Posts by Annie
Happy 2021 & Introducing The Live Simply Monthly Mantra Calendar!
Welcome to 2021, and the Live Simply 2021 calendar! Each month of this year, in addition to a delightfully on-brand illustration (created for us by the illustrious Ariel Markowitz), we’re giving you an intention word and a mantra to accompany it. Read it every morning. Read it multiple times per day if it resonates…
Read MoreMonthly Mantra: December 2020
This year there were times when you felt like every person and every situation was an attempt to enrage you and make you take to your bed in perpetuity. But love the life you’re lucky enough to live anyway. This year, people let you down so hard. They acted carelessly. They were senselessly…
Read MoreMonthly Mantra: November 2020
Not because you helped that lady pick up the coins she spilled on the ground that time. Not because you’re in better shape than you used to be. Not because you earn a competitive salary. And not because you’re hurting for a job. Not because of how well you can banter via text (that skill…
Read MoreMonthly Mantra: October 2020
Living in balance with stuff is my forte. I am what some might term “obnoxiously selective verging on compulsive” about the items that come into my world (no time for an ugly calculator around here). And so, I love what I own. Each individual thing is my favorite version of that thing. But if they…
Read MoreMonthly Mantra: September 2020
What I remember most about going over to my cousins’ house when I was young was how noisy it was. How the honking shrieks of Disney movies would ricochet through the rooms at seemingly all hours of the day. Occasionally, my cousins would abandon the movies midway through; Aladdin or Ursula bellowing on in the…
Read MoreMonthly Mantra: August 2020
Leisure is not innate to American society. We don’t build rest into our daily schedules. We are not in the habit of lingering around the dinner table long after the meal is finished. We rarely take mission-less strolls. Leisure is for young children, we think. Or, leisure is reserved for women of a certain socioeconomic…
Read MoreMonthly Mantra: July 2020
Forget success. Forget status. Do not aim to ascend the corporate ladder with greater speed than those before you. Do not try to attain “enoughness.” Stop your endless quest to build yourself up into a person other people take note of, so great is your success and your status and your corporate ladder ascension. There…
Read MoreMonthly Mantra: June 2020
The worst car accident I’ve ever been involved in happened two years ago, one hundred feet from my front door. It was a slick, frosty morning, and the woman cruising downhill never saw me. We skated across the intersection together, tires slipping, metal gnashing, airbags popping. I spent the whole day afterwards in a…
Read MoreLive Simply 2020: May Mantra
My sister and I, both diametrically opposed to being stopped, tried once to come up with an acronym for the phrase at which we worship: find a way to make it work. F-A-W-T-M-I-W. So you can see why that never became a thing. But our devotion to the concept remains. We know what you know,…
Read MoreSpring Favorites: 8 Essential Organizing Products
At the end of 2019, I compiled a list of the year’s most impressive, effective, and impactful organizing products–the ones that rocked our worlds (and, by extension, our clients’). But then we did a big move project, we worked with several dream clients, we sourced supplies for endless storage areas, and the page that the…
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