EVERETT BOGUE ON HOW TO UNCLUTTER YOUR LIFEFeb 8, 2010 | by kendall | Read | No Comments

Everett's first E-book

If you’ve ever come home to a messy bedroom or spent way too many regrettable hours cruising around the Internet at work, you can probably relate to the feeling of wanting a more organized, minimal life. Everett Bogue, author of the BeyondtheStars.com, centers his life on that aim and writes about how you too can start to cut away the unessiential from your own life. 

GHOST: What prompted you to start writing about minimalism?

Everett: I started writing about being minimalist in August of ‘09. I had just hopped on a plane to Portland, Oregon with all of my possessions on my back. I’ve always lived with very little things, but the decision to put my home on my back was a new extreme for me. I found the experience to be extremely liberating, so I started a blog to help others work towards attaining a minimalist life. Little did I know, there are a lot of other people in the world interested in this topic too.  This led to me writing and releasing my first e-book The Art of Being Minimalist.

Before writing Far Beyond The Stars, you worked at New York magazine’s website. How, if at all, did that experience shape you as a blogger?

I’ve been blogging for over ten years. I published my first website on Geocities when I was 12. I had a live journal for most of college. I worked at Gawker Media for a few months before I started photo editing New York Magazine’s blog network. Far Beyond The Stars and Nymag.com’s blogs are very different entities. Nymag is pretty focused on celebrity culture these days. Far Beyond The Stars is about teaching people to live better lives. Working at a professional blogging outlet taught me that I could make a living doing what I love. It gave me the discipline to create every single day.

Explain how the concept of “true food” plays into your life?

I’ve written a few articles about the way that I eat, which is largely inspired by Michael Pollan’s books In Defense of Food and Omnivore’s Dilemma. The food culture in America is terrible at the moment. We’re being told to sit down, shut up, and eat packaged processed food by food marketing companies. I’ve decided to opt out of that system. I try to avoid processed foods as much as possible, and only eat foods that existed before 150 years ago. So, vegetables, fruits, whole grains, grass fed meats, etc. I suppose we could call this a minimalist diet, but to me it’s just common sense. We need to stop allowing large food companies to poison us, and start taking control of our own diets.

For a lot of people the thought of actually getting rid of most of their stuff can be intimidating. What’s one small step they can take towards becoming more minimalist?

For people just getting started, I suggest they create a list of the 100 things that are most important to them. This is a great way to see what objects in your life are a priority to you. These are the things that you can’t get rid of, the things you use every day or once a week. Many people have rooms full of stuff they haven’t looked at for years, but they keep “just in case.” The problem with this mentality is that it is incredibly expensive. When you have three rooms in a house filled with stuff, you’re paying for what is essentially useless space. Other people put extra stuff in storage “just in case.” This is worse because it adds yet another bill.

You recently moved back from Portland to Brooklyn. Which place has more minimalists? And secondly, which place is easier, do you think, to be a minimalist in?

Portland, definitely. People are so helpful there, there are less of the barriers of ownership that we see in New York. When I was in Portland I got a free bed, and the people who were giving it away were nice enough to drive it to my house. They’d never do that in New York. A lot of this has to do with a more relaxed lifestyle. These are generalizations, but as far as I can tell people in New York are constantly striving, building, buying. The people of Portland are more interested in being creative, making good work, taking care of themselves. Needless to say, most of the people I met there were far happier because of their choices.

On your blog, you have a lot of advice about how to keep yourself focused at work, rather than fall prey to the distractions of Facebook or excessive emailing. What do you think is probably the one most effective tip?

The modern age has given us a lot of tools to create awesome work, but many people aren’t very adept at using them. You have to make choices: do I spend 2 hours writing something amazing, or do I spend 2 hours checking Twitter or Facebook? In my experience, concentrating on creating amazing work is always more effective. I use all of these tools, but in moderation. If you release great work on Twitter, it will spread. The most successful people are beginning to realize that social networking is a tool, not an 8-hour commitment. Turn off the social networking, start making something that will help people.

Everett Bogue writes about living a simple minimalist life at Far Beyond The Stars. He is the author of The Art of Being Minimalist.