Your life is hectic. Every day is a grind. You are running from the moment you get out of bed to the moment you get back there and then probably tossing and turning over the decisions of the next day all night long. Weren’t all our modern conveniences supposed to make our lives easier, give us more time, and let us relax more? Why are we all so stressed all the time?

Many people have a quest for riches instead of a quest for richness in their lives. More money won’t bring you happiness if you are unhappy. You’re either happy with your life or you’re not. If you are happy with what you have and have no further desires, you are truly rich. If you are selling all your time away from your priorities just so you can gain further material possessions, you are truly impoverished.

Simplifying allows us to reconnect with the things we value and learn to remove the stresses from our lives. It’s about peace and freedom from the idea that you have to do it all, have it all and spend it all.

Simplifying your life can be essentially broken into two phases:

1)   Figuring out what’s important to you

2)   Eliminating everything that’s not important

People simplify their lives in many different ways. For some people, it’s about organizing their life to be more streamline and efficient and merely cutting out the extreme stresses. For others, simplifying changes their lifestyle to essential self-sufficiency, so that they can feel more connected to their own production. Some even quit their jobs, become adamant anti-consumerists and begin to live in a whole new way. There is no one way to simplify or one end result to expect at the end and one should never feel guilty for not achieving some “higher” level of simplicity. If you are truly happy and fulfilled with your life—the main goal is achieved.

So how to do we take back our lives? How do we learn to enjoy our lives more and reconnect with the values, people and things that are most important to us instead of constantly worrying and stressing about the things that really don’t matter?

This series will (hopefully) help you begin to simplify and truly enjoy your life. Don’t look at any of the tasks as absolutes. Some will work for you, some won’t. The joys of simplifying come from finding what works best for YOU, not for someone else. The tasks I will talk about are merely designed to help you to start focusing your life in new ways so that you can reconnect to the things that matter most to you. If you’ve found an alternative way to do one of the tasks that has been successful for you—please be sure to post them in the comments so that others who may be like you can try them as well!