Clutter
* Clutter Represents Fear of Change
* Clutter as Punishment
* Using Your Discriminating Tools

Part of the "busting" in this book is simply identifying clutter, as in: "Busted! That's clutter!" The ideas headlined in each chapter are developed to some extent and there are a number of specific exercises. But much of the book is given to war stories from the writer's instructive, sobering, and ultimately inspiring reports from the difficult field of helping people de-clutter.

There are two further aspects that separate this book from others in the genre. First, the word "compassion" comes up: a word not often associated with handling messes. The author's sincerity about it comes across as he admits struggling to hold onto it at times. Take home lesson: compassion for ourselves is crucial if we are to succeed. This is different from the direct or implicit shaming of some clutter writers and a whole world apart from books that deny the reality of the raw emotion of sorting out heaps of stuff.

The second aspect is that the stories demonstrate the speed with which things can be sorted and disposed of. Where some other writers say, "Don't get impatient with yourself; this is going to take a really long time," this guy moves in with a supply of trash bags for recycling and donating -- and things get done. Ever looked at a closet and thought, however briefly, "This could sure get done in a hurry"? Apparently, it can. Whether his clients later regret what they've let go isn't something he takes up. But the relief that would come from getting through something quickly surely appeals to me.

I tend to want to see a big picture and that eludes me here. However, four closets and a whole storage room in my house testify to the fact that the big picture approach hasn't been completely successful for me. I'm intrigued and motivated by a strategy that is more about process than about tasks (although, as mentioned above, the book has plenty of exercises). And I've already had some success with it.