🔬 Weekly experiment 03, 2020

Hey There.

Week three is behind us, and 2020 is in full swing. Every year I start with a new clean Bullet journal and a new fancy visual language for it:

One-third of the journal is already full of new ideas, 80 pages to be exact. So yeah ideas might be piling up but so is the clutter. Brainstorming and storing ideas is excellent, but if we aren't careful, we end up with a giant mess of unsorted, unfinished ideas.

Digital clutter

At the moment I have two weeks of free time as I'm waiting to get the paperwork for the new job in order. So I decided to tackle the last messy part of my belongings. The one area that I've been procrastinating on throughout my minimalistic journey. The digital clutter: emails, notes, task lists, photos, old projects, code, links of saved web pages for just in case, thousands of articles.

For sure, the easiest and fastest solution would be to delete everything. But I wasn't ready for that since I suspected that the pile of my unsorted shit (yes I actually have a PC folder with such name) contained some hidden gems.

How did the mess appear in the first place? Digital clutter is out of our view. Without knowing we pile up day after day and before we know it, we created an unmanageable pile of mess. I've been piling things up for 10 years. No wonder that I have 1000 gigabytes of unsorted files.

I've been sorting slowly through those files for the last few days and discarding the most of the material. All this sorting is satisfying the control freak in me. But what's more important is that I rediscovered a lot of half-finished projects and ideas that are absolutely not worth throwing away. At least, for now, I feel like that.

The sorting revelled topics that used to get me out of bed in the morning.

Topics that excited me to push forward every day. But they got lost in all the clutter. By trying to do everything and piling up all sorts of stuff, I got sidetracked. For example, I rediscovered why I was reading The Economist and trying to understand the geo-politics:

So I took a deep dive into it again, and it felt refreshing.

Small weekly experiment 04, 2020

At the moment, my daily experiments are digital clutter reduction. I'm making space for future projects and taking back control of digital life.

What digital files have you been clinging on? What's blocking you? Are you sure that you need to keep storing all those emails from the past 10 years? I thought I did until I realised that rarely any email is worth saving.

Or maybe you've been storing all those links for future reading and never read them? As a rule of thumb as with physical possesions:

If you haven't' touched something in several months, you probably don't need it.

Let me know what you will purge in the upcoming week.

If you find a typo, have a comment or have an idea for improvement shoot me a message. 😉

Till the next weekly experiment.

Ziga

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