21–30 of 133 posts
Reduce your spending and reduce your backlog of saved items. If you need motivation to delete your personal backlog tasks, try hackernews "past" from 1/6/12 months ago or the equivalent.
Very interesting. Seems we are similar :D What I didn't understand: How is the growing list of things stressing you out? Do you feel pressured to do something with the items?
It's pointless accumulation and hoarding, and eventually becomes disorganized, which can be some degree of.stressful to deal with.
I'm a librarian, so I'm AWARE each time I look at my dumping grounds that I should organize them. Of course, that also feels like work, so then I don't do it.
First, the Eisenhower matrix of important/urgent:
https://www.techtello.com/eisenhower-productivity-matrix/
Use this framework to filter your content. I bet most of it fits in quadrants 3/4.
Second, check this time management talk
It's not what you read, it's what you ignore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWPgUn8tL8s
Tons of useful information there. One key takeaway is: do less stuff, but of higher quality.
My first tip is to separate content consumption away from your work/daily driver phone. The way I do this is on my phone my open tabs are only new things I want to cook soon and HN. It lets me get just a little bit of content without algorithms addicting me.
Secondly I try to categorize my wishlist as milestones or personal goals. My rationale is if I’m able to achieve x then I can deal with distraction y in my life. It also lets me separate between things I want soon and eventually. I realize sometimes those things are just neat and I don’t want them a month or 6 after I first saw it. This periodically reduces my bookmarks while also being a good barometer of where I’m at in life now.
The things that you're not going to be able to do will be eliminated from your list regardless of your choice(s). The question is whether you do this deliberately or incidentally with time.
David Allen's Getting Things Done isn't a perfect system, and has flaws. That said, it's quite good, and is better than virtually anything else I've seen. I strongly recommend it.
In an era of information abundance, what is limited is what information consumes: attention. (Thank Herbert Simon for that observation.)
The other thing information consumes is time, and no matter how much technology improves, you have only 24 hours, 14,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds in a day.
Ultimately, where information exceeds capacity to process it, what is needed is fast, cheap, and guilt-free disposal. Elminiating obligations without having to think about it, and without regret.
There are 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8,765 hours in a year (roughly 2,000 of those are spent at work, sleep, and everything else, respectively).
An 85 year lifespan is roughly 1,000 months, 4,500 weeks, 31,000 days, 750,000 hours.
Think of the things that you do once a week, or once a month. Do you read a book a week? You'll read at most 4,500 in your lifetime. If you've stacked up more than 4,500 books, either you're going to need to pick up the pace ... or you're going to leave most of them unread. Perhaps you'll only read a few sections of each. If not books, than games, videos, movies, articles, etc.
My suggestion is either to consciously select for quality, or to extract the most you can from what you do gain access to. Preferably some mix of both.
Few of the most excellent works of all of human history were written in the past 24 hours. FOMO is an exceedingly misleading anxiety.
Your time here is limited.
Yes, you need to cut back.
If you have a partner or someone you trust to help you with this, include them.
Figure out your goals, what's important to you, what's necessary (regardless of whether you like it or not). Count that in.
Eliminate as much of your current committments as possible. If you can't do so by a rational method:
- Elminiate by classes of accounts: entertainment, little used, media, etc.
- Eliminate by least used.
- Eliminate at random.
- Cut everything. Re-add those which turn out to have been useful.
The last approach is drastic, but surprisingly effective.
Yes, cut your discretionary spending. While you're at it, see if you can increase your income as well. Times may be tightening, but it has been a competitive labour market.
I'd suggest limiting additional storage until you can do better with what you have. Though the notion of ever-additional storage and never deleting anything is an information technology vision that seems increasiongly likely.