This is part of our series on The Simple Living Manifesto. We invite you to join us on the journey.

The 11th idea in the manifesto is:

Edit your rooms. One room at a time, go around the room and eliminate the unnecessary. Act as a newspaper editor, trying to leave only the minimum, and deleting everything else. Article here.

This is a slow process at our house right now. With the two foster boys running around, my editing and purging has essentially come to a grinding halt.

But we’ve just about finished editing our office turned guest room. Laurie and I have both taken turns editing the closet as well as our bookshelves in the room. We’ve also removed some of the office furniture in the room, which not only makes the room feel much larger, but also cuts down on one more place for clutter to collect.

I think we/I should probably make one more sweep of the closet before we can say it’s been fully edited.

I’ve also started in our “master suite” by editing my dresser, my side of the closet and some of the things under and on my sink.

Leo has some great pointers elsewhere — such as take each room at a time and leave the closets and drawers for last.

But I’ve approached this slightly differently, opting for the areas around the home that I know need to be edited — and editing them when I’m geared up and ready to go.

As a former newspaper editor myself, I always knew that certain reporters and submissions would need the same things taken out of their stories each week.

Press releases always contained a bio paragraph at the end of the story that would never be used. And some reporters would always tack on information that was never pertinent to the story.

If I stopped and edited every story all at once, I would often get overwhelmed with the individual stories.

Instead, as soon as certain stories came in, I edited the obvious things, saved the story and then went on about my work.

Then as time permitted, I would start fine-combing the story for other necessary edits.

And if time allowed, I would finally drill down to edits that were more a matter of preference or style than necessity.

Working the stories this way kept me from losing track of time and getting derailed from other pressing matters. And this seems to have helped in my editing process around the house.

My home editing process looks a bit like this:

1. Find a small area that needs obvious edits. (i.e. a bookshelf, a closet, a dresser top)
2. Start purging the things you know you won’t ever use/need again.
3. Find a new home (preferably out of site) for the things you know you’ll use later on.
4. If time permits, give the area another once-over to fine tune your edits and purge a few more things.
5. Feel accomplished about what you’ve done.
6. Then move on.
7. Find another small area elsewhere in the house that needs obvious edits and repeat.
8. Once you’ve completed all the obvious edits around the house, you’ll come back to those first spots and realize there’s even more things there that you can edit.
9. From there the cycles continues…

So what about you? How do you edit your rooms? Do you take one room at a time, one area at a time or a completely different approach?

Join us!

Write a blog post about the point above and then share the link in the comments below…

keep reading...

• The Simple Manifesto #12 – Edit your closets and drawers
• Simple Manifesto #72: Will this decision simplify my life?
• Simple Manifesto #71: Live closer to work