It’s Monday, and it’s also our last day of spring cleaning. We leave you with tips for your coffee break.
It was a comical idea, me writing about apps to organize your life. I’ve always been fairly organized, but my organization system? A disaster. Until recently, it was a jumble of sticky notes (both virtual and paper), draft emails of lists, Google Calendar entries, and things floating around my own brain but nowhere else.
And then I found an app to organize my life that works like my brain.
The planet is undergoing rapid climate change, and precious corners of the earth are being irreversibly environmentally altered. The International Ecotourism Society defines ecotourism as “responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people." It’s a good time to ask, how does one see the world without contributing to problems of pollution and global warming?
When real-world relationships get confusing, we grasp for the closest romantic trope that helps everything make sense: Love at First Sight. Always a Bridesmaid. The One That Got Away. The Love of My Life. At best, these stories make imperfect fits for our big, complicated lives. At worst, they force us into ways of thinking that make us miserable and set us up for failure. That’s why it’s so important for us to build alternative romantic narratives for ourselves, ones that conform more closely to our lives as we want to live them. We need our own tropes to fall back on, our own arcs to lean on in times of stress and doubt and confusion.
How to Ditch Happily-Ever-After and Build Your Own Romantic Narrative
It’s convenient to think of the trash can as a black hole into which scraps and discards and mistakes disappear. But these cities, some of the greenest cities in the world, know better. Producing more trash means wasting more money and using up more resources that could be put to better use.
From today’s spring cleaning challenge, here’s an easy way of fighting a smelly fridge: To get rid of an odor in your fruit or vegetable drawers, crumple up a brown bag and place it in the drawer for a couple of days. Smells should be absorbed by the paper.
As the tweets, Facebook status updates, check-ins, Instagram photos, and Tumblr posts pour in, it can start to feel like your friends, coworkers, and even your frenemies lead lives that are infinitely more interesting than yours.
Don’t let FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) ruin your life! Here’s how to be a smarter social media user.
Clean your pet like you’d clean yourself. Don’t wash your animal with carcinogenic chemicals. There are plenty of all-natural or organic pet shampoo and soap options out there.
It’s the perfect time of the year to get into gardening. While you’re at it, make your garden greener by taking steps to conserve water and make your own soil.
In the past few decades, the fashion cycle has accelerated, price tags have plummeted, and shoppers have adapted: We’ve learned to buy more clothes and value them less.
Spring cleaning may inspire you to load a bag full of old clothes to Goodwill, but what about cleaning up your cheap clothing habit instead?
A writer confronts her tabloid habit:
I had way too many opinions on celebrities and way too few on issues that directly affected me, like health care or jobs. It was time for a change.
Each day, I would make a list of all of the problems I wanted to solve in the next 24 hours, then get in bed at 8 p.m. I would wake up somewhere between 4 and 6 a.m. with most of the solutions flooding through my head. Implementation took far less time, I made fewer mistakes, and even though I’d gotten up so early, I didn’t feel completely terrible because I had actually slept.
Have you gone through your stash lately? Is that bottle of sunscreen celebrating its fifth birthday? Can’t find the bandaids?
Spring cleaning ideas for nursing your messy medicine cabinet back to health.
How long has that pile of ratty clothes and old shoes been sitting in the corner? If you haven’t missed it the last five years, odds are you won’t be looking for it this summer.
Let’s pretend for a moment that someone, somewhere, might want the things you’re ready to leave on the street a few doors down. How about harnessing the awesome power of the internets? There’s a website for almost every entrepreneurial (or charitable) inclination.
mattjosephdiaz-blog