Enough Already

Peter Walsh writes books about reducing clutter. He likes clutter. Thus, he sees it as the core problem for everything. In "enough already", he wants to help everybody eliminate the clutter in their mind to help live a better life.

This reminds me of an essay I wrote in high school about tennis being the entire meaning of life. After all, anything you do can be related to tennis. Walsh chose clutter. I suppose you could chose broccoli and get the same story.

His primary target is the shop-aholic. These people that buy and hoard let the clutter take over their life. They also see that as an excuse to not make the hard decisions that need to be done.

Some of the early discussion are well done. He discusses making hard decisions, creating common visions for family and not letting stuff and minutia take precedence over what is important. Priorities need to be set to get done what needs to be done. If relationships are not fed, they wilter. If the body is not taken care of it gets fat.

However, he ends up carrying it on too long. He layers on the "self-help" aphorisms from all aisles of the bookshelf. You get basic finance, health, religion and ripping up credit cards. All of it is pretty much on the 101 level. It doesn't have much that is groundbreaking, but I would be worried if it did, since it is way out of his area of expertise. Taken with a grain of salt, these can be good reminders of what you need to do. Taken seriously? Well, you can go all out with his worksheets and his philosophy. But if you are a shopaholic, this book is probably still sitting unopened on your bookshelf.

It's All Too Much

The full title of this book is : It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. Perhaps the title could use a little de-cluttering.

Peter Walsh is passionate about clutter. According to him, clutter is the symptom of almost all problems in our life, and eliminating the source of the clutter can be a big solution to helping us out. Rather than just go for means of organization, he stresses the need to look at priority and make the changes that will prevent the attachment to excess consumption and hoarding. As such, consumer product companies are likely in line to suppress this book. After all, rather than encourage getting all sorts of organization solutions, he stresses simply getting rid of the junk. Instead of attachments to things, he stresses attachment to people and thoughts.

The philosophy of the book is great. My biggest complaint was that the author seemed to be a little full of himself, and would appear to be lightly talking down to his readers (as a big brother talks down to a younger sibling.) Other than the tone, however, the ideas are sound, though would require hard work to fully implement.