How to boost your quality of life

We’ve all been there: a desk seething with piles of paper; a floor only traversable via a narrow path through a chaos of stuff. And surrounded by all that stuff, you can never find exactly what you need when you need it.

But there’s no need for this headache! You can overcome it simply by setting limits for yourself.
Start off by setting an upper limit. This will help you locate and keep track of your possessions.

Take the author’s electronic gear stash, which once occupied an entire closet. Over time, though, the closet became overcrowded, and finding a specific cable meant dragging the whole mess out of the closet and onto the floor. The author realized things had gotten out of hand, and decided to take action.

So he bid his electronics goodbye and sold off most of his gear on Ebay. What was left fit into one box, which became the upper limit. If he buys a new piece of electronic gear, some other piece has got to go. This way, his stash is manageable, tidy and he can always find what he needs.

Just as you can use upper limits to control things that you might be overindulging in (like perusing Facebook, perhaps), you can also make sure you’re doing more of the things that lift your quality of life, such as exercising, meditating and traveling.

How?

By setting lower limits. The author, for example, has set a lower limit of at least one trip every month, at least 30 miles of running per week and cooking meals at home at least three days a week. By setting lower limits for your leisure time in this way, you’ll make sure your time doesn’t always get gobbled up by work.