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Feed Me, Seymour February 22, 2008

Posted by J in Decluttering, Meta.
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Leo at Zen Habits has a post on dropping RSS feeds. He discusses how he cut his 100 or so RSS feeds (which he spent an hour a day reading) down to a more manageable sixteen. Quite a leap. In his article, he outlines a ruthless system for minimizing the time spent on feeds every day.

For him, that may have been a necessary leap. But the article suggested readers take a look at their own feeds, so I did just that. According to Google Reader, I followed 175 feeds when I finished reading this article. Of those, maybe fifty update daily or more than daily. Maybe another twenty update on a regular schedule, two or three times a week. The rest are weekly or even less frequent.

One of his suggestions is to cut infrequent blogs. This was a bit of advice that I personally am going to put aside. To me, infrequent blogs are content that I enjoy that don’t take much of my time precisely because they rarely make demands on it – and yet, unlike an infrequently updated website, I don’t have to remember to come back to them and look for new content.

In the comments of the post, Leo mentions that part of the value for him in reducing his feeds is the sheer joy he feels from looking at a list that he’s whittled down that much. I suppose I can see how someone might feel that kind of joy, but I think that’s the difference between me and someone who’s a genuine productivity porn enthusiast – I find the techniques interesting, but I derive no inherent joy from having less of something. Less work, less worry, those are benefits of organization for me. Just plain less, or fewer enjoyable things, doesn’t have the same appeal.

I think that sort of near-fetishization in organization or productivity is a distant cousin of the “attachment to non-attachment” that sometimes crops up in enthusiastic Buddhists (and the related truism that new converts to almost any religion are often among the loudest and most obnoxious adherents). There’s a Buddhist tale about a monk who came to a river and needed to cross it, but there was no crossing for many miles. He built a raft out of the materials around him, and made his way across the river. When he got to the other side he left the raft there. He didn’t forget that the raft was a tool to get him over a specific hurdle.

So I’m keeping my infrequent feeds, and my comic strips, and my friends, and basically all the feeds I enjoy reading. I did remove a handful that I realized I was mostly skipping over… ironically, mostly productivity blogs or blogs about blogging. If you find you have more feeds than you have time to read them, you might also find his article helpful.

5 Ways to Manage Digital Packrattery February 22, 2008

Posted by J in Storage, Technology.
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I am a digital packrat. I admitted this last night on the new forums for one of my favorite productivity sites, Zen Habits, and it made me think about how I think about keeping and storing information.

Inspired by that, I’d like to present my five ways to manage information for digital packrats.

  1. Put it all in one place – and I don’t just mean stacking a whole bunch of burned CDs on a spindle or in a CD album. If the files you have stored aren’t easily accessible, you might as well not have them because you’ll never bother to use them. If the list of files you think you need stored is less than a few gigabytes, I’d suggest backing them up to either a USB drive or a spare gmail account.
  2. A USB drive is a wonderful way to carry your research and projects with you, particularly if you use software like PortableApps to carry the software you need as well. However, USB drives are also easy to misplace – make sure that any sensitive data you have on one is encrypted with TrueCrypt or LockNote and include information for someone who finds the drive to get it back to you.
  3. Gmail storage is particularly useful if you have a lot of files that are difficult to browse on your computer or that you don’t need often, but need to keep. I set up an email address specifically for archiving. Every time I finish a project for a client, all the relevant files are zipped and sent along as an attachment with a useful label like “Client.com Website Archive” and any keywords I think I’ll use to find it later are typed in the body of the email. Old stories and poems, journal archives, and even archived versions of websites are stored here and accessible to me via google search. I can also backup my WordPress website and have it automatically sent to my archive email.
  4. If you’re the sort of person who keeps their entire media library on their computer, I’d suggest having an external hard drive dedicated solely to media. It’s certainly more convenient to have only one small box to take the place of all your CDs and DVDs – just make sure nothing happens to that hard drive, since one accidental disconnect could trash it.
  5. Finally, the easiest way to manage digital packrattery is not to be a packrat. I know it seems silly to worry about it when so much storage is so easy to have on hand, but like any clutter, the sheer volume of information can make it hard to remember what you have and where you have it. If you have a good organization system, this can be mitigated, but every system will break down eventually.

Besides, do you really need to keep those old hacker text files or the emails from your first internet crush, the one you haven’t talked to since since he stalked you in 2001? Somehow I think you wouldn’t really miss them if they were gone. I don’t.

You may also want to check out Geek to Live: Carry Your Life on a Thumb Drive

Bookworms and Bookshelves February 22, 2008

Posted by J in Decluttering.
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There’s nothing that starts a debate on an organization or simplification forum like the topic of books. Some people think books are stuff like any other stuff, and you have to view your books the same way you view your clothes and your knick knacks. Most people, however, seem to view books as somehow sacrosanct and exempt from our self-imposed challenges and our mental definition of clutter. While my books are some of my favorite possessions, they’re still just possessions. (And very heavy possessions, as anybody who’s moved two dozen boxes of books through their college years can tell you.)

I’m going to say something that many booklovers would view as heresy: Odds are, you don’t need all those books. You probably don’t even really want all those books. Far better, then to cull your collection. (And hey, if you use all that space as an excuse to buy more books, that’s your own business.)

First, ask yourself, why do you have these books? Are they books you’re going to read, someday, really? Do your bookshelves act as a chronicle of your reading habits since you learned to sound out letters?

There’s nothing wrong with keeping the old favorites that you reread once a year, or even a few books you’ve had since you were small and you have a sentimental attachment to, but even if you think you can’t bear to part with any of them, you can still think about it. Yes, I’m giving you official permission to think about which books you would be willing to part with and why. If it makes it easier for you, tell yourself that you’re not really getting rid of any of them. You’re just doing a thought exercise.

Another thing that makes it easier for me to part with books is to make sure they’re going to good homes. Like pets and children, the image of a book left alone and forlorn in the rain makes me rush out to dry it off and give it a good home. I twitch at the idea of throwing a book away. But taking it to a used bookstore with an upscale and offbeat clientele that I know will appreciate it, or even giving it to a friend who would enjoy it, makes it possible for me to part with the book with a minimum of guilt.

Further Reading

Variations on the Four Box Method February 22, 2008

Posted by J in Decluttering.
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One of the standard techniques for cleaning or decluttering in a problem room is the four box method. Used on scales as small as an overstuffed desk and as large as the homes that are featured on TLC’s Clean Sweep, the four box method is one of the most recommended ways to clean.

Some of that popularity can be ascribed to the simplicity of the technique. All you need to use the four box method is, as you may have guessed, four boxes. Each box gets a label: “put away,” “give away,” “throw away,” and “not sure.” Everything in the room then gets sorted into one of those four boxes. When you’re done, you put away the things in the put away box, toss the throw away box into the trash bin, drive the give away box to your local Goodwill, and put the not sure box somewhere out of the way. After a month or two, anything you haven’t found yourself needing from the not sure box goes to the Goodwill too.

The standard four box method works great in a variety of situations, but sometimes you’ll be in a situation where you need to add another box. For example, if there’s a good used bookstore in your area and you’re cleaning out a room with a lot of books, you may want a “sell” box next to the “give away” box. There are certain kinds of books no used bookstore will take off your hands, so there’s no point putting all the books in the “sell” box, but putting them in the give away box gets them out of sight and out of mind before you have a chance to feel guilty about parting with your beloved pages.

Similarly, someone cleaning out a particularly difficult closet might want to augment their “give away” box with a “sell” box for the sorts of gently-used designer clothes that you might want to trade in at your local Plato’s Closet or other upscale used clothes shop. The whole point of the four box method is to get everything sorted in one go, after all — using a sorting method that will require you to go through them again later defeats the purpose.

During my recent experience moving, my roommate and I hit on yet another variation on the four box method uniquely suited to moving. Replacing the “put away” box with a stack of boxes for packing helped us do double-duty, packing and decluttering at the same time.

It’s easy to look up an organizing system, try it, and realize it doesn’t suit your needs, but that doesn’t mean the system itself is useless. Most of these systems are popular because they’re universal enough to appeal to a lot of people. Take a second look and you may see that the system would be perfect for your job with just a little tweaking.

The Search for the Perfect Neurotic Backups February 22, 2008

Posted by J in Technology.
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My laptop died in January.

It was a long time coming, and I didn’t lose anything – the problem wasn’t the hard drive, and eventually I’ll probably take the time to crack that sucker open and put ‘er into an external drive case and retrieve my files.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about backups, offsite storage, and all the other assorted messy details of keeping files safe. Offsite backups are important in case the worst happens, after all, and also protect you from lesser evils like the day your cat manages to take out both your laptop and your external hard drive in one hunting expedition.

The problem with offsite backups for me has always been remembering to do them. I think I may have found a solution.

Amazon’s S3 offsite backup service is one of the cheapest around. To simplify its use and automate the backup of certain files, there’s JungleDisk, a $20 program that is written specifically to interface with Amazon’s storage and make it easier.

I’m still in the trial period for JungleDisk, so I’ll check back later and let you know what I decided to do with it.

Hello world! February 16, 2008

Posted by J in Uncategorized.
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Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!