Review: "Rightsizing Your Life" Is A Holistic Guide To Changing Your Environment

The modern idea of simplifying your life to find happiness draws on ideas from an odd mix of eastern religions, 1960's sensibility, 21st century personal productivity, and life assessment. Ciji Ware's new "Rightsizing Your Life" is a thorough guide to the process itself, which goes far beyond colored file folders to consider topics such as the emotional impact on family members.

Rightsizing, according to Ware, is the continual process of altering your environment so that you can focus on what's important to you. You feel the need to rightsize when important parts of your life are "too big," "too much," or "not right." Sometimes that means upheaval, such as career change or relocation ... but not always. It may not even involve downsizing your living space. The purpose is to remove the ephemera of, say, cutting the grass every week so that you have time to do things that are meaningful and enjoyable to you. (In this, there is crossover with some of the ideas used to incrementally improve wellbeing seen in Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar's book Happiness, which we recently featured.)

The rightsizing process is is a feature of middle age. You've got to have enough invested in where you are -- career, home, community -- for changing it all to be a major decision. And midlife is when many step back and ask "is this what I want?" "Rightsizing Your Life" does not provide a significant coverage of how to make that decision, but it does help with every step after that.

As you might expect, Ware includes plenty of practical advice on nuts-and-bolts rightsizing: how to decide what paperwork to keep, what to do about children's art projects from years ago, and how to be brutal about thinning out your closets.

But the book really shines in covering what you might not have considered: your own feelings about changing important parts of your identity, and the similar emotional responses of family members. Ware provides help with self-assessment as well as advice on how to openly deal with the family dynamics of major change.

She also looks at actual experiences, including -- to her credit -- rightsizing gone wrong.

Ware's holistic approach puts "Rightsizing Your Life" several notches above the "here's how to organize your closet" primer. Anyone even considering refocusing their life should find it useful.