There is a hard, mathematical limit to how elegantly you can arrange your cables, which moves inversely and exponentially with the number of devices that need to connect to other devices.
@gerrymcgovern I deleted 79,125 'promotional' emails from my Gmail account yesterday.
Didn't think I really needed them.
Didn't think they were useful.
Why do I get so many of these completely useless messages?
Why is so much time and energy expended on these hopeless things that most people completely ignore?
And why should we keep storing them, year after year?
Decluttering activity of the evening: threw all the philosophy books I had in the book donation pile. Why do I have a giant pile of philosophy books? Because of ONE philosophy class in college, which I hated... eons and eons ago. Have I moved them at least 4 times? Yes. The last time I read one of them? COLLEGE. #clutter (also, you can get them all free on Project Gutenberg now, I am pretty sure).
— Go through each room, closet, and drawer.
— Make a list of ten things you find, in each, of something you haven’t used, in the past year.
— Once you’ve compiled a list for the entire house, go through it and toss out the first item in each area.
— Repeat every week.
Even though it's 2023 and I really want to be #minimalist on #clutter, I still have paper magazines + newspapers because as a kid I used to voraciously devour (and absorb information from) my parents' national geographics* and now one of my kids will literally read anything on paper lying around at breakfast, but if it was on a screen would end up watching YouTube instead...
Lately I've been working on organizing some things, and setting up systems is always key. Even for digital stuff. Maybe ESPECIALLY digital stuff. Just like cleaning your physical house and trying to rid it of clutter (did a lot of that recently, as we always do, sometimes to little avail 🤣), digital clutter is real. Going through my YouTube 'Watch Later' playlist and it's down to 106 things. That feels like a miracle- it was over 200 videos (almost 300) the other day, and just by watching a few seconds of one or two, many just needed filing to another playlist - especially ones I'd already seen and just want to save. And, of course, same as phone screenshots, some things you just have NO idea why you saved it. So you delete those. And wow. 106. Amazing. Maybe I can knock out more next week. Plus, I'm learning some things. They're some really boss videos. If I find some really cool ones, I'll post em here, of course.
It's tough to unpick on your own, but I believe it can be done. For people who can't stomach decluttering advice from neat freaks, try reading Dana White's Decluttering at the Speed of Life. It's helped me get unstuck numerous times.
#Introduction I’m now #retired, after a career in accounting & IT mostly at HP (& then Agilent). After that, I spent 17 years as a professional organizer, helping people with their #clutter; I was also the #editor of a local magazine.