permaculture - how to design your life!

We've been looking at how to design environments, so let me share a nice common sense principle with you called zoning. The idea behind this is that you want to place the things you use most often close to you, so you spend minimum time, energy and travel in your journeys.

This is going to read like a map of the London underground, as we have 5 zones. let me explain more!

Zone 1 includes the places and things in our home we use at least 3 times per day. If you get on your bicycle 3 times a day - you want it in an easily accessible place, where you can shoot out with ease - rather than in a shed at the end of the garden where it's a hassle to get it out. We can also take a holistic look at zone 1 and say that ourselves and our inner state make up zone one and to be really in this zone, we need to be centred.

So, make a list of locations you visit 3x plus a day for certain needs. Make sure these are close to you!

Zone 2 is for functions that we perform once or twice a day. Make a list of 3 locations you visit to do these. In terms of proximity to you, this should be in the next zone - again fairly accessible.

Zone 3 is for places you may visit once or twice a week for your functions (eg supermarket - shed for the lawnmower) and these can be physically further away.

Zone 4 can be quite remote. These are the places you need to get to no more than once a month - maybe a few times a year.

The theory here is energy efficiency - put the things you need most in your life closest to you. I know from my personal experience that when I made the conscious choice in 1999 to live within walking distance of work - it freed up huge amounts of energy for me as this was a zone 2 function. Working from home and within the community where I'm living is the ultimate!

And if you're saying, what about zone 5? I'll explain more here! Zone 5 is the wilderness. Instead of being able to manage and control this zone - we are visitors here. This is where we go for inspiration. In some cases, we can spend as much time in zone 5 as in zone 1. In class, it was suggested that zone 5 can also be an inner state and that meditation can be a zone 5 activity if this is what we do to get our peace and inspiration.

So, to summarise - when planning anything from how to organise your office space to a move to a new location, put things in the right zones, according to how much you're going to use them or need them.