Spring Clean Your Life with These Apps, Services
by
Jennifer Jolly, Special for USA TODAY
Spring cleaning is a lot like New Year’s Resolutions you make big plans and you mean well. But no matter how excited you get about your goals, somewhere between the snow melting and stocking up on sunscreen, you poop out. This year, there are some really cool, easy ways to tackle some of the toughest spring cleaning duties with a whole new host of tech tools.
Let’s start with a closet purge-fest:
Several sites and apps make it really easy to sell or donate your clothes. You can sell them piece by piece with sites like Tradesy and Vinted, or just send all of your unwanted clothes to Twice and get someone else to sell for you. Want to donate, but don’t have time to haul it all to Goodwill? Try Fashion Project. They’ll send you a prepaid donation bag and once your pieces have sold, 55% of the proceeds go to a charity of your choice.
If you’re not ready to let go for good:
Ditching that big down jacket may free up some closet space but you don’t have to toss it. For the stuff you just can’t let go of, but don’t have room for, try a service like Makespace or Boxbee (NYC, SF, Oakland, Berkeley). They’ll bring you crates to store your stuff, and deliver it to a carefully-monitored storage facility. Just give them a ring when you need something back and they’ll bring it to you. Say goodbye to maintaining a storage unit.
Another great thing to get rid of? Old gadgets:
But, don’t just throw them in the trash or sell it on Craigslist. To make some money off your old stuff try Gazelle one of the simplest sites to sell your old gadgets without any hassle of having to find a buyer. You can also drop off your gadget at an ecoATM and get your cash right there on the spot.
If your gadget has seen its last days and it’s beyond sellable, check out Electronic Recyclers International, Inc. or donate it to a site like Phones 4 Charity. Some manufacturers, like Apple, will also recycle your old stuff for you and in some cases, you’ll even get a gift card in return.
According to the EPA, one million recycled cell phones is enough to power 185 U.S. households with electricity for year, so donating should always trump dumpster. Just to be on the safe side, make sure to erase your data before recycling anything.
Cleaning Checklist
When it’s time to get down to business, a list is your greatest asset. Apps like Tody (iOS) or Clean House (Android) remind you of all the dirty details you may be forgetting by organizing and managing all of your cleaning tasks. Just pick a room and select the tasks you want to get done.
If you’re in a need of a deeper clean than you can get done on your own, startup Homejoy will help you book a certified cleaning pro in just a few clicks, for a as low as $25 per hour. Just tell them how many bedrooms, bathrooms and you’re on your way to clean.
Take care of those annoying house repairs (Finally!)
Need to fix a leaky faucet? How about repaint a wall or hang a heavy TV? These are all things that are annoying to do for most people and so you put it off and just let it bug you every single day. Well, don’t do that anymore. Amazon Home Services is another great place to find someone to help you do just about anything. They recently teamed up with Task-Rabbit, and other professionals, to offer everything from in-home deep cleaning to DIY furniture assembly and everything in between. (Yes, even goatherding.)
Now that it’s all clean, here’s how to keep it that way:
Alfred is the butler you always dreamed of. For $99/month, an “Alfred” will come to your house and take care of everything from cleaning to buying groceries twice a week. The Happy Home Company is a service that gives you your very own home manager. Just tell them what you need done and they’ll get a prescreened professional to come do it. They’ll even make sure that someone is there to let them in your house. They seriously take care of everything even paying the repair person. For $10/month, you get some serious peace of mind knowing that someone you can trust is dealing with all of the headaches you’ve been avoiding. They’ll even wait for the cable guy!
Hey, this is a great start but we’re always interested to hear about what you’re doing and how you’re using new technology to spring clean your life. Be sure to share in the comments section.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Awardwinning consumer tech contributor and host of USA TODAY’s digital video show TECH NOW. Email her at techcomments@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter @JenniferJolly.
THE U.K HAS A
NATIONAL SPRING CLEANING WEEK!
(March 6 12, 2017)
AND EUROPE HAS NATIONAL SPRING CLEAN
WHY DON’T WE HAVE ONE, TOO?
See:
www.springcleaningweek.com www.nationalspringclean.org
Mission:
A real Spring Clean throughout your home can brighten every day, So bring a little more light into your house by joining National Spring Cleaning Week.
We support, give advice and tips on how to clean certain areas and objects as well as showing you the further benefits of taking part and how it’s not just a hygiene problem.
You can also find videos on DIY ideas, stain removal, furniture and most importantly on the subject of you. Our mission is to encourage the whole of the United Kingdom to spring clean all the physical and metaphorical clutter.
There are ways to give yourself a spring clean, whether that may be your finances, your energy, your computer files or your skin: you’re just as important as everything else.
So let National Spring Cleaning Week give you a hand around the house with moral support, tips, advice and motivation.
Why Take Part?
The reasons behind you taking part and ridding your house of all the mess are endless: they don’t only apply physically but psychologically also.
A thrill for life will sweep in through those sparkling windows and the invigorating air encircling your uncluttered furniture will renew you-mind and body.
Relieve the stress of every-day’s jumbled strain and join us for a brighter home and a newer you.
If you’re interested in knowing more reasons why this is such a fantastic idea, read our little list, full of gripping motives.
HOW COMPULSIONS HELP US MANAGE OUR STRESS IN AGE OF ANXIETY
by
SHARON BEGLEY
(Wall Street Journal January 19, 2017)
There’s the woman who hit the treadmill so compulsively that she could do little elseand all because, every moment that she wasn’t exercising, the thought of fat cells proliferating in her body drove her nearly mad with anxiety. There’s the actor who was so certain he suffered from a dire illness that he compulsively pressed his doctors to give him CT scans, over and over, to assuage his angst. And there are the millions of us who feel compelled to check our phones before we get out of bed in the morning and constantly throughout the day, because FOMOthe fear of missing outfills us with so much anxiety that it feels like fire ants swarming every neuron in our brain.
With compulsions taking more and more forms, from severe to mild, few people these days can claim to have none. Why have compulsions become so common? By 2015, according to the American College Health Association, more American college students suffered from anxiety (16%) than depression (13%), which had long been the most common mental affliction in this population. Adults haven’t been immune either. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, in any 12month period, some 18% of U.S. adults suffer from anxiety intense enough to be considered a disorder, compared with about 7% who suffer from major depression.
Not so long ago, psychologists didn’t know what to make of such behaviors. They tossed around expressions such as “compulsive shopping” and “shopping addiction,” using them almost interchangeably, and struggled to understand whether addictions and compulsions truly differ. More recently, with the aid of neuroimaging and other brainbased studies, scientists are producing a new understanding of compulsions that goes to the heart of the age of anxiety in which we live.
Behavioral addictions begin in pleasure. But compulsions, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, are born in anxiety and remain strangers to joy. They are repetitive behaviors that we engage in repeatedly to alleviate the angst brought on by the possibility of harmful consequences. If I don’t check my phone constantly, I’ll miss an urgent text from my boss. If I don’t religiously organize my closets, my home will be engulfed in chaos. If I don’t shop, it will be proof that I can’t afford nice things and am headed for homelessness. Neuroimaging research is showing ever more clearly that the roots of compulsion lie in brain areas that can trigger anxiety. For instance, a 2016 study found that, compared with healthy people, compulsive hoarders had significantly greater activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which detects errors. They are bombarded with neurological signals which tell them, for example, that it is a grave error to discard a Starbucks receipt that most people would consider meaningless. Compulsive hoarders “perceive an abnormally high risk of negative feedback for difficult or erroneous” decisions, researchers wrote last year in the journal Psychiatry Research. Similarly, a 2015 review of 19 neuroimaging studies concluded that the brains of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder-the most widely recognized form of compulsive behaviour-show patterns of activity and connectivity strikingly similar to those of people with classic anxiety disorders, including social anxiety and generalized anxiety disorder. Such disorders feature “common patterns of neural activation,” the scientists wrote in the journal Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, including in the amygdala (which generates a sense of dread and angst) and the anterior cingulate cortex.
“A compulsive behavior is one that’s done with the intent of decreasing an overwhelming sense of anxiety,” said Jeff Szymanski, a clinical psychologist who is the executive director of the International Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Foundation. So the roots of compulsion lie in the brain circuits that detect threats and generate a profound feeling of anxiety-circuits that are abnormally active in compulsive hoarders and those with other kinds of compulsive disorders.
A compulsive behavior is therefore a form of self-reassurance. That holds true for compulsions on the much less extreme end of the spectrum: Everything’s OK now that I’ve checked the iPhone 15 seconds after I checked the email on my desktop. Suffused with and overwhelmed by anxiety, we latch onto any behavior that offers relief by providing even an illusion of control.
We live, after all, in a world that largely refuses to respond to our commands. We can’t stop a date we met online from seeing us as one of countless fish in the sea, or prevent climate change by driving an electric car and recycling. So we control what we can, compulsively cleaning our homes or checking our phones, hoarding or shopping or wearing out our thumbs with videogames. We cling to compulsions as if to a lifeline, for only by engaging in them can we drain enough of our anxiety to function. Compulsions are the psychological equivalent of steering into a skid: counterintuitive, initially scary but ultimately effective (at least for most of us).
The British historian of medicine Roy Porter once observed that “every age gets the lunatics it deserves.” Since the publication in 1947 of W.H. Auden’s poem “The Age of Anxiety,” our era has been defined by dreads both existential and trivial, societal and personal. Western societies’ rising levels of angst suggest a corollary to Porter’s maxim: If every age gets the lunatics it deserves, then our age of anxiety deserves those who are in the grip of a compulsion.
This isn’t to say that those of us who behave compulsively in one part of life or another-at least as long as we don’t become dysfunctional have a mental disorder. While extreme compulsions often appear odd, irrational, pitiable and self-destructive, our emerging understanding of compulsions implies something quite different: Even the craziest-looking compulsions are adaptive, even pragmatic, and all too human. A compulsion is at once psychological balm and curse, surface madness (or at least eccentricity) and profound relief.
In other words, just because you have a compulsion doesn’t mean that your brain is broken. The ability of compulsive behaviors to quiet anxieties great and small is one of the greatest gifts our brains can give us.