Too Much, Not Enough, and No Longer Too Much

[livingdeb]

Too much rain + not enough buses = a one-hour-ten-minute commute of four or five miles. That is all I have to say about today.

Blog series of the day - Merlin Mann's My War on Clutter, (the first in) a series of four entries (links to the other three are at the bottom of the first entry) on how he finally got around to getting rid of clutter. It's fun to read lists of suggestions on how you might do such a thing, but more fun and illuminating to get details from someone who just did it. "Clutter of every kind has been the default state of my physical world forever. Although no official record of the conversation exists, I would not be surprised to learn that I tried to talk the staff who delivered me into letting me keep my first diaper; just because — y'know — you never know when it might come in handy."

Best quote: "I finally realized what's really been stopping me from accomplishing anything substantial. It's so simple and so dumb that I'm embarrassed to admit it: my garbage can was too small."

Most helpful quote: "If the stuff that you accumulate doesn't help get you closer to the life you want to have, it's simply not worth keeping. Period."

Comments

Getting rid of stuff

[sallini.livejournal.com]

Although I have my apartment in pretty good shape, I have been bringing home the trappings of my nearly 6 years at the job I am soon leaving, and since I will not be having another office any time in the near future (like, years), I am having to figure out how to incorporate the stuff worth keeping into my home. The things I am having most difficulty getting rid of are hand outs from conferences and classes that contain good information, but that honestly, I would be unlikely to ever look at again because they are a bunch of disjointed papers that cannot be organized easily. I'm trying to ask myself, "Does this hard copy contain anything I can't find, and probably more easily, online or in a book?" and "If so, shouldn't I just spend the 2 minutes typing the crucial nuggets into a Word document I can easily store and sort through later?" It seems to me that if it's not worth spending a few minutes typing into my computer, it's not worth keeping (unless the whole thing is just an absolute prize of a document, which most, frankly, are not.) We'll see how it goes.

Re: Getting rid of stuff

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

We should be doing this sort of organizing as soon as we get back from the conferences and classes. But it's so much easier to stuff everything in a file or on a shelf while we're catching up on work stuff that has piled up.

I'm trying to do more of this now, though.