A decade ago I noticed that I had no spare time anymore. I lived in a very large house with ocean view, filled with antiques and valuable knick-knacks. There were beautiful flower gardens in my yard. I worked in a prestigious, high stress, but very well paying job and my commute was over an hour each way.

When I analyzed my life situation I felt I was possessed by my possessions. My spare time went into cleaning and maintaining the house that was not my home, but mainly the storage space of my stuff. I never had time to enjoy my beautiful flowers, my ocean view, or my knick-knacks and antiques.

My job, as a software engineer required work on weekends and lots of overtime - and what’s worse, was completely unfullfilling.

I started to completely overhaul my life, redefined valuable, and developed an extremely simple technique to separate my belongings and got rid of most of my stuff. I moved closer to my work, into a much smaller apartment with a tiny garden which I shared with another tenant. A short time later I changed jobs, without pay cut, unfortunately the next job was equally unfullfilling, but as a QA engineer I had only a fraction of the stress and overtime as before.

Within a year I went from no spare time to completely free weekends that I took to go camping, skiing, and for short trips. Not only did I get all my chores done during the week, I had 2 and sometimes 3 free evenings!