1. Admit you live in a small space. Deal with it. In a modern city, living and working space are your most precious assets. Learning the most efficient way of prioritizing space reduces the stress that city living bestows on us.

2. Use your space to organize your life. Prioritizing space by time can have great rewards. How much time do you spend doing your personal daily routines? Allocate more space depending on time spent.

3. Discard habits that clutter your life. What aspects of your lifestyle are you willing to re-address? Trips to the grocery? Entertaining at home?

4. Decide what’s important. Make an inventory of the things that are important to you personally – especially the things crucial to your quality of life, your job, and your relationship to loved ones.

5. Don’t be a pack rat. Part with the material possessions that you don’t use on a regular basis. Any new material additions to your home or office should be followed by a visit to the local Salvation Army or Goodwill.

6. Know your limits. Try to improve and understand the physical limitations of your living/working space by analyzing your personal moods. This knowledge can guide you into learning how to use your living or working environment more efficiently. It’s an ever changing process: “What worked six months or a year ago may not work for you today.”

7. Get outside. Make use of the public and communal spaces at your disposal – freeing up your personal space for other uses. Meditate or take time to reflect at your local park. Drink, eat and even entertain at your favorite restaurant, bar or coffee house (they love ‘regulars.’)

8. Create a regular maintenance program. Creating an uncluttered environment requires some perspiration. Downsizing on your wastefulness is just not enough for a balanced living or working space. On a daily basis, take fifteen to thirty minutes to do some chores: mop your bathroom floor or clean a drawer in your desk. You’ll be surprised of what a difference this time spent can create.

9. Enter the 21st century. Use technology to your advantage. Today’s gizmos are so compact and multifunctional. They can cut the clutter time.

10. Repeat step #4.  Every so often, relapses may occur, so be ready to repeat step number four. Clutter can accumulate with time and only YOU know how often ‘every so often’ is.

11. Trust your creativity. Feel free to exercise your creative mind. Follow your instincts; life is all about trial and error.

12. Remember your home is your sanctuary. In dense, chaotic, and stressful urban environments, the last thing you want is to come to a space that resembles that outside world. As an urban dweller, you have little control over your outside environment. Use this as your motivation. At home or your office, the way you design your space should resemble the way you touch, smell, hear, taste, see, and feel about the world.

Williamsburg garden Walk:

For those interested that happen to live in gotham city; Crest Hardware and Urban Garden Center, My favorite nursery in my neighborhood is organizing a local,  walking tour of  gardens of Williamsburg. Come and enjoy beautiful outdoor spaces on Saturday, September 15, between 2-5pm. It’s a self-guided tour. For maps and directions go to crestgarden.tumblr.com for more details on the tour.

My latest addition of my interior design courses are at Hostos Community College ; A CUNY college up in the Bronx. These classes will be  on Saturday mornings 10am-12pm  from 10/06-11/03. You can register online at http://www.hostos.cuny.edu

I will be teaching a class about small spaces at Hunter college in October. It’s a 10hrs course as part of the personal enrichment program of the continuing education department. Every tuesday from 10/02-10/30 6-8pm. Space is limited; to register go to http://www.hunter.cuny.edu

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Living in small spaces can be a bit challenging. We at MD2 like to think of space not as much as a location but more as the interaction of  time spent within a specific space. We like to refer to this as your livingspace. livingspaces can be communal (coffeeshop, park, etc) or personal (the closet, your garden, etc.).

A livingspace that is  small can present anybody with a bit of a challenge specially in todays culture of consumerism and globalization. So here lies the problem: how do we find a balance that will create a more positive experience  within our personal livingspaces? Communal livingspaces are another story since they tend to present themselves to us more as a personal choice: If you had a bad experience, you really don’t have to come back.

What we at MD2 have learned from dealing with our clients is that no amount of design will solve this problem without some form of lifestyle re-adjustments. The bottom line is that for any livingspace to work, the fundamental answer becomes more organizational and not so much spacial.

Part of our work at MD2 is to help our clients realize that a big part of the problem and solution is not the space but the person who inhabits it. Living in small spaces is a lifestyle either by choice(unlikely) or circumstance (financial) and not a location. The sooner they realize this fact; the faster we can  start re-designing their livingspace. This step of de-clutterasation(physical and mental) is one of the first and hardest to make and does not cost a penny.

So here is were our expertise materializes: do you really need a good small space specialist or is it what you really need is a good psychologist? A penny for your thoughts.