Access Exploring Writing: Paragraphs and Essays & Connect Writing (1.0) Access Card 2nd Edition Chapter 4.4 solutions now. Our solutions are written by Chegg experts so you can be. IELTS Writing Task 1: Free lessons, strategies and tips for getting a high score for the academic task 1 of the IELTS test. You have to describe some kind of graph, diagram or map. We'll show you the best ways to do this and top tips for a high score.
This post may contain affiliate links. I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post. Learn More.
It was two years ago when I made my first real, or what I thought, was a real attempt at simplifying and decluttering. I said to myself, “I’m doing this minimalism thing. I crave simplicity. I can’t stand all this crap surrounding me. It’s gotta go.”
So I dove in. Head first. Right into the deep end of the freaking pool.
I emptied every box I had onto the floor. It was a mass of stuff, everywhere. The basement looked like a cheap cluttered flea market. My mind was blown away by all the useless crap I had accumulated. Some stuff I remembered purchasing, other stuff I regretted purchasing.
My first attempt at minimalism was, well, overwhelming. I wanted to light a fire to all of it. I wanted to give in and just toss it all back in boxes, hide it away and avoid it.
When I started out, there was no guidebook, no Marie Kondo. I didn’t even Google it. I just dumped and hacked away at the mess on the floor bit by bit. One day I was ruthless, the next I’d want to fish things out of the garbage or donation box.
Then I stopped. And I asked myself, why are you doing this? Are any of these material possessions really important or of any value to you? Resoundingly, the answer was mostly no. All I knew at the time was that I wanted peace and simplicity in every aspect of life.
So I purged. Ruthlessly. With no looking back.
If I had it all to do over again, I would have put a bit more thought into the process. And minimalism is exactly that – a process. For me, simplifying was a necessity to save my sanity. I was tired of being a shopaholic. I was tired of how complicated and stressful my life had become. Clutter literally stresses me out. Making the choice to live a simple life has changed everything for me – I have an abundant mindset, have a much different idea of success, and have found a way of life that I love.
If you’re new to minimalism and simple living and want to learn how you can simplify and live a life of less, here’s a beginner’s guide to getting you started:
Understand What Minimalism Is
What do you think minimalism is?
Paragraphs Minimalist Writing 1 0 46
If you answered it’s a design aesthetic with clean white interiors, sparse furnishings and capsule wardrobes of grey, white and black, you’re partially right. That’s one way to look at it. There’s the design aesthetic and then there’s the mindset part of it too.
Your life doesn’t have to look like a perfected Scandinavian living room to be minimalist. There’s no law saying that to be minimalist you must paint your entire house white, have only two chairs, and your capsule wardrobe must be grey, white and black only. That’s a false perception that’s been floating around the internet. Well, that and there are minimalist bloggers that prefer grey, white and black.
Minimalism does not have to be vanilla. It doesn’t have to be extreme where you own almost nothing. Myself, I prefer feminine minimalism with a touch of gold and blush. So Parisian chic!
Aside from the design elements, for me, minimalism is about creating life habits that align with your values so you can live a meaningful, happy life. One that’s full of intention. And while it is about owning less stuff (I have decluttered and minimized what I own), it’s also about being intentional about what you own and what you bring into your life. Instead of surrounding yourself with #allthethings, you keep it simple and own what you love instead.
Minimalism and simpler living have helped me focus on abundance instead of lack, gratitude over fear, and quality over quantity.
The Minimalists sum it up perfectly in one sentence: “Minimalism is a tool to rid yourself of life’s excess in favor of focusing on what’s important—so you can find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom.”
Related: 11 Blogs To Inspire a Life of Simplicity and Minimalism
Accept The Process
Every change we make in life is a process. By starting your journey with an awareness that minimalism is a process – a transformation of sorts – you’ll create lasting change. Having this mindset will solidify the foundation you build your simpler life on. It will get you through the tough times when you want to burn everything because it’s not disappearing fast enough and it will get you through the struggle of wanting to buy it all back again.
Start by accepting you want to change your life for the better, understand that it will not happen overnight and that it will be an evolution.
Identify Your Why
Why did you decide minimalism was right for you?
I love having a guiding principle or value; it drives me. Understanding why we do something or why we want to create a happier meaningful life helps us see the beauty in what we’ve created. We form an appreciation for our “why.” Without knowing why we’re headed where we are, we can’t embrace the process or idea of simple living.
Creating a why is like having a north star; it will guide all your actions throughout the process of designing a minimalist lifestyle. Work on finding a “why” that will weather the storm and keep you pushing through your more emotional days. For me, I’m a planner and I hate chaos of any kind. Chaos and turmoil are unsettling to me – I don’t feel grounded. Physical clutter is visual clutter, which in turn, becomes emotional clutter.
My why? To lead a stress-free, mess-free meaningful life. Full of intention and mindfulness. Rooted in peace, calm and gratitude.
Create Habits to Live By
So you’ve found your “why.” Now it’s time to set some principles to guide you. Your minimalist mindset. In creating your guidelines, you should consider:
What kind of lifestyle do you lead?
How does it look now and what do you really want it to look like?
What makes you happy?
What makes you sad and/or depressed? You want to avoid these states for obvious reasons.
What will keep you motivated and mindful? Journaling? Minimalism games or challenges? 1 in 1 out? A shopping ban? Quality versus quantity?
Next, look back on your “why” and ask why again. Keep asking why until you get clear on why you’re really craving simplicity. You’d be surprised at the rules you’ll find already in there. Such as? Well, maybe you want more time for family or hobbies. Or you’re tired of saying no to friends all the time.
Paragraphs Minimalist Writing 1 0 4 Worksheets
You need a few rules to guide you and keep you motivated. These rules are yours. They are for your life. Please don’t adopt someone else’s rules or believe you have to. It’s not a race to see who can own the least amount of items. The idea here is to become happy, abundant and content in YOUR life. Use this advice and that of others as guideposts or markers to help you formulate what your ideal life should look like. Please, please don’t get hung up with – but so and so says I should own only 5 dresses, 3 pairs of shoes and only 1 candle. Nuh uh – don’t do this. You’ll be unhappy.
Adopt The Mindset
So far, we’ve looked at what minimalism is, that it’s a process, and we’ve identified a why and created habits. To solidify this life change, you need to adopt a minimalist mindset. In other words, take your rules, guides, habits, mantras (whatever you like to call them) and live by them. Adopt your why and habits into your everyday life. This will look different for each of us based on our lifestyle and the “why” we have chosen.
Start Small
Remember me at the beginning of this post? Dumping everything on the floor? Try not to do that. It’s more stress-inducing than you think. And besides that, it’s a bit overwhelming. Trying to change everything all at once usually ends in failure or a meltdown of some kind. So as not to shock your soul or brain, please start small.
Here are a few ideas on how you can start small (+ 9 Ways to Simplify Your Life):
Donate a stack of books to the library.
Donate a bag of clothes.
Clean out your makeup drawer.
Create a few minimalist mantras to help you adopt your new mindset.
Develop a daily practice or routine to create your happier, simpler life. This could be journaling, it could be accepting that perfectionism is not necessary, or that you will no longer allow fear to rule your life.
Create a starter self-care routine.
Practice gratitude.
Be Patient
Understand that simple living and minimalism is a process. You will not change your life or home overnight. It will take time and you will encounter roadblocks. When you feel yourself getting impatient, frustrated, or fighting your new life change, consider taking a “me” day, having an Artists Date, or stepping back from decluttering. Creating new habits takes time. Be patient with yourself and do a check-in to ensure you’re not taking on too much change all at once.
Deep Declutter
When you’re ready, and your mental game is strong, then consider doing a deep declutter. If you do this before you have your “why”, your rules/guidelines, and adopted the mindset, it’s possible you’ll revert to old behaviours or give up. This was my first step but it should have been the last step. I essentially had to start over again. Decluttering is meant to free up space and free us from stuff that we don’t want or need. It’s the last step in a process toward freedom and happiness. Do the foundational mind work first – then embark on decluttering your room one space at a time.
Related: The Surprisingly Easy Method to Decluttering and Staying Clutter Free
Embrace Your New Way of Life
Yay! You’ve laid the mental groundwork, done the decluttering, now it’s time to embrace the life you’ve created. Minimalism is so much more than a clean house. It’s about creating a fulfilling life minus the stuff, the fear, and the overwhelm. Be mindful, don’t compare and remember this is your life. Do what works for you. Don’t get caught up in the trap of perfectionism. Life will never be perfect, it is what you make of it. If you choose to live with less, be happy and intentional, hang onto that.
Are you new to minimalism and simple living? Have any tips? Share them!
Everyone is familiar with the information overload experience. Having spent your hard-earned cash on the latest product, perhaps a Smart TV, that promises to transform your life, you switch it on and are presented with a myriad of options, none of which you require. You open up the accompanying manual and groan audibly as you realise that the manual covers 10 different TV models, translated into 15 languages. To find the information you want, you must spend an hour wading through useless and irrelevant material.
Paragraphs Minimalist Writing 1 0 4 0
At this point, I usually give up and just hand the manual to one of my teenage children to decipher (why do teenagers seem to intuitively understand all things technical?). But what if you don’t have a spare teenager hanging around? And you don’t have the time to trawl through dry technical jargon? How can manufacturers improve user documentation to cater for the time-poor user?
One of the current buzzwords in technical documentation design is ‘minimalism’. Video editor moviemator pro 2 1 1 download free. Companies like IBM, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Apple, Lucent Technologies, and Microsoft are all applying minimalism when developing their product documentation.
What is Minimalism?
The term ‘minimalism’ was coined by Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, John M. Carroll. While he worked at IBM, Carroll began to look at ways to streamline the documentation process by stripping out text that was not absolutely necessary to the particular task. The example below shows a bad error message which is likely to confuse a user. After removing the ‘note’ text, it is still clear to the user what they must do to restart the tool; the text is superfluous.
A non-minimalist error message
Some Key Elements of Minimalism
Minimalism is guided by a number of distinct principles. To implement some of the key elements, apply the following guidelines:
Make tasks action-focused.
Use generic content.
Standardise language.
Avoid wordiness and jargon.
Action-Focused Tasks One of the most important elements of minimalism is that tasks are action-focused. In other words, a task emphasises ‘doing’ rather than ‘knowing’. Each topic is documented in a short, generic, and task-centered chunk rather than a long, narrative-style section. The task topic addresses one specific question: how do I do this? If there is more than one task, a new topic is created. Titles should be action-oriented: ‘Configuring….’, ‘Enabling….’, ‘Troubleshooting….’, etc. This allows the user to quickly find the required information.
From a technical writing point of view, the advantage of this approach is that one subsequent change in a product option results in a change to a single topic. This is the basis of effective single-source authoring, whereby topics are created once and tagged. They can then be easily updated and reused across a range of different scenarios, for example, configuration guides, command references, product information sheets, etc. The amount of time (and costs) that the documentation team spends on rewriting and editing is, therefore, considerably reduced.
Generic Content By avoiding unique information such as identifiable brand/model names, documents which previously were applicable to just one specific product, can be reused across an entire suite of products with little or no change to the content. This is particularly beneficial in an organisation where multiple products have similar functionality or similar interfaces. So instead of writing ‘To configure model 345’, you would use ‘To configure the device’.
Standardised Language Similarly, using controlled standardised language and parallelism to construct similar structures for similar elements is an important component of minimalism. Decide on one phrase to convey the same basic action and use this consistently. This might be ‘Download the XY software from the following website’ or ‘Go to the following website to download the XY software’, but choose one and stick to it throughout all user documentation. Using active words like ‘decide’,‘search’ and ‘create’ means the user doesn’t have to over-process the information; instead, the required action is instantly understood.
Avoid ‘Wordiness’ Another important factor is stripping documentation of all extraneous verbiage and thus, reducing content. This means removing instances of jargon, repetition, and wordiness. Write for precision and succinctness, so don’t use ‘in a timely manner’, when ‘promptly’ suffices, don’t ‘reach an agreement”, instead simply, ‘agree’. Similarly, jargon-filled product descriptions may lead to ambiguous messages and may even alienate a potential customer. In fact, some companies have taken a somewhat original approach to this problem. In 2009, a London-based company, Original Software, began issuing fines to staff every time they used jargon, so staff now pay 50p for using phrases like ‘leverage’ and ‘paradigm shift’. Spokesperson for the company, Kate Mackinder says:
‘For example, there is nothing wrong with “interface” if we are talking about an application interface, but when used to simply replace “let’s meet up” not only does the speaker sounds like a bit of a twerp, but it is a blatant misuse of the word.’Minimalist writing avoids wordiness and jargon
Advantages/Disadvantages of Minimalism
Good writing means that the message is instantly clear to the intended audience. Adopting a minimalist approach may appear, in the short-term, to cost more as writers have to dissect and rewrite content into single free-standing chunks. However, in the longer-term there are real cost-saving benefits, particularly in the areas of localisation and translation, where often payment is on a ‘per word’ basis. But the greatest benefit for companies is user satisfaction. The less time a customer spends working out how to do something, the more likely they are to purchase again in the future. As Charles Mingus once said, ‘Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.’
HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY?
If you’d like to share your thoughts or know more about this topic, complete our feedback form. We look forward to hearing from you!
Please follow and like us:
About Jo Good
Jo Good works as a technical writer with Technically Write IT, Cork. She has a first class honours MA in Applied Linguistics from University College, Cork and has worked on a wide range of writing and editing projects in the technology, medical, business, academic and cultural fields over the past 14 years. Having also worked in the areas of literacy and English language teaching, she has specialist knowledge of the challenges faced by non-native English-speaking writers. View all posts by: Jo Good→