Uncluttering

No, I have NEVER achieved that level of disastrous mess.

Most people clean up in the Spring. I’m apparently not most people, since I’m doing it now. Hey, it makes sense! I’m preparing for the bitter winter by assembling the nest now, and the nest is too goddamn full of stuff at the moment.

3 full black garbage bags of associated crap went out to the bin. The majority of it consisted of old shit that I didn’t even realize I still had. While I could never get to the point that true hoarders do, it’s a bit appalling to realize that there is a part of that mentality apparently somewhere in my head. Maybe I can purge it out of there with more sports statistics.

I just finished throwing together 7 boxes full of books that I don’t want anymore. Some are old reference books about naval vessels and aircraft or whatever else that I got as a kid…they’re full of information that was relevant in 1985. In terms of sheer poundage, the pile of those that I’ve boxed up is ridiculous. Others are books that I enjoyed, but they aren’t something that I can ever see myself going back to because once you’ve read them once, that’s it. You aren’t going to gain anything new from a repeat visit. And some of them either flat out sucked, or just weren’t my cup of tea. Of course, now I don’t know what the Hell to do with them. In the past I’ve traded them at a used book store, but I don’t WANT to bring back 3 or 4 boxes worth of replacements.

Really, with most of my game purchases moving to the online sphere, and with it being quite some time since I actually went out and bought a CD or what not, books are my one physical medium that had grown utterly out of control. It’s nice getting that back to something of a reasonable concern.

I just finished uninstalling about 15 different games or apps that I don’t use, don’t play, finished and don’t touch any more or don’t need. Of course, I’m already installing the final buys from the last Steam sale to replace a lot of that, but at least I’ve moved on from “Shit I don’t touch ever” to “Stuff I want to play”.

And probably the more important part is removing the clutter from the online spectrum. A short while back, I realized that I was spending WAY too much time online not actually doing anything. Or using up a lot of hours pursuing things that don’t even interest me anymore.

The first step towards this was talking to Brad about the DRM News site we were working on. Unlike a lot of other stuff I’ve been ridding myself of, it isn’t a project I had lost interest in. It was just too much work for 2 people to undertake as a purely voluntary concern. The amount of time spent writing and editing and looking for topics or material and chasing down potential interviews and working on the sales page was to the point that I simply didn’t enjoy it as a project anymore. And if you don’t enjoy something, and it isn’t essential to your life…why continue with it?

That lit the spark of “Gee, am I REALLY spending my Internet time productively?”

There are several forums that I’ve been visiting as nothing more than just a routine. I no longer enjoy aspects of the community, or flat out disagree with basically everything the site is doing. So why the fuck am I still spending time there, or using my voice on a site like that at all? They have been purged from the bookmarks and no longer are part of my normal routine.

My Google Reader account had grown so bloated that if I didn’t visit several times a day to clear it, I’d spend the evening basically just emptying the enormous queue of material since it was too damn much to deal with in one shot. I’ve probably slashed the number of feeds coming in to it by half. There was way too much repetitive content, or things that were occasionally interesting but generally not anything I cared to read about at all. Gone.

So, do I spend less time online? No. The difference is, I’m spending that time doing things that I actually LIKE doing rather than going through some rote order of websites and feeds that I don’t even care about anymore. And now I can more easily switch over to working on other projects that I want to devote time to than I could while wasting time on nonsensical bullshit (HOPEFULLY some news on this front soon).

Time is a precious resource and I’m trying to free some of that up for things that I like to do. And I’m going to try not to just backslide back in to what I’ve done previously. It’s time to get a little more proactively brutal about chopping something out as soon as it becomes irrelevant to me.