Customer Reviews

Enough Already!: Clearing Mental Clutter to Become the Best You

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had not read Peter Walsh's previous books, and honestly didn't realize that he was the host of TLC's "Clean Sweep" show. I've seen the show a few times before, and while my house and life are nowhere like the ones on the show, there is plenty of clutter I'd like to clear away (in both).

The book is a very easy read. I finished a cursory read in under an hour. That being said, I went back to fill out the numerous quizzes and questionnaires when I had more time to think about them. I considered them very valuable (instead of just a way to fill pages). For instance, in the Work section, he has quizzes like "Is your work life cluttered?" and activities like "Define your vision for your career" and "Quick Desk Purge." Unfortunately, as a consequence of all the clutter in our lives, we never quite get around to asking ourselves these questions or giving ourselves permission to take control...having it in front of me helped.

Because the author's background is actually in educational psychology (instead of just show business), he seems to understand how to make the information accessible to the reader. I also really appreciated that he didn't beat us over the head with the fact that he has a TV show (some books out there by TV personalities are so weak and really just marketing ploys). He does use letters he has received from listeners/fans/viewers to compliment the points he is making.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who feels overwhelmed with life at times. The books covers all possible parts of "life" like relationships, work, and health, so if you've got one or more area that is cluttered, it could really help. Based upon this book, I will also be seeking out his previous books he has written, to see how they may be useful.

Here's a breakdown of the chapters:
Introduction
The challenge
Look to yourself first
What does it take to make changes in your life?
Choice and change
1. Relationships
You can't make love in a pigsty
Imagine the relationship you want
Clear the clutter of unreal expectations
Watch out for obstacles
Declutter your relationship
And then there's the stuff...
2. Work
To-dos...or not to-dos? That is the question.
Imagine the career you want
Clear the clutter of unreal expectations
Watch out for obstacles
Declutter your career
And then there's the stuff...
3. Family
Learning to juggle
Imagine the family life you want
Clear the clutter of unreal expectations
Watch out for obstacles
Declutter your family
And then there's the stuff...
4. Money
Live for today and tomorrow
Imagine the financial life you want
Clear the clutter of unreal expectations
Watch out for obstacles
Declutter your finances
And then there's the stuff...
5. Health
The cluttered body
Imagine the body you want
Clear the clutter of unreal expectations
Watch out for obstacles
Declutter your health
And then there's the stuff...
6. Our Sense of Well-Being
What's so difficult about peace, love, and understanding?
Imagine the inner life you want
Clear the clutter of unreal expectations
Watch out for obstacles
Declutter your internal life

[note: I received this book prior to its release through Amazon Vine. The book and its cover appeared to be the final copy, so I do not anticipate much will change before the release.]

This book was mainly about mental clutter. It's the first book by Peter Walsh that I've read and it got me clearing out some of the physical clutter that I've been avoiding for at least 10 years. Seven years ago when I moved to the house I live in now, I just moved the clutter from the old house to the new one. Part of the reason was that we sold the old house sooner than we expected and I didn't have a lot of time to declutter, but there was also the mind clutter thing that just froze me whenever I thought about it. I work for a company on the other side of the country and have a home office, so not only do I have personal clutter, but I have work clutter as well.

I love reading books and articles on organization and it's big fun to order them on Amazon and then have an impressive pile of books to read. It puts off the process of actually doing anything because after you've received all the books, you have to decide which one to read first. Then, it takes time to actually read the book. Then you have to process in your mind what you've read and decide whether the author is another hack or if the advice is really doable. Or worth your while. (Usually it isn't and by then you've found something infinitely more fun to do). The next thing is to get motivated enough to actually go into the room and start to physically move, like opening a file folder full of outdated junk and deciding to make a pile of it to be shredded. Then, of course, the shredder can't handle two hours worth of constant shredding and burns out and you have to buy a new shredder. But you have to do a lot of research to know what shredder to buy, one that's going to last and can handle three hours or more of shredding once every 10 years and maybe 2-1/2 minutes worth every so often in between. (You procrastinators know what I'm talking about). So all the books I bought on organization usually fizzled somewhere between "Where do I start?" and "Why isn't this shredder making a shredding sound and what's that big clump of half shredded paper stuck to the roller?". This book was different. Peter Walsh isn't preachy and his ideas are all down to earth and not impossible for your average slacker to initiate.

Clearing clutter is more than a physical problem and this book convinced me of that. But it wasn't a big, long psychological dissertation on the subject. It was short, common sense, and to the point. It was also entertaining to read and not too long on any one point. It wasn't preachy (Don't you just hate preachy books?) and it got me moving. I guess I might have heard of Peter Walsh before, like from a Tivo'd Oprah show, but didn't really know him by name and hadn't read any of his other books. But now, I'm a believer. Anyone who can get me to actually go beyond good intentions to organize even a small amount of my office has to be a genius. (I'm not an easy person to motivate to clear out things that are perfectly well hidden in a drawer). I even ended up buying another one of his books, Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?: An Easy Plan for Losing Weight and Living More (Don't you just love that title?) that I thought might give me a little more detail and keep the motivation going. So far it looks like a keeper.

So two big thumbs up for this book and a big thanks to Peter Walsh for making my home office a less stressful and more fun place to spend time.

In "Enough Already," organizing expert Peter Walsh takes de-cluttering principles and applies them to many areas of life: relationships, work, family, money, health, and our sense of well-being.

I embraced the idea promised by the subtitle, "Clearing Mental Clutter to Become the Best You," but I was disappointed that Walsh separated mental and physical decluttering so thoroughly. He writes, "Getting rid of the physical clutter is, as they say, another story, and it's one I've already told in my book 'It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff'." So to get more than the barebones basics about dealing with physical clutter, you'll need to buy his other book. In my estimation, it would have been more effective to write a really great book about de-cluttering the physical environment, and include a solid, original chapter on the mental environment, rather than writing an entire book about mental de-cluttering, applying the same principles over and over to different aspects of life.

The chapters are presented in a set formula, which scores points for consistency but eventually becomes tiresome. The common elements are: "Imagine the life you want," "Clear the clutter of unreal expectations," "Watch out for Obstacles," "Declutter Your (family/money/health)," "And then there's the stuff..."

Walsh seems to believe that if you have physical clutter problems you'll have similar issues in all major areas of your life. This may be true of extreme hoarders, but I don't believe that is true for most functional people.

In the end, Walsh's advice about organizing and life comes across as valid, but broad and general, spread too thinly across such a wide range of topics.

Another book in this realm that I highly recommend is Marilyn Paul's "It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys: The Seven-Step Path to Becoming Truly Organized."

Imagine you're browsing the bookstore in the terminal before boarding a flight of several hours duration. You spot Peter Walsh's "Enough Already", with its promise of "clearing mental clutter to become the best you". Sure, why not, you reason.

Your flight is sitting on the tarmac, waiting for takeoff and you get to page 7 where you are informed that you should have purchased, read and implemented the author's other book BEFORE reading this one. "But I've written a whole other book about [cleaning your home], so instead of rehashing it here, let's just say that before this book can help you, you must already have a (relatively) clutter-free and organized home".

Is there any hint of this on the covers or flaps? Of course not.

Do I have to tell you that Walsh then refers to his earlier book throughout this one?

Walsh claims that he will "help" you in six key areas of your life: family, relationships, work, health, money and spirituality. Uh huh.

Walsh opens his first chapter, "Relationships", with the charming headline "You can't make love in a pigsty". Wanna bet? Anyway, that turns out not to be a reference to his book on organizing your household, but rather to your mind as a pigsty. To illustrate his point, Walsh describes a woman who sounds like a character sketch from a made-for-television drama. Utterly unbelievable. High power fashion executive, yada, yada.

He offers a "quiz" to determine if your relationship is cluttered. Ten simplistic questions is all it takes. But it doesn't matter what you answer because Walsh has already determined that your relationship is troubled. "Some relationships do and should end. You're committed enough to be reading this book, which means you're willing to put in the work your relationship needs."

Assumptions like this - and just plain awful character sketches - litter this book.

The advice given is banal and not at all different than what you'd find in an advice for the lovelorn column - in a magazine directed to teen girls. "Make sure your dress is appropriate for your office by looking to someone whose position and performance you admire".

For me, this book has no redeeming virtues.

Jerry

I'm a big fan of Peter Walsh's clutter book It's All Too Much, and so I was really looking forward to this book. Peter's easygoing and energetic style of writing is fun to read and worked perfectly in It's All Too Much.

Unfortunately, I'm coming at this book from the perspective of a self-improvement junkie. I have read at least one improving book a week for the last two years, and I work hard to implement the changes I want to make. So this book, which has topical, common-sense advice on a number of broad topics such as family, work, money, and health, didn't hold much new info for me.

In each section, Walsh has some quizzes and activity questions to get you thinking about this area of your life. Then, he has short essays on a number of related topics to get you revved up about making some change.

The problem is, he is trying to cover so much information that none of it really gets the attention it deserves, and the info Walsh chooses to cover is so basic (like suggesting we write things in a calendar as soon as we make an appointment, or file paperwork as soon as we finish an activity) that it's really only useful if you really haven't got the basics covered yet.

If you are just waking up in your life and want some basic help in figuring out what to focus on, and in learning some basic philosophies and steps to take, then this might be a good choice for you. Just don't stop here. Use this book to help you figure out what subjects to tackle next, once you've got the basics down.

I personally didn't find any new gems in here, not because it isn't a solid book, but because I've read in-depth books devoted to specific topics that are covered in this book. No need to read a synopsis of some good ideas in this book when I've read multiple books on the same topic.

In this book, Peter Walsh takes his concept of "if it doesn't fit your vision of your life, it has to go" for decluttering homes to the rest of one's life. It's all right as far as self-help books go, but I think he took it a little far. He uses a lot of emails sent from clients with life problems but he doesn't say exactly how he helped them. He doesn't have a family of his own, but comments freely on how we should run our own. I found most of the chapters to have a lot of fluff in the middle, but some good tips at the ends. His suggestions for life are kind of wishy-washy, like "be there for your kids, but give them their space" but then he won't give a definite picture of what that looks like. Basically, his advice for decluttering and organizing a home is fantastic, but I think he was stretching a bit to write this book.

Fuzzy Wuzzy's Summary:
*** Somewhat recommended, with reservations and only lukewarm fuzzies.

As a frequent reader of all kinds of "be a better person/lover/artist/photographer/gardener/techie/etc" self-help books, this was a decent not-too-deep read that moved quickly from chapter to chapter. I have never seen the author's television show, "Clean Sweep", on the TLC channel, and even though the book flap says that he is a regular guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show, I have never seen him anywhere on television. So my first introduction to Peter Walsh was through this book.

Peter's persona that is projected by how this book is written and worded strikes me as a "tough love" approach to self-improvement. He hits the reader with a constant barrage of direct no-nonsense questions in this book worded like "Do you really need to buy this?" or "Do you really need to do that?", and it is certainly an effective way to force people to think about the contradictions and ironies in their daily life routines. He reminds me of a strict overbearing father who sets you on a stool and tries to talk some sense into you, "Do you really want your life to be this messed up?" I can arbitrarily flip to a page in any of the chapters and get an onslaught of questions.

For example, in the "Relationships" chapter, one of the many questions that he poses to the reader is: "Do you act as though your free time is more precious than your partner's?" In the "Work" chapter, he asks: "How can you manage (people) if you don't clearly communicate what is expected of them?" In the "Family" chapter, he asks: "Does he (your child) prefer his space to be cluttered or organized?" In the "Money" chapter, he asks: "How much of your income do you need to survive?" In the "Health" chapter, he asks: "Why is change so hard?" In the "Our Sense of Well-Being" chapter, he asks questions like: "Do you seek reason in your life?"

My rough guess is that if you were to spread all of the questions presented in this book evenly out across every page, there would be at least 4 or 5 questions presented on every page. As thought-provoking as these questions are, and as much as they cause the reader to stop, introspect, and ponder "Hmmm", there are far fewer answers offered by the author for all of his questions he asks the reader to consider. While Peter's background is in removing physical clutter from peoples' homes and what he describes as being an "organizational consultant", and while I understand that he is not formally trained as a psychiatrist, I get the impression that he tries to cover way too much "life coach" territory in this book. And in all of the chapters, he invariably ties many of life's problems back to physical clutter.

Most of the chapters have a "And then there's the stuff..." section where the "stuff" clutter is discussed both literally and figuratively. And one gets the impression that Peter thinks many of life's problems trace back to the physical clutter in peoples' lives. But this should be no surprise as the very start of his book says "I don't believe you can make progress in any area of your life if your home is a mess." and he makes the prerequisite that "before this book can help you, you must already have a (relatively) clutter-free and organized home." While this is true for the really messy (and really messed up) outliers of the population, I personally know people who are fastidiously clean and neat with loads of mental clutter, and I know people who have messy homes and offices living happy content lives.

This was only a mildly thought-provoking book for me. Throughout every chapter, I had this nagging question that kept popping up in my mind of: Does all mental clutter really lead back to physical clutter? The perfect target audience for this book is the most extreme cases of physical clutter in homes where you have to tiptoe through the living room to avoid stepping on an object and the garage is so packed with clutter, junk, unused purchases, and excessive consumerism that you can barely walk around inside the garage much less park a car in it. If you have serious mental clutter issues, this book presents lots of questions but not enough answers and expert advice to solve your woes.

Peter Walsh has made a career out of helping people clear clutter from their houses. He tells sad stories of people who have rooms that are filled from floor to ceiling, and from wall to wall, with stuff. Clearing these rooms out can change a person's life.

As George Carlin pointed out in one of his monologues (Brain Droppings has the routine), our attachment to "stuff" is complicated. We all have our stuff, and we want more. Just like overeating, over-buying and over-saving can be big problems not easily solved by just hiring someone to come in and haul stuff away. The problem can be deeper than that.

The problem of clutter can be broader as well. In Enough Already, Walsh goes beyond just the clutter of stuff in our houses to talk about the clutter in our lives and the clutter in our brains. Fighting clutter can free us from a lot of the problems that bother us.

Early on in the book, I thought that approach was too gimmicky. But it works. Walsh gives good ideas on how to simplify our lives -- our approach to living -- and how to make those changes permanent.

Much better book than I expected.

I wasn't familiar with Peter Walsh or his work before ordering this book, but found the idea of a book that dealt with mental clutter to be appealing since I tend to carry around many worries inside my head.

Overall, I found this book mildly helpful and Walsh gives various tips about how to clean up your life in the areas of personal relationships, health, financial matters, etc. However, as other reviewers have noted, he tends to cover so much ground that the coverage remains largely superficial. There were a few useful exercises, but focusing on just one or two key areas would have allowed Walsh to go into more depth and actually provide information that would have been beneficial.

The chapters about relationships and health also rubbed me the wrong way. As another reviewer noted, it seems like Walsh believes that all relationships are in trouble, and it's almost as if he advocates leaving any relationships that aren't perfect. In the health chapter, he explains his view that anyone who has difficulties managing their weight needs to clear out their mental clutter first. While I agree that mental issues certainly affect weight issues, he doesn't really offer advice beyond generalities and platitudes.

Overall, I would give this book 3 1/2 stars. While it is motivational in places, it just doesn't offer enough concrete strategies to make it worthwhile in my mind.

Enough Already is a very interesting and inspiring read. It's full of work-on-yourself exercises as well, and if this kind of journal-oriented (using the term loosely) works for you, I'd call it a five-star book. Even if it doesn't, it's nice therapeutic reading.

I'm too disorganized to have time to do exercises and think about my not-so-deep, dark past. This is a psychologist-in-a-book, and while it's great fun (I killed a lot of time in its pages), it's not the kind of thing that helps me actually get real-world things in order and finished.

As in most books meant to help the disorganized (usually ADD/creative) personality get their stuff together (after sorting it neatly), it's by an author who doesn't have the problem. For me (not necessarily for most others) this means I'm not really being understood, just getting a pep talk and some great tips.

There's only one book on clutter that really works for me. It's called Outwitting Clutter: 101 Ingenious Space-Saving Tips and Ideas to Make Any House or Apartment More Livable and the author is a reformed clutter. It's fabulous, especially if you want to do rather than analyze.