Or, How to Clear Clutter
My New Years resolution centred around getting more organized… streamlining things. And it’s been less of getting organized than it has been a paring away of things disorganized. In the spirit of community service, I’m sharing my method of de-cluttering. *Results may vary.
1. Take all the clutter that’s collected in miscellaneous piles and corners. Put it in a box. Admire how nicely the right angles of the floors, walls, and furniture meets. You will immediately feel better.
2. After a week, or two, you may want to go through the box and will probably toss most of it. File the rest and deal with the things that will a. accrue interest or b. cause physical discomfort if not dealt with.
3. If it’s been on your to-do list for more than a year, it’s either a. something you’re avoiding and will feel much better about if it’s just done (and probably not a quarter as difficult as it seemed like it would be) or b. a total write-off, and no matter how interested in it you once were, it’s time to set it free. Free like the wind.
4. I have freed my email inbox by ruthlessly unsubscribing from all newsletters, and by pre-sorting my mail. Spam, obviously, goes to the spam folder. Certain e-blast lists that I keep up with go directly to an e-blast folder. A graphic designer listserv-type list that I’m subscribed to goes straight to a Listserv folder. Anything that makes it to my inbox is from a real, live person who is contacting me about something relatively pertinent. Anything that needs to be saved gets saved to the docket folder as an RTF file.
I also turned off all email notifications. The only way I find new email now is if I go looking for it. This alone has helped my work-flow concentration immensely.
My old goal was to keep my inbox down to 100 emails or so… it was a very bad version of a “to-do” list. The new inbox, thus far, gets cleaned out down to zero every week or so.
That’s it for now… more dispatches from the dustbin likely to follow.
Happy New Years!