Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [70]
Prune physical piles of reading materials that are nagging you. Where in your week have you allocated time for that reading? Match expectation to opportunity and vice versa.
Here’s how to make the unread less daunting. Put on some good music and sit down next to the piles of books (and magazines and clipped articles) with three boxes named the following:
1. Ooh! Inticing!
2. Hmm, I think I want to read this.
3. Do I have to read this?
When you're tired of sorting into those three categories, tidy up by putting the #3 stuff in your charity, sell, recycling, or to-be-returned spots as appropriate. Then put the #2 stuff out of the way (e.g., in a basket behind your comfy chair or under the coffee table). Last, put the #1 stuff in spots where you like to have something at hand to read and reward yourself now with a little reading time with whatever catches your eye.
If your unread books make you feel guilty, don't buy books unless you're going to start reading them within the next 48 hours. Ann Arbor Discardian John Hritz took that kind of approach: “I've gone zero-sum or less on books, CDs, DVDs, clothes, etc. By zero-sum, I mean that to buy one, I donate one or more. This gets me out of the binge and purge mentality of organizing. I try to have a place in mind for something I want to buy and if there's already something there it has to go.”
If it’s really getting to you to see that stack and putting the yet-to-be-read in a less prominent location doesn’t relieve your feelings of obligation, eliminate all but two of the things in your read-next pile—loan ’em to someone, donate ’em to the library, sell ’em, whatever—but eliminate the reading guilt.
Consolidate your personal email. Do you have more than one personal email account or more than one email program with a pile of saved or unread mail in it? Think about each of them. What if it suddenly went away? Would you be sad or would you shrug? If the former, find a way to extract the important messages, forward them to your current account and archive them or otherwise make a backup; if the latter, decide why you are rewarded by still having that account or get rid of it.
Every time you feel guilty over optional inputs with which you aren’t dealing, treat that as a reminder to eliminate 10 things taking up your time, energy, or space. Suppose that you had a magic free 20 minutes. Which unread magazine is the last one you'd pick up? Cancel that subscription. Which unread book? Donate it. Unfollow-unsubscribe-cancel-delete-donate-discard.
Tune your tech
Use the tech that brings you value and use it in a way that brings value to the people with whom you use it. Twitter is good for keeping in touch, but be sure to populate your list of friends you follow with only those whose updates you really want to see. You don't have to get updates sent to your phone or instant-messaging client. As a quick thermometer of what a group of people is doing, Twitter is a nice service—brief, frequently silly, ignorable as necessary.
If Twitter isn't for you, you can or are probably getting a similar effect from your Facebook or Google+ or Flickr contacts or blog post titles in a feed reader. Bottom line: Just because you're friends, it doesn’t mean that you’re obligated to keep up with the entirety of each other's electronic output.
Edward Vielmetti encapsulated this nicely: “You can only deal with so much interruption in a day, and if the channels you are tuned into have too much static, remove some of the static.”
We are biologically attuned to changes in our environment, so be very wary of what you allow to light up with a red flag, sound a bell, or otherwise poke you. Go for quality over quantity. You should also consider the quality of your own output. Vielmetti had a tip there as well: “It can be instructive from time to time to tune in to your own electronic output and see what kind of droppings you are leaving behind—there is certainly a balance