cre8d design

I’ve been on a mission to reduce clutter in our house lately, thanks to reading Organized Simplicity (another book born out of a blog, Simple Mom), Simplicity Parenting (a book which now has a blog), The Happiness Project (a book which spawned a blog as it was being written) and the more extreme The Minimalists (a blog which launched an e-book).

If you were to come and visit our house, you’d know that we don’t have a cluttered house (the garage however…).  I like minimalism but definitely not to the point of starkness.  However, things naturally build up over time without a regular assessment and clean out.  I went through my wardrobe and drawers in a series of rounds (it got easier to let go of sentimental pieces) and donated a very big stack of clothes I hadn’t worn in ages – some as many as 12 years ago!

It felt great to do a big clean out, but more importantly, it is actually helping me make every day a little bit easier:

By reducing the apparent options available, my actual choices became less stressful and quicker to make.

On the whole, it doesn’t seem like too much to have to hunt around for a few moments to find what you’re looking for in a drawer or closet, but that little bit of time is reduced when there’s less to rummage through.

Research shows that people get overwhelmed and stressed by too many choices and end up making impulse decisions.

I’ve been pondering also about online clutter and how it can create stressful situations and increase the time it takes to complete a simple task.  Do people end up just clicking on something (the “Back” button?) just to get out of there and go back to the familiar?  Do they randomly click on a link and hope it shows what they want because they’re just so overwhelmed?

Are we enticed by the idea of providing lots of choices, but forget the time and stress cost of the associated decision making?

I’ve just finished reading Design*Sponge at Home by Grace Bonney, based on her popular interior design blog Design*Sponge. I discovered her blog five years ago and it’s gone from strength to strength and it’s a delight to see that the book (which is beautifully put together) made Amazon’s Top 10: Best Books of 2011: Art & Photography.

I really enjoyed reading Bonney’s introduction to the book (merely two pages of the 390 page book), which is a familiar story for many of the early blogs which went on to enjoy such success: “I had no idea how my life would change when I clicked a button on the screen that said PUBLISH”.

The driving factor for her in started the blog was to “connect with people like myself… Even though no one joined in the discussion at first… I didn’t care because I loved having an outlet where I could write about my passions. I was thrilled to have an outlet to express my love of design…It made me feel less like the crazy girl in the room who’s always going on about cool wallpaper. And yet, as it turns out, I wasn’t alone… Within weeks, my blog was eliciting comments and e-mails and I felt like I was connecting with a community that I didn’t even know existed. We started having online conversations about the kinds of things I previously thought interested only me…”.

She says she was “going on and on” about design until her boyfriend said “Hey, have you ever thought about starting a blog about design? Maybe you could use it as a writing sample or a portfolio and use it to apply for a job at a magazine one day?”

A passion shared and then joy and surprise at a newly found (and formed) community.

“And then one day I realized that what began as my own personal blog had become the design magazine I had always wanted to read – and work for.”

Bonney grew up wanting to be a journalist for a newspaper, and ended up creating the job of her dreams. I love it!

Reading her book reconfirmed to me that the best blogging (and writing in general) is by people passionate about their subject matter. People who write for the love of it, even if no-one else is reading.

It’s been almost ten years since I discovered blogs and quickly afterwards began blogging myself. Back then, it seemed almost possible to be able to navigate all the blogs in the world and bloggers in various topical areas knew each other well. Blogging tools weren’t all that user-friendly back then, and it was still a somewhat geeky domain with a whole new set of terminology (XML, RSS, pings, trackbacks, permalinks, cgi scripts, …)

It’s been just over ten years since Movable Type was released, the second big blogging tool which came along after Blogger. Movable Type was wonderfully empowering and yet utterly frustrating. Changing your blog’s design meant long rebuilds of pages and learning a new limited templating language. A regular problem was dealing with mysterious cgi server errors and deciphering perl code. Some things haven’t changed though: the rewards of regular commenters was mixed with the frustration of dealing with spam (the defenses against it have improved but still cause headaches) and trolls who would write hurtful feedback.

Back then, people were’t in it for the advertising dollars, or the money or a book deal. They weren’t there to promote their company, brand or product. They were there for the love of it. They were there because they had something to say and a decent proportion of the whole world was able to hear it for the first time. The idea of a soapbox in front of the world was a new and alluring concept. It required quite a bit of technical knowhow to get a blog up and running; especially a Movable Type one.

Ten years on, creating a new blog is just a few clicks away and it doesn’t seem revolutionary at all. There’s millions of blogs, the idea of a global audience isn’t at all amazing or probably not even very inspiring for starting a new one.

Yet for all the online fads which have come and gone, blogs have continued to flourish.

Bloggers are still breaking stories, opening their hearts and lives, teaching and sharing insights and encouraging others. Companies are expected to have a blog as part of their corporate site.  News media have embraced blogs (albeit being threatened by them at the same time).

Facebook and Twitter have not stopped people blogging. In fact, a number of New Year’s resolutions I’ve seen talk about blogging more.

I can’t wait to see where blogging goes in the next ten years!