Eliminate Chaos: The 10-Step Process to Organize Your Home and Life
Eliminate Chaos: The 10-Step Process to Organize Your Home and Life
Eliminate Chaos is a user-friendly system for organizing each room of the house, including the kitchen and pantry, closet, garage, home office, and childrens’ rooms. The authors ten-step system is presented in an easy-to-use, workbook-style layout. Full-color photos demonstrate the various stages of the organizing process, illustrating not just “before and after,” but the realistic, messy, all-important steps in between. Leists method is based on the underlying principle that “its not about the stuff.” She touches on the psychological reasons behind clutter and not letting go such as procrastination, denial, thrift, and family history but her underlying premise is that being organized is an on-going process, not a one-day event. By learning to sort, prioritize, and make fast, rational decisions about their household goods, readers become more efficient and functional not just at home, but in other areas of life as well.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Eliminate Chaos
This is a very helpful book to eliminate clutter. It includes lots of pictures to see what organizing a home is all about before and after de-cluttering. You can get ideas instantly just by looking at the pictures and comparing what you have at home.
5 Stars Organizes your brain so you can organize your stuff
I’ve read a number of books and websites about organizing, decluttering and simplifying, and I’m really glad I got hold of this one. So often when I see something about how to organize, I get overwhelmed by the big picture, or the details get out of hand. Leist strikes a good balance - she outlines ten steps to organizing at the beginning of the book, then devotes a chapter through several areas of the home (eg., kitchen, closet, garage, etc.) and applies the ten steps, using a real-life example project for each area. This allows one to approach organizing in a methodical and concentrated way. Not only does she give the steps to organize, but also site-specific ideas, both in word and detailed photos, for each area. I find the book inspiring and easy to use - you really can apply all ten steps to any organization project you have, big or small. I feel as I organize more and more, the steps will solidify in my brain and become part of my everyday life.
3 Stars Good not great
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.) This book covers many problems with valued solutions but it could have been more. She dealt with other peoples problems instead of her own or ours if you know what I mean.
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.
5 Stars Eliminate Chaos
I am the sad owner of literally dozens of “orginizational” books! They are piled up in my office area, on the floor near my bed and positioned randomly throughout my home! As you can tell — NO ORGANIZATION HERE! When I opened this treasure I knew I had arrived; I was HOME. It gave me very practical actions that I had no trouble following. Thank you, bless you. Those other references can GO — LABELED “CLUTTER”! I am a happy camper once again and can move freely throughout my home for the first time in many years. Thanks again…
5 Stars Very informative
I bought this book as a learning tool for my new organizing business. I have learned so much! It is a step-by-step detailed guide on the entire process of organizing any room in your home. I have purchased several books on this subject and this is one of the best.
Filed under: Personal Development Book Reviews