The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life (Kindle Edition)

by Lorie Marrero (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Applying just an ounce of the advice in this practical guide saves you enough time and money to pay for itself. You will learn:

• The actual scientific law of nature that helps you get organized
• The cure for procrastination
• Ten types of “High Calorie Clutter” to avoid
• Where to start and how to tackle your projects
• How to successfully add new habits into your life

Certified Professional Organizer® Lorie Marrero is the creator of ClutterDiet.com, an innovative program allowing anyone to get expert help at an affordable price. Her organizing products are sold online and in stores nationwide. Lorie has been a spokesperson for Brother label makers and FedEx Office, and she is a sought-after expert for national media such as CNBC, Family Circle, WGN News and Woman’s Day.

About the Author

Certified Professional Organizer Lorie Marrero is the creator of ClutterDiet.com, an innovative program allowing anyone to get expert help at an affordable price. Her organizing products are sold online and in stores nationwide. Lorie has been a spokesperson for Brother label makers and FedEx Office, and she is a sought-after expert for national media such as CNBC, Family Circle, WGN News and Woman's Day.

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 600 KB
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Reason Press (December 24, 2008)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B001OC6SAY
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #15,910 in Kindle Store (See Bestsellers in Kindle Store)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #6 in	Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Advice & How-to > How-to & Home Improvements > Cleaning, Caretaking & Relocating
  #83 in	Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Lifestyle & Home > Home & Garden

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clutter and Diet...comparing the two, January 1, 2009

By	C. R. Brown "C. R. Brown" (CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book on decluttering your entire life., February 28, 2009

By	Eric Wentworth "Eric Charles Wentworth" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Clutter Diet - slimming down your household's waste, March 14, 2009

By	H. Perkins "Language Lover" (Boston, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life (Paperback)

The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life
With Lori's metaphor of dieting, you could say this book is all about waste reduction for your house, if you'll pardon the pun. Her different take on an old topic gives it a freshness that helps to distinguish it from the crowd of other organizing books out there.
And just like the other type of dieting, Lori takes us through the key steps we need to take to get started - and to stay on track - to reduce the clutter in our lives, from finding the motivation, to getting the education we need on how to do it, to knowing where and how to find the support we need to keep it all going.
The book has lots of simple but practical tips and techniques (food shopping? Get the family to write things down once they need to be replaced and only buy what's on your grocery list), together with a handy 'Clutter Fitness Exercise' at the end of each chapter to reinforce what we've learned.
She also helps us strip the fat away from less tangible modern-day clutter that tends to accumulate in the form of junk mail, email spam and the results of poor time management. (Check out the excellent tip on using the Rules engine in Outlook).
The final section of the book nicely reinforces the dieting metaphor with a selection of 'recipes' that are full of ideas on organizing and keeping control of specific rooms and important spaces in your house, whether it's your home office or your utility room.
A pleasant layout and (of course) uncluttered design make this book easy to use and enjoyable to read. One small area for improvement: It might have been a good idea to include an Index, especially given the book's topic.