50 Minimalist Rules That Changed My Life

after 5 years of minimalism these are 50 of my top lessons and hacks for a simple clutter-free life you definitely don't need to do them all but just pick a few and Implement them into your life the two-day rule I originally learned this from somebody who's on like mat V's podcast I think like 5 years ago and that is to Simply never skip two days in a row I've kind of moved it to 3 days in a row cuz I only go to the gym like 3 days a week and like the math anyways but

it's pretty much if you're trying to start a new habit you're trying to be consistent cuz that's like where most growth comes from don't miss 2 Days in a row you're trying to go to the gym you know 5 days a week it's okay to miss one day just don't let that one day turn into 2 days turn into 3 days turn into 4 days turn into 5 days so just make sure that you don't miss twice and for me I turn it into the 3-day rule so if I go to the gym Monday it's

okay if I don't go again till like Thursday or whatever it's okay to like be a little bit flexible but just don't let whatever habit you're trying to start that you know could improve your life fail because you miss multiple days in a row just set a limit where you're never going to miss more than 2 days or more than 3 days and that's how you keep habits going for a long time the nightly reset hate this light dude this is one of my favorite habits of all time and that it's just every night before

you go to bed get rid of all the dishes that are in the sink put them in the dishwasher wash them do whatever if there's stuff on the counter put stuff on the counter where if there's stuff on the floor put the stuff on the floor away literally taking 5 minutes and resetting your house even if it's like not the best cleaning job it's just like basic picking stuff up it makes such a difference for the next morning and just like not letting things get out of hand we have two small kids now so things

can get like crazy really fast and just 5 minute cleanups before bed every night never letting you know the house be a complete wreck before you go to bed really really helps it not getting out of hand and then you start the day stress it's like this whole thing and you're cleaning first thing in the morning it makes a really big difference the house on fire rule most people only use about 20% of their possessions 80% of the time there's been tons of studies on this it applies to almost everything in life including you know

your clothes the time you spend at work that actually leads to making money like there's so many different ways that this 20% matters but especially in minimalism when you're going through your house you're going to find that 20% of the things scattered throughout your house you use most of the time and if you just get rid of that 80% or at least 50% of the 80% you're probably not even going to notice that most of that stuff is gone so especially when I was starting my journey I was honestly looking for that 80% that I

just like hardly ever used and got rid of most of that stuff and that way almost everything that I have I use and it provides some type of service or value or saves me time or makes me happy or makes my life easier and the rest of the stuff is like is just stuff like I let it go use the 2020 rule this pretty much just states that if you can replay something for under $20 in under 20 minutes just let it go and obviously you don't want to be wasteful with that but if you've

got 27 mugs and you haven't used most of them in like 6 months or a year but every once in a while you have 27 people come over and you need every one of those mugs like it's okay just let it go it makes a lot of decisions a lot easier when you're decluttering to just just let it go I don't even know 27 people literally don't think I know 27 people the Box this is one of my favorite things ever I've been doing it for years but I just have a box right here pretty

much constantly and as we go through our house and we find something that apply to some of these other rules and we want to get rid of it we want it out of our house but we're not decluttering right now it just goes into the box and then once a month once every couple weeks whatever it is take the box we donate the Box we restart the cycle and that keeps a constant flow of stuff we don't use going out of our house and keeps our house from getting cluttered and us having just a bunch

of crap around that we don't use invest different this is the worst frame shot I've ever had in my life we're going to go with it since getting into minimalism and really trying to focus and find the things that actually matter which is not very much um we've stopped investing in stuff especially for birthdays Christmas all that type of things and instead we've started investing in Freedom and also experiences so we take our money instead of spending stuff we try to buy ourselves Freedom by investing that money or buying ourselves memories and experiences like traveling

a lot of times you can do that really cheaply you don't need to spend a lot to have that or going you know to the park or going for a walk or doing things outside instead of going you know shopping or spending money on stuff A lot of times the free option or the cheap option or the experience option is almost always going to beat out the buying somebody clothes and we do that with Christmas too instead of buying people stuff we generally try to buy an experience where we'll either all go do something together

we'll give them a gift card to actually do something as opposed to just random crap that they're going to get rid of in a couple months have a home rule this one is actually pretty simple and that's simply stating that everything in your house should have a home now that sounds really easy except that a lot of times there's stuff that doesn't have a home and it just ends up sitting on like there's actually two boxes we have right now we're like I don't know what to do with this stuff but we need to we

need to store it so I don't know what to do with it but I'm going to figure it out because I have this rule in my house that everything has to have a home the coffee cup has a home where it goes so that it doesn't get left on the counter doesn't get left on bookshelves my keys my wallet the kids toys everything has a place where it belongs so that stuff just doesn't get left around cuz a lot of times I noticed that I was just leaving crap around cuz I didn't know what to

do with it if that's you take some time to actually make a home for everything that you own and things will just magically stop getting left around cuz can put them back work smarter not harder when I started actually automating as many things in my life as possible and actually learning how to use tools to save me time I started saving an insane amount of time because I always used to think that like work harder work harder work harder that's going to solve all my problems totally not true turns out about 20% of the efforts

lead to about 80% of the results 8020 rule again right there and it's very true and there's also a ton of things that just completely waste our time so I automated all my bills I automated as many things with work as I possibly could I learned how to use tools like AI as they come out and I try to stay on top of them cuz a lot of them can save you an insane amount of time with your work and especially if if you do work for yourself you have some type of business the important

thing is that stuff gets done not that it gets done in like this perfect like ABCD exg as long as we get to G it doesn't matter how you got there and that's been really something something I'm focusing on is finding ways to save as much time as possible on things that just don't matter at all I don't want to have to think about it I don't want to have to do it I'm not just going to do it cuz this is the way I've always done it work smarter not harder choices and trade-offs there

is one thing that really stuck to me for a long time and that was that every time you say yes to something you are saying no to something else if you say yes to eating a banana you could be saying no to eating peanut butter but sometimes we just grab whatever is in front of us we just do what is presented to us so I've been really consciously working on being very selective with what I say yes to cuz I know that if I say yes to going to a conference I'm saying no to being

home with my family that's a huge decision it's not just the decision that you see it's the opportunities that you're missing elsewhere so being very careful with every decision that you making making sure that it aligns to you and your goals because not only are you saying yes to something you're saying no to something else whether it's in diet whether it's in work whether it's how you spend your time you're saying yes to scrolling on your phone you're saying no to interacting with the people around you that's a huge decision so I'm trying to really

make sure that I'm living with intentionality and not just letting things happen to me and that's why sometimes I become unavailable if you don't do this you definitely should it's either just blocking certain times or even certain days where you were just unavailable like there's times throughout the day where my phone just does not work it goes on airplane mode I put it on do not disturb I put it in a cookie jar I do whatever or even with my family sometimes I need to be unavailable for 2 hours so that I can get 4

hours worth of work done in 2 hours and I will actually go somewhere I'll go to my office and I'll work there because I know that I can be super productive there and nobody's going to bother me so if you can have times of being unavailable where you're off your phone you're not getting interrupted by people and you can get meaningful work done whether that meaningful work is exercise whether it's just thinking and letting your mind declutter whether it's getting something done scheduling times to become unavailable is life-changing one thing multitasking can reduce productivity by

up to 40% and this doesn't only apply to like trying to do multiple things at once but also having multiple goals that you're like trying to do a bunch of things at the same time generally I've realized that in order to make real progress you need to have a lack of balance so instead of trying to accomplish a goal in in Fitness a goal in relationships a goal in business a goal in lifestyle a goal like my my hobbies I will purposely find the one goal that will make all of the other ones a little

bit better and put all of my energy on that or most of my energy on that and then after I hit that goal I can shift to the next one and that's where I found I've actually made progress instead of just treading water in a bunch of different things you need to actually become slightly unbalanced in order to make you know real progress and that's just finding the one thing that is more important and will make everything else better there also a book called The one thing highly recommend literally changed my life avoid decision fatigue

we make decisions from the second we wake up to the second we go to bed and that's why I have set up my life to make as few decisions as humanly possible because I because I don't like to make them when I do make them I want to make them important decisions so like before bed I lay out my clothes from the night before and even when I'm picking the clothes I wear all black all the the time and I don't have to worry about it just close my eyes pick something that's what I'm going

to wear that's like one less decision I have to make for the rest of my life and if you can find one decision that will make a thousand decisions it's like a thousand decisions less you know that that you have to make it if you can do that with a bunch of things by by kind of routining your life and setting things up that way you can avoid decision fatigue which actually like makes the quality of your decisions worse so that the the things that are important you will have the mental energy to to spend

on those things that are important you're not just exhausted by making you know 500 decisions before you even go to work on like oh what should I should I do this today should I do that like everything for me is as routine as possible and I just like the the Simplicity of having very routined things that make me feel better sunk cost bias I've noticed this in my own life whenever I am decluttering something or even sometimes when I'm doing an activity it's because I already invested time or money into that thing it's not actually

CU I want to do that thing or even you know it's not because I actually like the clothes it's because I spent money on it so I feel this need to keep it I feel this need need to use it but you got to ask yourself better questions does this thing actually add value to my life do I actually enjoy this thing would I spend money again in order to buy this thing or do I just have it because I have it and I spent money on it in the past this can be very freeing

to do and just because you spent money on it or just because you know you bought it the money's already gone that's already happened what you do afterwards can save you an insane amount of of mental space or just like time or energy back in your life wind stacking this is the idea of like like voting for the person that you want to become by stacking wins and kind of proving to yourself that you are that person so I became somebody who is healthy and you know into fitness and goes to the gym by taking

a certain time out of my life for me it was like multiple months and consistently going to the gym almost every day but at least five times a week at the beginning and every time I went and I did that small thing of just stepping through the door I worked out for like half an hour and then I left I was Voting to become a healthy person I was Voting to become a fit person and then eventually after a couple months I look back and I'm like oh okay I am that person that I was

voting for because every time I'm just putting in that effort I'm putting in that little wind to continually stack on top of each other and then that just becomes like an identity for yourself so whether it's the gym whether it's eating correctly whether it's someone who keeps a clean home just doing Small Things consistently can actually change you know kind of who you are as a person it can make you a better person because of the track record of the things that you've done exploration why do I still have these I originally heard this from

the book essentialism which is another amazing book but he was talking about trying things to find what you are passionate about and looking back over my life I have tried so many different things and it was because of that exploration that a lot of good things happened in in my life like I tried a bunch of businesses before I found one that a I was good at and B I enjoyed YouTube I tried a bunch of clothes before I found out that I just like wearing all black in like the certain style and exploration and

looking at life as like exploring and constantly being open to trying new things and finding better ways to do stuff and not just sticking with what you've done in the past is a great way to like add excitement to life but also to find new things that you might like or you might enjoy or might make your life easier or better in some way just by having an open mind and being open to new ideas and trying new things perform the great reset the great reset shout out Ryan for me every generally couple months I

have to reset a bunch of areas in my life because I suck as a minimalist just in general and just like keeping my life the way I want it to be I'm not very good at that so sometimes I need to reset things I'll take a month and we'll do a no spend month we do generally do that a couple times a year but we will spend on nothing but absolute Necessities no clothes no anything online nothing but like food electricity and you know all that type of stuff which also saves you money so there

you go but sometimes I also need to take a break from technology sometimes I need to take a break from activities that I'm doing from working too much I need to reset an entire room or my entire house I actually just came off doing that for like a month and I even kind of documented some of the process and wrote down some of the things that I did and made like a 30-day reset challenge that you guys can do if you want to kind of follow along the process and reset your life and get it

back the way you want it totally free I'll leave the link down below but I think if you haven't reset a bunch of areas in your life recently not only when you do it is it fun to do but also you just feel like so much lighter afterwards I feel like we have this fear of being alone of not listening to music or a podcast or texting with a friend that we're missing out on something but once you start to actually embrace time alone maybe not too much and being lonely but actually being okay with

quiet time with alone time when I've started doing this it's actually allowed my brain to kind of decompress and released a lot of stress in my life which leads into limiting social media if you're lonely or anxious limiting social media be an absolute Game Changer even some research about this if I ever find that I'm on socials too much I try to do a little bit of a reset with that as well and I have never regretted it if you get rid of Instagram for a week you will not miss anything but if it's not

social media and it's just screens in general try scheduling screen time whether that's only allowing your TV to be on at a certain time of the day or not allowing phones in certain rooms or on at certain times this can boost your productivity and overall happiness without really taking much work engage in highquality leisure activities I recently gave up video games and pretty much all TV and I've replaced that time with more exercise working out hanging out with friends building things and although sometimes it's harder to actually start those things I always feel better than

I would have if I just sat for an hour on the couch doing absolutely nothing like it's still fine to do that occasionally but if that's uh a daily habit where you're spending 3 hours a day on the couch try replacing that with learning a new language or guitar or building something it's so much more fun manage your attention not just your time the 90% rule this rule pretty much changed my life it's kind of like the most extreme version of the 8020 rule I think I heard this from essentialism and it's pretty much if

something is not a 90 or above I'm not going to say yes to it if it's not a heck yes then it's a no so whether it's a commitment I'm going to do clothes I'm going to buy even the food pretty much anything I can apply this to if it's not a 90 or above I'm going to get rid of it or I'm not going to bring it into my life everything popular is wrong I generally just assume that if I see a bunch of ads for something or it's a trend to buy something or

even things like Black Friday if everybody's going out shopping whatever most people are doing I don't want to do because most Americans especially are overweight they're depressed they're they're lonely they have you know health issues they have no money and if you follow the path that everybody else is going eventually that will probably be you so I just kind of assume that whatever everybody else is doing is is probably not the best thing to do for for me in my life so I'm just going to assume it's not and look for a different path sometimes

there's not one there but a lot of times there is one that's actually easier wide is the gate upgrad lessness we're in this era right now where everybody is constantly upgrading when a new phone comes out they get the new phone just because it's a newer phone than the older phone that's now like a year and a half old but works totally fine even though that same money could reduce their stress could buy them some freedom for me if something is not broke and actually worn out I will not upgrade I will not replace until

I actually need to enjoying work as a minimalist I try to make sure that my life is designed for me and I'm actually living it by Design and not by default and that's actually why I got out of my cleaning job I kind of defaulted into this job it was my dad's company I grew up cleaning Office Buildings and that was something that I kind of fell into however it did not make me happy it was not fulfilling it had you know a low ceiling on how much I could make and therefore I took time

on the nights and weekends to try other opportunities so I could eventually move out with that and not just stay there for the next 20 years because that's what I fell into you know as a kid and I think if you don't enjoy your work you should ask if this is something that just kind of happened or is this what you chose to do to enjoy the rest of your life these hundreds and thousands of hours that you're going to spend there are you actually enjoying them or is it just something that happened to you

value fullness for me this means spending my money on things that actually bring me value and asking would I rather have you know $10 of free or this hamburger if I'm hungry it's going to be the hamburger if maybe a hamburger is not a good analogy would I rather have $1,000 which can compound over time and you know buy me Freedom or would I rather have a newer phone when you understand compound interest and how $1,000 invested can be insane money later on starts making a lot of decisions for you and I value my life

and my freedom way more than stuff so spend value F that was horrible healthfulness this pretty much just means to me that I am going to always invest money time energy and focus into my health for me that means buying grass-fed meat from a farm up the road because my entire family we can literally like feel better after we eat that than we do when we buy stuff at the store so we are willing to invest more money and time into making ourselves feel better and be healthier because that is something that is really important

to us feeling the best we possibly can even if it means spending a little more money that's worth it for our healthfulness I really got to come up with better names for these but until I do being an intentional this just means being very intentional with how you spend your time and how you spend your money making sure every time you spend either of them it is aligned with one of your goals because a shocking amount of time we actually spend our time and money on things that we know physically and mentally hurt us you

only have so much life you only have so much money be intentional with it and then of course you need to be selfish is this was something that was hard for me but you also have to realize much like being on an airplane where you're supposed to put your own air mask on before you do other people if you're not mentally in a great spot it's hard to be the best partner and the best parent or whatever that you can be the best employee if your health is trash because you're not taking care of yourself

and you have low energy and brain frog it's going to be hard to be the best version of yourself for others so if you want to take care of other people sometimes you have to start with yourself you have to be a little bit selfish make sure that you're in a good space so that you can help other people if it's clutter-free it's for me and you hopefully this is hard because clutter tends to like just come up out of nowhere it just spawns it's super annoying but if you feel stressed out in your house

you probably just have too much stuff and sometimes it's hard to know what that is so here's a couple things you do one go through ruthlessly grab a bunch of crap put it in a box put that box in your garage or your attic and then set a reminder on your phone to check that in like 6 months if you don't need to go back in that box for the next 6 months don't even open it up just put it in the back of your car donate it that's literally the easiest way to trick yourself

into decluttering not that I have to do that regularly because even as a 5-year minimalist i' still have a hard time decluttering but it really it really really works the other thing you can do ask a friend to come over if you have a friend who's pretty clean and has no attachment to your crap invite them to come over and help you declutter for an afternoon for a day for an hour sometimes you just need somebody to tell you that that fuzzy blanket that you didn't even know that you had cuz it was at the

bottom of a barrel but you are so attached to because somebody gave it to you for Christmas 8 years ago you don't need it sometimes you just need a friend to lovingly slap you across the face quality over quantity less but better but especially when applied to clothes I generally have like two pairs of shoes one winter jacket very minimal amount of you know pants and shirts but everything I do have is generally a little bit more expensive a little bit higher quality because I noticed that when I was buying cheaper stuff constantly Not only

would it just be uncomfortable every day but it was also not actually really cheaper because I had to keep cycling through stuff the stuff would wear out the seams would come apart even like appliances and stuff would break or just not work when they were cheaper so sometimes it's better to buy once and have it last for like 5 10 years than it is to just continually buy the the cheap stuff that's on sale and hope that it works and it's okay and it fits all right quality over quantity Embrace boredom yeah I know like

most people don't like uh being bored but it turns out it it's not you know such a bad thing in fact I think we need to be bored more often we need to have nothing to do and not feel guilty about have nothing to do for half an hour we don't need to fill that with you know some type of Noise with doing something we just need space it's okay to be bored it's okay to let your mind wander it's okay to daydream every once in a while and do the things that you did when

you were a kid in fact it's some of the most fun that I have separate work and life kind of if you're somebody who works from home or you bring your work home with you a little bit try to be really conscious and and leave your work you know in your office or at your desk or on your laptop or on your phone or whatever and not bring it with you into the rest of the house can be a huge mental relief honestly this is something I've been trying to do for a while I really

struggle with this so This Point's really for me it's something I'm focusing on right now cuz it's so easy to just think about work 24/7 when you have your own business but I know it's not mentally good for me digitally declutter look at that look at that literally like last week this entire thing was completely covered with random crap and since I took like half a day and I decluttered my online and like my firmware digital clutter and like got tons of apps off my phone it was great it's been so much less stressful I

work more productively I can find things better I built like organization folders and stuff if you haven't digitally decluttered in a while you really need to turn it off since I turned off notifications like all notifications besides like from family members on my phone I've been on my phone so much less I get distracted less I'm more productive with work I'm more present in conversations with people there's just so many benefits to not having any notifications on unless it's it's like a family member so that if they're dying they can get in touch with you

nobody else really can and then you just schedule times where you get back to people but you don't get like your phone doesn't buzz in the middle of a conversation it doesn't buzz in your pocket while you're driving while you're working you can just focus on life and and not constantly be brought back out of it explore the 2-minute rule and use it regularly if if you're not familiar with this you can use it in two different ways one if you're trying to start a new habit just commit to the first 2 minutes of the

Habit nothing else so that's reading one page of a book going and sitting in the car going you know driving to the gym and then being okay with backing out or two if you have a project that needs to get done and you you've been thinking about doing it you're just like it's just been like six months and you haven't gotten stuff done like little things you can do it in 2 minutes or less just do it immediately wash the dishes right now hang that picture on the wall clean up that thing that's been in

the hall forever if you can get it done in 2 minutes or less just get it taken care of and reduce your stress don't chase the numbers when it comes to minimalism a lot of times you can get caught up following other people or trying to get down to a certain number of you know possessions or trying to get rid of a certain number of possessions there's all these Trends and stuff so if that's something that you're feeling guilty about and you're struggling with cuz like oh well this person's house looks so nice or oh

you know I I have you know 2,000 items and this person only has 150 items man I'm doing it wrong like something's wrong with me if you're struggling with any of that just totally Let It Go the 9090 rule this one's a great hack to declutter and that's simply saying if you haven't used it in the last 90 days and you don't expect to use it in the next 90 days then you're okay just getting rid of that item makes decluttering super simple the one one rule this one's very simple if one thing comes into

your life make sure one thing comes out out of your life this will keep your house from building up clutter it might also stop you from bringing stuff in cuz it's kind of a chore to actually get rid of something but it's a good one to set in place if you want to go extreme make it the 21 rule everything that's got to come in two things go out it's actually pretty good if you enjoyed this video you will love this video right here on 50 ways to save money and improve your finances it's actually

very good plus if you want to reset your life you can check out the free course down below see you next week