Scientific studies have shown that having fewer choices increases happiness.

Remember the last time you bought an ice cream cone somewhere at a tourist attraction or at the beach. They have a limited number of choices, usually vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, plus 2 or three fruity flavours. Once you made your choice you go on and enjoy your treat, but you don’t really wonder if you have made the right choice.

Now think back to the last time you were at a Chinese restaurant, looking at the menu. It's a whole different story, right?

And now for something completely different: usually we think of decluttering as something that deals with stuff that makes us stumble, or that we cannot bear to see any longer, right? I’ve written about those at length, and I’ve also written about something I call ‘Small Places’, the spots that are created by awkward placement of furniture or that are just odd corners somewhere in the home attracting small-ish bits of clutter that never move again. Add to this the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ idea and what you end up with is … a freezer!

You are probably planning to go on a vacation during the summer months. Are you one of those people who dread leaving because it will invariably lead to a lot of trouble at the workplace and lots of things piling up, waiting for you to come back and take care of them?

If this is your usual experience at the end of a lovely vacation, maybe it’s time to make sure it does not happen this time around? There will always be the odd thing that nobody else can take care of, but if you plan ahead a little you can probably remove at least some of the heartache and ultimately enjoy your absence more. The whole point of your vacation is to give you time off work, yes, but that does not mean you should then have to work twice as much for a couple of weeks to catch up with normal operations again.

When I talk about decluttering, I’m often asked about my experience with hoarders. It appears that having clutter in a home is generally linked to the idea of hoarding, if not considered pretty much the same thing.

I can only assume that this idea is a result of media coverage, and especially television programmes dealing with homes in various states of neglect, for various reasons. While I understand that the media overplay situation, I am often surprised by the way these cases are presented. The common denominator seems to be that these people need help, and I agree to some degree. I do, however, also believe that many of these people are not hoarders at all.

Most of us are working with a text processing tool like Word, Write, or others on a regular basis. At the very start of word processing under DOS environments, most of what we did to text was governed by keyboard commands. Turning text bold or underlined, or slightly bigger was pretty much the high point of excitement in terms of standard layout options, and italic font was considered fancy and looked oh so wonderful when printed on those dot-matrix printers of yore.

Suffice it to say, we have come a long way since then, and whenever we complain these days about text processing or computers in general, we do so on a pretty high level of comfort.

Every start of a month marks the end of another one. How do we deal with the paperwork that accumulates with monthly bills, invitations, flyers, tax-relevant receipts, personal papers, bank statements, etc.?

Here’s what an ideal world would look like: any incoming paperwork is sorted right at the doorstep:

How is your desktop looking these days? Hold on: NOT the physical desk (that’s a whole different story), but the one you see on your computer monitor? Do you see a lot of icons on your desktop or are you one of the purists who keeps it as empty as possible?

While there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to use your desktop to start with, there most certainly is a ‘not so good’ and a ‘better’ way to use it. Before we decide on the makings of ‘good’ use, let’s have a close look at the different things we might find (or place) on a desktop.

Let’s look at clutter from a purely physical perspective for a moment, and disregard any role the mind plays when dealing with clutter.

Any object in our homes had a reason to come into our home. In some cases those reasons can hold true for a long time: think about a new bed or a sofa, or a set of pans for the kitchen. Those are objects that will keep their usefulness for a long time. This type of objects tends to be sturdy and made to last, one would hope, and I would call them the basic building blocks of home comfort.