Advice

Do you need to be a minimalist to declutter?

| Eleanor

I’ve been decluttering a lot recently. My home was rapidly becoming a place of clutter which was negatively impacting my mental health.

My home no longer felt like my safe space and began to add to the stress of daily life. Instead of walking through the front door and feeling ready to relax, I felt like I still had so much to do because my home was in chaos.

Enough was enough, I needed to do something about it!

This is when I discovered minimalism and decluttering. I’d watched hundreds (yes hundreds) of YouTube videos all about how owning less can improve your mental health and wellbeing. A repeated theme in as lot of the videos I watched was productivity and slow living. Those are two things that I value in my life too so I figured, why not become a minimalist?

Well, I’ll tell you why; I like stuff. I enjoy collecting things, especially books and plushes. I love having physical copy of photographs to flick through. I want to be surrounded by beautiful things.

So that ruled out being a minimalist for me.

But does that mean that I couldn’t embrace decluttering into my life? Absolutely not!

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6 Things In Your Day-To-Day Life To Romanticise This Winter

| Eleanor

Winter can be a pretty difficult time of year for many people. The days are shorter and the weather is colder. But that doesn’t mean there are not beautiful parts of Winter too.

It can be harder to see the beauty in life during the shorter days, but that’s just even more of a reason to find joy in the small moments. We need to romanticise those little moments in life that we usually rush through. Slow down and take a second to appreciate those little, magical moments that Winter offers us.

So, here are six things that you already do or can incorporate into your daily life this winter to make things a little more lovely.

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Dating Advice I Wish Someone Gave Me

| Eleanor

As a single woman who has been through quite a few failed relationships, I feel like there’s quite a lot of things I’ve learned now that I wish someone would have told me when I first started dating.

Back in June, I shared a post with you all where I explained that I was going through a break up. Since then I have been in and out of the dating scene and it just made me realise a few things that I felt like I should share.

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Things To Not Take For Granted In Your Teens

| Eleanor

“It’s not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things.” – Evan Davis

Teenage years are hard. If I think back to my teenage years, I wince a little at the thought of it all. There’s the difficulty of learning who you are, making friends and dealing with school. Plus, it’s the time in life where your hormones are going crazy, but I won’t even get started on that.

However, there’s parts I miss about my teenage years too and some of those things make me wish that I appreciated those moments so much more while I had the chance.

Time is something that you can never get back. I’ll never be able to go back to my teenage years and experience those moments and things again, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take the life lessons and incorporate them into my daily life now. It also doesn’t mean that I can’t share my thought for current teens to read in the hopes that it helps them appreciate things things now.

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5 Minute Tasks To Boost Your Productivity

| Eleanor

There’s plenty of moments in your life where you are doing nothing. I like to call these ‘in-between’ moments. These are the moments when you are ‘in-between’ other things.

We can waste a lot of time with our in-between moments without even realising.

A little way that you can notice how many in-between moments that you have is by tracking the minutes of your day. When I do this, I notice that I take 30 minutes a day just dancing around the room to music, 2 hours scrolling through Twitter, and at least 5 minutes a day waiting for the kettle to boil.

Sometimes we have in-between moments when we are putting off doing something. I could happily reorganise my bookshelves or organise my wardrobe by colour just to avoid responding to emails or tidying.

In our mind, we probably still class this as being productive and in some ways it is. However, there’s other things that we should be doing instead and deep down, we know that.

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5 Tips To Be More Organised And Productive

| Eleanor

Productivity is not about doing more, it’s about effectiveness.

We have a limited amount of hours in a day. One they are gone, you can not get them back. The way that you spend your hours can be very important. That doesn’t mean that you need to stress out now though. It means that you should make a plan to get organised and productive so that you can spend your future hours more wisely.

You need to find a balance in life. Think of the yin and yang. You can only work so hard before you get burned out and you can only relax for too long before you feel sluggish. Finding balance in this is so important and it’s something that you will develop over time.

There’s a few different ways that you can build a productive system and you can start doing these things today. There’s no need to put things off anymore. Get started now.

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How To Spend Time Without Your Phone

| Eleanor

Is your phone the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you touch before bed? Do you frequently pick it up “just to check”, only to look up forty-five minutes later wondering where the time has gone?

If you do, then you’re like the 99% (this is not a fact, don’t quote me, I could be exaggerating) of people who are also addicted to their phones. They are our life these days. They are full of all our details, plans and even banking so we would be pretty messed up without them really.

Even though we love our phones a lot, and I mean a lot, a lot. We all still need a little bit of phone-free time in our lives.

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