Product Description

Faced with jam-packed schedules and multiple responsibilities, stress seems to be the watchword for life today. How do people who feel they are doing more/earning more/getting more but enjoying it all less manage to turn things around and focus on building more satisfying lives? How do they sort through all the stuff and find the meaning that they long for? How can they simplify and enhance their lives? Keeping Life Simple is a little book chock-full of simple, practical answers, each of which can be digested in a minute or less. Author Karen Levine offers 380 tips for ways to reduce the clutter, focus on what really matters, and enhance life s everyday moments, which, after all, make up most of life. Her no-nonsense solutions are offered in a reassuring and motivating tone, from one who has clearly been there herself. As simple as they sound, these are the encouraging words of support that everyone craves to hear permission to pare down, simplify, and enjoy life more. This little book, easily kept on a bedside table, in the car, or dropped in a purse, will be a welcome companion for anyone faced with the challenge of living today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #969536 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Arizona Daily Star
"[Levine's] snippets of advice are not only simple in construct, but pocket-size, so they're easy to dip into."

From the Publisher
A Selection of Rodale Book Club

From the Back Cover
Discover what really gives you satisfaction and fulfillment -- then toss out the other junk and learn to live! Family expert Karen Levine helps you to identify what brings you contentment and pleasure and shows you how to reject the tasks, the mindsets, and the possessions that drag you down.

In Keeping Life Simple you'll discover:
-- How to analyze the way you use time and resources
-- Hundreds of practical tips to take control of time and money, and reduce life's "clutter"
-- How to simplify and organize your home, housekeeping, cars, and even the kids
-- How to create more meaningful, stress-free family celebrations and holidays

Customer Reviews

500 things you can do . . .
This book is a collection of bits of advice about life and how to live it. It is intended for people who have come to the conclusion that there is more to life than consumption. The book begins with seven guiding principles:
1. Relax your standards.
2. Free yourself of stereotypical roles.
3. Take time to figure out what you find most satisfying.
4. Create time for the things you care about.
5. Learn to enjoy what's in front of you.
6. Learn to be flexible.
7. Prioritize.
After laying out these principles, Levine recommends keeping an activity log for a week At the end of the week, she asks readers to analyze their activities during the week to see how closely they are aligned with the principles. She wants readers to especially focus on how satisfied each activity made them feel, and also whether each activity was an efficient use of time. The remainder of the book consists of tips for simplifying or getting more satisfaction out of life, organized by topics like rest and relaxation, taking care of yourself, managing money, and home repairs and maintenance.

After reading the introduction to the book, I had high hopes for finding some useful ideas or encouragement for living a simple life. Unfortunately, the tips section of the book doesn't quite live up to the promises. Quite a number of the tips are general and aren't exactly focused on living simply, like the suggestion to occasionally run your dish strainer through your dish washer "to get it really clean." It's hard to see the connection between the simplicity philosophy and other tips like "learn a foreign language in your car." Others seem to be downright inconsistent with simplicity like "take a bubble bath with votive candles and buy a copy of Chant." The idea behind the book itself is intriguing, but it would have been much better to either describe the credible simplicity tips in greater detail or come up with a lot more credible simplicity tips and eliminate the fluff.

A wealth of information on frugality
Great book. I recommend it to anyone already into frugality. Not so good as a starter with too much emphasize on actions and a little bit of a lack of background stuff. But in connection with a more philosophical book on frugality for sure a very good choice