I’m really tired. I didn’t sleep enough last night– late night spice-purging activities kept both of us up late, and although I had the most leisurely day at work in recent memory, I’m still feeling pretty exhausted at this point. But, I promised a post on self-help books today, so here it is.

A lot of people ridicule the self-help book industry. This is partly deserved– many self-help books paint themselves as The Solution to All of Your Problems. And of course, no book is going to solve all of anyone’s problems. Not even Panaceas for Complete Idiots.

But I’ve found these books fairly helpful over the years. I won’t go through the whole list of books– maybe some time when I’m less tired– but we’ve read books that have helped us be better parents, helped our relationship with each other, helped our relationship with Pann’s crazy parents, and helped us learn new skills.

One of the skills I’ve learned from these books is organization. Actually, I’d say I’ve learned several different skills, from several different books. I started this particular odyssey about 10 years ago and I’d say I read about one book on organization or time-management per year. Here are some of the best:

• From Julia Morganstern’s Organizing from the Inside Out I learned about organizing rooms and space and stuff.
• Barbara Hemphill’s “Taming the Paper Tiger” taught me some useful skills for managing the piles of paper that build up in my life (not linked because the version I have is out of print; she’s now got two separate Paper Tiger books, which I haven’t read).
• Organizing for the Creative Person, a book which deals with some of the special challenges that we creatives run into when we try to get organized– and some creative solutions to those problems.
• Also from Julia Morganstern, Time Management from the Inside Out taught me to map out my time, set up a schedule, and manage it.
• David Allen’s Getting Things Done, a favorite of geeks everywhere, taught me to manage the incoming demands on my time and maintain a comprehensive set of to-do lists.

All of these books have taught me skills, and I see their authors as mentors: people who realized “I understand something that’s difficult for other people; let me write a book to teach what I know.” I could imagine that if I knew these people personally, they could help me get even more organized than I am now.

Which brings me to this year’s book, on the topic of decluttering. As Pann already mentioned, we’re reading It’s All Too Much by Peter Walsh. Clutter is definitely our biggest organization problem at the moment– a variety of factors have caused to us to compress our possessions into an ever-smaller number of rooms, while new things seem to keep coming in the door each day, and oh baby do we have clutter.

It’s All Too Much is, I should be clear, a pretty good book. Reading it, I definitely picked up some lessons that will help us have a less cluttered house– one thing is that I’m kind of pumped right now to get all of our books to fit on the bookshelves by the end of the year. Walsh makes the excellent point that if you claim something is important to you, you should treat it like it’s important to you, not shove it in the back of a closet. The book has good insights, and like the others above, we’re learning from it. It’s already having a positive impact on our lives.

The problem, though, is that Walsh comes off as kind of an asshole. Unlike the other authors I mentioned above, I can’t imagine talking to Walsh about my clutter problems. The style of his book is “I’m not going to accept any of your nonsense excuses for why you need to keep this clutter. Out it goes!” And while that can be a kind of liberating thing to say to yourself, it isn’t really the attitude I want from a self-help book.

Interestingly, Walsh seems to have it in for self-help books:

I walked over to their bookshelf and started scanning the titles. There were diet books. Exercise books. Self-esteem books. Parenting books. Finance books. Marriage books. Books on how to live better, happier, richer, fuller lives. It was a complete library of self-help books for every issue a family might have…. “You think the state of this house is no big deal, but look at all the problems you’re trying to solve.” (pp 5-6)

An odd attitude from the author of a self-help book.

Decluttering is great. It’s liberating, it makes you more at peace with your home, your family, and your stuff. But it is not The Solution to All of Your Problems. It’s just one more skill. A skill you can learn from a book.