Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [68]
Whether it’s checking in with the life of your neighborhood and the season or opening yourself up to more mindful work, set aside distractions and be here now. Open your eyes and see something you've been ignoring. Clear away a stale stack of papers on your desk. Knock away the next half hour of to-dos on a procrastinated project. Acknowledge a truth. Learn about a country about which you know nothing. Write or draw whatever is on your mind. Connect with someone you like and with someone you love to remind them that they rock; someday you won't have the chance to do so again.
Celebrate the simple miracles in your life and give yourself the best opportunities and surroundings to enjoy them. How many excellent things can you allow to fall into your life in the next 24 hours? Start counting the delights. Carpe diem!
Symptom #26: Plugged into the Wrong Connections
Solution #26: Unfollow-Unsubscribe-Cancel-Delete-Donate-Discard
It used to be you define yourself by what you use; now you define yourself by what you don’t use.
—Kevin Kelly, editor
What’s coming at you?
As you shift your habits to spend more time on what is truly important to you, it will also be necessary to adjust how much of that important stuff you can actually take on without creating new stresses for yourself. Even though you’re doing the right things to reduce your load, it can seem as if you’re still only able to make so much progress before you get that drowning feeling again. That’s when you need to stop setting yourself up for the backlogged life.
What floodgates have you opened onto yourself under which you’re currently standing, complaining about how wet you are? Certainly technology is partly to blame for the problem. As Greg Knauss pointed out, “The tools I use to manage information have evolved to the point where I can abdicate the tedious process of gathering it all together to them, and they now do a very diligent job of making sure that it's all brought to my attention. Endlessly. Maddeningly.”
We live under an avalanche of voicemail, email, TiVo recommendations, feed reader and social network posts, magazines, catalogs, Twitter links, charity solicitations, books, as well as all of the other to-dos we give ourselves.
To escape you can take the radical Move It or Lose It approach and discard everything older than a certain date; however, for most of us, that’s a bit too bold. Instead, we can increase the efforts we’ve already started—reducing the incoming stream and processing that stream more quickly—while adding a new element, “completion by deletion.”
In GTD terms, we can start dropping a lot of things that would otherwise go on our someday-maybe lists. Here's the rationale: That magical day—when we’re caught up on the things higher on the list (either in priority or urgency or both) and get to this stuff—will never come. We are never going to get down to the someday-maybe stuff by eliminating everything above it.
It’s not “next in line”; it’s a parking lot for ideas we might want to reconsider sometime. To do those things, they have to climb back out of that low level and catch our attention again. If they become important or urgent, they will. So pare down your inactive projects list and remove anything about which you no longer care if you forget forever. Then, later, if you're all caught up, you can add it back (or not).
Create your forcefield
Choose the inputs that you want to receive—not just what is flung your direction but of what you want to be aware. Realize that you've got an attention force field, through which you can allow only some things to come. Email is one of them, but under your terms (e.g., the settings you choose and your spam filters). You are in charge of these inputs to your life; you can’t control the content,