Keeping Life Simple: 7 Guiding Principles, 500 Tips & Ideas (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[Levine's] snippets of advice are not only simple in construct, but pocket-size, so they're easy to dip into." -- Arizona Daily Star

Product Description

The book's seven guiding principles help the reader assess what's really satisfying and then offers hundreds of pertinent ideas about how to create a lifestyle that is both more rewarding and less complicated.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 154 pages
• Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC; Later Printing edition (January 7, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0882669435
• ISBN-13: 978-0882669434
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 4.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,789,124 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars 500 things you can do . . ., June 27, 2004

By	Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is a collection of bits of advice about life and how to live it. It is intended for people who have come to the conclusion that there is more to life than consumption. The book begins with seven guiding principles:
1. Relax your standards.
2. Free yourself of stereotypical roles.
3. Take time to figure out what you find most satisfying.
4. Create time for the things you care about.
5. Learn to enjoy what's in front of you.
6. Learn to be flexible.
7. Prioritize.
After laying out these principles, Levine recommends keeping an activity log for a week At the end of the week, she asks readers to analyze their activities during the week to see how closely they are aligned with the principles. She wants readers to especially focus on how satisfied each activity made them feel, and also whether each activity was an efficient use of time. The remainder of the book consists of tips for simplifying or getting more satisfaction out of life, organized by topics like rest and relaxation, taking care of yourself, managing money, and home repairs and maintenance.

After reading the introduction to the book, I had high hopes for finding some useful ideas or encouragement for living a simple life. Unfortunately, the tips section of the book doesn't quite live up to the promises. Quite a number of the tips are general and aren't exactly focused on living simply, like the suggestion to occasionally run your dish strainer through your dish washer "to get it really clean." It's hard to see the connection between the simplicity philosophy and other tips like "learn a foreign language in your car." Others seem to be downright inconsistent with simplicity like "take a bubble bath with votive candles and buy a copy of Chant." The idea behind the book itself is intriguing, but it would have been much better to either describe the credible simplicity tips in greater detail or come up with a lot more credible simplicity tips and eliminate the fluff.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A wealth of information on frugality, July 21, 1998

By	Uwe Hauck (Bonn, Germany) - See all my reviews

Great book. I recommend it to anyone already into frugality. Not so good as a starter with too much emphasize on actions and a little bit of a lack of background stuff. But in connection with a more philosophical book on frugality for sure a very good choice

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good ideas but kind of Fluffy, March 8, 2009

By	Carter Hargrave (Tulsa, OK USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Keeping Life Simple: 300 Tips & Ideas (Paperback)

A good first book into very basic simplicity. Not a real how to by any stretch. Here are some ideas that helped and continue to help me on my simplicity search.
First I have been working diligently on de cluttering my personal and business life. I have read so many simplifying and de-cluttering and efficiency books I almost have a clutter problem with all the books on the subject. (Cured that recently too with the Kindle 2.)
I run three business. One brick and morter and two online. I was getting over four hundred emails a day and was drowning in mail and spam. So I utilized ideas / suggestions from several sources to cure my problems. From the Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss we started using detailed faq's lists on our websites and an auto-responder that answered many questions so we would no longer have to reply to as many emails. For the ones we do answer the questions are predictable and we saved the answers as email drafts that way we just cut and paste and all done.
For the Spam we ran our eight email accounts into one google mail as they have the best spam filters and you can reply from the email address to which the mail was sent so they dont know that anything is happening. And suggestions from the life hacker Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better by Gina Tripani has some interesting ideas for sure.
Keeping your inbox empty we use suggestions from Stress Less and Zen to Done by Leo Babauta and you would not believe how much better you feel when things are under control. But it is you who must Work the system or you will be overwhelmed again.
A much more detailed program is used in Getting Things Done David Allen book, but the above is kind of the simplified version that I currently prefer.
And for just getting rid of all the clutter in your life any of the books from Peter Walsh, How to Organize (Just About) Everything, and Enough Already, are great even though they tend to recover some of the material from his other books somewhat but thats not a big deal since the info is worth repeating. Another good author but she covers pretty much the same thing is Julie Morgenstern. The books by Koch on the 80/20 principle are also worth looking into. For the paper clutter in my life I have a digital sender scanner and have scanned over four full file cabinets into Adobe PDF computer files. I have done this with pictures too as you can also save them info Jpeg and Jiff files. While there are tons more books out there and I seem to have most of them, these are the best to get things under control and to get you the time to do the things that matter to you.