Journal

A Year of Simplifying My Life (And Why I Didn’t Start With My Wardrobe)

I’ve just finished a year of simplifying my life, and I’m honestly a bit surprised by how it turned out.

Each year, I choose one aspect of my life to focus on. Then over twelve months—twelve new moons—I commit to a different experiment each month. Small things. Just for those four weeks. But by the end of the year, significant changes have happened. Sometimes you can’t see how far you’ve come until you look back.

Last year I focused on nurturing my body after realising I’d become disconnected from it. (I have a chronic illness and had stopped treating myself particularly well.) This year, at the end of 2024, I was feeling overwhelmed. My work felt never-ending, like my brain was constantly cluttered.

So I decided to spend a year simplifying things.

What people expected me to do

When I announced this project, lots of people—knowing I’m very messy and find clutter difficult—thought I’d be doing a massive decluttering project. You know, the Marie Kondo thing. January wardrobes. Cupboards. All of that.

But that wasn’t what I was aiming for at all.

What I wanted to get rid of was the feeling of heaviness. This sense of never being done.

Where I actually started

I thought the best place to start was with my work. I have three strands: The Studio (an online creative community), life coaching, and a natural dye garden where I dye embroidery threads. All of those are manageable things. Importantly, they all fill me up. It’s work I’ve chosen because I love it.

So I had this feeling that maybe the problem wasn’t the actual work.

When I sat for a few days looking at what I was spending my time on, I discovered something uncomfortable: I was spending 60-70% of my time responding to emails from people who weren’t working with me at all.

People asking about paint colours. Whether I could help them set up a YouTube channel. Where I get my cardigans from. They were travelling to Scotland and wanted hints on where to go.

And I was replying to it all.

Of course, more kept coming in because people wanted pen-pal relationships. This was completely my fault. I’m a people pleaser. I’d built good boundaries face-to-face, but I hadn’t noticed that online I’d let them slip completely.

Month One: Learning to say no (online)

So in January, I stopped responding to 90% of emails that weren’t to do with my work.

This has been one of the most difficult things all year. I still feel terrible about it.

But it’s also been one of the most transformative things—recognising that I’m here to do particular work, and if I spend my limited time and energy doing other things, I’m actually doing down the people who pay me. And doing down myself.

What was really interesting: so many of those emails said “I don’t join memberships” or “I’m not interested in The Studio” or “I don’t have time for The Studio.” They weren’t wanting to connect with my actual work. They just wanted a shopping list or an itinerary.

The internal clutter

Having dealt with the flood of incoming stuff, I realised I hadn’t dealt with the things I initiate that also clutter up my time.

My phone stats were shocking. I had a really bad problem with Instagram addiction.

Month Two: Breaking the Instagram habit

I used an app called Screen Zen that blocked Instagram in a way I couldn’t get around the back door. Took my usage down to 10 minutes a day. That was enough to break the addiction.

After a month, I realised how dull it was. Full of adverts. Full of people putting on a veneer—vulnerable veneer, showing-off veneer, I’m-so-busy veneer. It gave me the same feeling that small talk does, and I really don’t like small talk.

Instagram was small talk. So I came off completely.

As a side note: I thought I needed to be on Instagram for my business because that’s what people who sell courses about Instagram tell you. But once I stopped being on Instagram, my newsletter open rates went up. My newsletter sign-up rates went up. My YouTube views went up. The number of people joining The Studio went up.

It’s almost as though by always being on Instagram, there was never any push to really connect more meaningfully. I was just another scroll.

Month Three: Actually moving

I’d freed up time by dealing with external and internal clutter, and I decided to use it to tackle activity.

I’m not naturally sporty. I don’t like exercise. I hate group activities. So unless I keep an eye on it, my activity levels drop because I prioritise other things.

I used my Apple Watch to set an activity aim. I could do anything to fulfil it. That worked really well. Nice and simple.

Month Four: A spacious work schedule

Because I’d freed up time, I noticed I could have a work schedule that was much more spacious.

I have chronic fatigue symptoms—some days I’m fine, some days I’m not. If I’ve got a busy day, I need a couple of really quiet days either side.

I’m not very good at batching things, so I decided to theme days in the week:

• Monday: Forward planning, writing, admin
• Wednesday: Record YouTube, write blog, newsletters
• Thursday: Production day—samples, dyeing threads, creative work
• Tuesday and Friday: Gap days

Those gap days are incredibly useful. They give me confidence that even if I don’t get things done on one of my set days, I’ve got space.

Month Five: Flowers on the table

This newly spacious way of working made me aware that the writing space upstairs has a bad habit of becoming piles of paper and clutter. When that happens, I can’t write clearly.

So in May, I decided that every night I’d clear that table and put a bunch of flowers in the middle. It was about the flowers—picked from the garden, smelling nice, looking nice. It felt civilised.

That helped me keep my space simple and let creativity flow.

Then life happened

In June, life threw some life at us. My dad fell, had a bleed on his brain, spent three months in hospital. He died at the end of August.

Had I not simplified my workload and workflow, I would have found it incredibly difficult to spend the amount of time I wanted with him. But I had less cluttery work to do. I had a schedule with actual space in it. I just stopped doing the embroidered threads for the year—that was fine.

I could show up in the ways I wanted to. I felt that to be an incredible privilege. I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for something I’d done in retrospect.

When the physical decluttering finally happened

While all of this was going on—going back and forth to the hospital, dealing with incredibly stressful family situations—that’s when the actual physical decluttering kicked in.

It started with my wardrobe.

I didn’t do the whole taking-everything-out, trying-everything-on thing. I just went through my overstuffed rails and decided: if I’ve got several similar dresses, how many do I actually need? What are the top three or five? Get rid of the rest.

And somehow—I think because I’d done so much mindset work with the people-pleasing and social media addiction—it was easy.

There was no shame. No shame about having bought things I hadn’t worn or having things I no longer fitted. It was unemotional and easy.

Some things went to charity shops. Others I sold—sold enough to fund a trip to London for the two of us.

Gradually that spread to the rest of the house. Every cupboard, every drawer. People were becoming uneasy because this was not my character.

Part of it was that I could control this when I couldn’t control what was happening elsewhere. But also, I think having picked away at the threads of clutter and overwhelm, you just get into a flow.

What I learned

I am not a minimalist. Minimalist spaces make me anxious. I’m surrounded by things I love in my house.

What I was doing: I didn’t want to get rid of anything I actually liked or loved. I wanted to get rid of the things obscuring what I loved. The pens that don’t work. The junk mail. The things you’re not quite sure where they came from.

This month—December—I’ve ended up in the studio where I have so much stuff. Things kept for “they might come in useful” (and often they do, but it was overwhelming).

When I’ve tried in the past, I’ve started, made more of a mess, become overwhelmed, and shoved things to one side. I’m now four or five days into sorting my studio and it’s already really different. Again, there doesn’t seem to be any guilt or muddle or emotions involved. It’s just clearing so I get back into the flow.

The lesson I’d give

Really lean into your character.

If you’re not a neat and tidy person, if that isn’t going to immediately give you a thrill, then maybe look at sorting out some of the clutter in your brain before you tackle your physical surroundings.

People always say: declutter your wardrobe and you’ll feel so much lighter and freer. That may well be the case.

But I found that by decluttering my mind, sorting out my overwhelm, somehow my wardrobe became much more decluttered, free, joyous.

Not everybody works the same way. But for me, the mind came first. The wardrobe came last, almost like an afterthought. And when it did, it was easy.

Now I’ve got a couple of weeks to think about what I’ll be doing from this winter solstice into 2026. When I’ve decided, I’ll let you know.

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