Another step towards Minimalism: Buying Smarter
Recently, I cam across a reference to the book called ‘The Year Of Less’ which helped mentioned a very beautiful idea that could help us take another step towards minimalism in our lives. Lets cut to the chase and discuss it right away.
The author mentions the creation of three different types of shopping lists:
- Allowed-to-shop-for list
- Approved-shopping list
- Not-allowed-to-shop-for list
Those are very intuitive name. We create these lists — two primary list being the allowed-to-shop-for and not-allowed-to-shop-for list. We can create these lists at the beginning of the day, week, month or even year and sort out our to-do purchases in these two lists. Once the list is finalised, more items cannot be added to the Allowed-to-shop-for list. This helps create accountability for our decisions made.
And now comes the twist. From the Allowed-to-shop-for list, we only buy those items that our matches our higher priority levels as they make it to the Approved-shopping list leaving all other items to move to the Not-Allowed-to-shop-for list. Adhering to this protocol of purchasing only from Approved-shopping list is something that we set a goal as for ourselves and keeping in mind the accountability and restrictions we face, we are bound to stick to it most of the time.
I feel this is a very good idea to enable smart purchases rather than instinctive ones thus allowing us to practice minimalism in the most decent and smart way possible. Keep this in mind before you go to mall just for looking at products on sale or watch an Apple Event.
~Aditya
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