78 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Clutter and Diet...comparing the two, January 1, 2009
Lorie Marrero is no stranger to clutter. I know this because her blogs and website have helped me sort through four storage units (saving me hundreds of dollars each month!) and most of my condo. Comparing the clutter of our lives with diet makes a lot of sense. Diet...we don't gain weight overnight and we can't lose it overnight. Same goes for clutter. All we need is a plan. Lorie provides us a plan to release this clutter.
There are many excellent books on Clutter and organization. This is one of them. Lorie helps you understand how the clutter is aquired and how to get it out of your life forever. It's not an easy task but this book helps you each step of the way.
The book is broken down in to four main sections, Getting Motivated, Clutter Prevention, Clutter Reduction, and Maintenance. Prevention helped me as much as the actual decluttering sessions. I learned to see "what enough looks like" - sounds simple but I did not know. So my "homes" for my items were overflowing. I am now learning what enough looks like.
The final section in the book breaks it down to suggestions on a room by room basis. She suggest products to help you along the way but you don't need to buy anything (other than the book) to implement Lorie's system.
This book is very easy to read and well organized.
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48 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best book on decluttering your entire life., February 28, 2009
This review is from: The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life (Paperback)
Lorie Marrero makes the cogent point that a cluttered life is a reflection of a cluttered mind. Using the metaphor of a food diet for the process she recommends to organize your life is inspired since the two have much in common---eating junk food is the nutritional equivalent of a home cluttered with junk.
First, I really liked the graphic design of this book. It's paperback format is oversized and the pages have a spacious, inviting feel. The lines are spaced with extra leading so large sections of copy don't feel ponderous and overwhelming. Generous amounts of white space enhance the approachability of this 260 page book. In short, it's an easy read.
Another intelligent element of this book is the author's knowledge that any form of habit-breaking program needs outside support in order to succeed. Unless there are others providing some oversight to our efforts, it's human nature to back-slide. She accurately points out that 95% of people will likely achieve a goal if they have specific accountability with a person to whom they are committed (think Alcoholics Anonymous here). A website www.clutterdiet.com provides support and tools, including a free downloadabale companion workbook, to help keep your decluttering efforts on the straight and narrow.
Marrero spends a considerable portion of the book devoted to the psychological aspects of cluttering. Procrastination is, she says, the major reason why people clutter. Procrastination robs you of your energy (it's called the karm of incompletions). Specific exercises are provided to overcome the various mental barriers to leading an organized life.
Besides the obvious clutter---Beanie Baby collections, stacks of magazines, clothes you haven't fit in since college, that junky crap that you get for free---Marrero addresses other forms of "clutter" in our lives. Time clutter is a subject that could (and has) been the subject of a book all on its own. The author provides a 12-Step Program called Overdoers Anonymous to tackle the time clutter problem.
There's also the exponentially increasing problem of modern life she calls Communication Clutter---emails, junk mail, spam, telemarketers, and all that other inconsequential and unimportant online and telecommunications "stuff" that eats away at the time we have here on earth.
The back of the book includes room by room "recipes" with the "ingredients" for successful decluttering. There's a lot of meat here (to use the author's food analogies) and also requires the most actual physical work. So it's not an easy section to get through.
There's a lot of take-away in this book that more than justifies its price. I've read two other highly recommended books about getting rid of clutter in your life and learned a lot. But this is the best book on the subject by far, in my opinion. Start here before you look anywhere else.
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great resource, good read, really helpful., February 27, 2009
This review is from: The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life (Paperback)
I've read several "clean up the clutter" guides recently, including "It's All Too Much" by Peter Walsh, and this book stacks up well against all the recent titles. I really liked Lorie Marrero's "hook"--that organizing your home is a lot like learning to eat well--because it takes into account both the short-term and long-term aspects of combating clutter. Anyone who's interested in buying a book like this is probably facing a fairly serious situation and needs immediate help, but needs a longer-term framework or philosophical approach too in order to stay uncluttered. Marrero's diet analogy works on both counts: you can go on a "clutter diet" to make an immediate, noticeable impact, but then you maintain your new "physique" (your less-cluttered home) through consistently-applied new behaviors. In short, I really liked the book, I liked the writing and tone (it read as if the author was walking through my house with me, giving suggestions and moral support), I liked the helpful format, and I definitely recommend this book to anyone seeking help in getting their stuff under control.
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