Today we started thinking about the rules of our experiment. We have been thinking about the general rules for quite some time already and I started elaborating on these general rules in the back of my agenda a while back as well. But 2010 is getting closer and we felt that we should really have some clear rules of how to live the experiment before we started it. We started out by defining the categories of our life for which we thought we should make rules. We came up with the categories of clothes, energy, food & drink, household, leisure, personal care, transportation and travel. For each category we had a brainstorm to formulate the rules. Finally we added a category of exceptions to the rules as well.
While setting up the rules, we encouterend a few dilemmas already. For instance about transportation. Obviously, the best option would be to use public transportation as often as possible, both for work and for private trips. For my daily commute, I think public transportation really is not an option. By car it takes me an hour to drive from home to work, if I would take the train it would take at least two hours. In addition, the only train that I could take every hour leaves at impossible times. So I tried to
‘compensate’ this by the intention to take the train to meetings more often.
Another difficult topic concerns food & drinks. Especially the sweets and snacks part can be approached in several ways. We could decide not to eat any sweets and snacks for a whole year, but we could also opt for not buying any prefab sweets and snacks. Finally, we chose for the latter option, which still leaves us with some awkward situations. Like this one: with the current rule, we are allowed to buy a bar of chocolate to make desert (chocolate mousse!) or cake, but we are not allowed to eat the chocolate when we’re having tea. Well. We’ll see.
We have listed our rules on a seperate page of this blog. Any feedback on our rules, including suggestions for additions, changes, etc. and tips for leading a consumeless and sustainable life are more than welcome!
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