Thursday, December 31, 2009

Life Transformation - Organizing Habits

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is organizing habits. One thing I really have trouble with is setting priorities when it comes to consuming information. I suppose many people with a healthy curiosity about a wide variety of topics have this problem. However, when there is essentially an unlimited amount of free information available on the World Wide Web, the tendency to attempt to consume everything of interest has to be resisted. Otherwise, as in my case, your email inbox will continue to grow without bounds with all the things “you plan to get to as soon as you have more time”. Same with the ever growing stack of magazines on the desk.

The overall habit must be to become more selective in what you try to drink from the fire hose of information coming at us each day. We can’t possibly take it all in, or even any reasonable fraction of it, so there needs to be prioritization about what is important to further your top one or two goals, what is really worth the time spent on it, and be willing to ignore the rest.

So my goals in this area for the coming year are (this is where things get more radical):

  • On Jan 1st, I will zero out my email inbox (actually archive the roughly 1900 emails currently in there, ugh!) and start out fresh. I will completely clear out my inbox again each night before going to bed.
  • The first time I open an email, I will remove it from my inbox. If I can deal with in 2 minutes or less I will handle it right then. Otherwise I will put it in a “To Do” folder, file it in a folder where I save useful information on that topic, or delete it. I will not leave it in the inbox with the intention of coming back to it later.
  • Many web browsers let you open multiple windows, with multiple tabs per window. This is great for opening articles that you intend to read “later when you have more time”, but it also invites a great deal of abuse. On Jan 1st I will close all the windows and tabs on my web browsers, and do so again each night before going to bed.
  • I will have at most 3 magazines on my pile of “magazines to read as soon as I have time”. If a new magazine comes in the mail, I will get the pile of magazines back down to 3 before going to bed.
  • Decluttering: Vertical places (desk tops, table tops, floors…) are not meant to be places to store things. To discourage clutter and accumulation of useless stuff, and encourage focusing on those things I prioritize, I will clear off key vertical spaces each night before going to bed.
  • To encourage more productive days, I will get up at 5am on a regular basis. The exception is when doing so would result in a severe lack of sleep because I had to stay up late the previous night.

That sounds just radical enough to be exciting.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm seriously impressed by your list. I've conquered much of this de-cluttering over the last two years. I'm now using Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, etc. and streamlining everything about my computerlife through Google. It has been very helpful. For instance, when you sent the email about the next SGM (THANK U), I just clicked on the message to add it to my calendar. My calendar and John's calendar are connected, so we both know what's going on every day. And instead of having messages delivered to my email box, I've got Google reader rss feeds picking up local news from The Kingston, Poughkeepsie and Albany Newspapers. I've still get the NYTimes through email; perhaps I'll change that.

I still don't understand what Twitter is for, do you?

I've also severely limited what pops up on Facebook for me, keeping only the friends who actually post interesting news, rather than what they ate for dinner last night and such.

Now, if and when you choose to answer this, it'll pop in in Google Reader because I follow your blog, and a number of others through it. Not too many though!

Also at the end of the year I go through every single piece of paper that I've filed over the year, bills, receipts, tax things, and make sure I actually need this piece of paper, usually takes me a whole day to do it. Then I burn what I don't need in the fireplace. It's quite refreshing!!!

Happy Happy New Year, my friend!!!

Anonymous said...

And I even get the TEDblog through Google reader. ;)

Mike Ignatowski said...

Elisa,

Wow, great list. I started using Google Calendar for keeping track of everything. Even if I lose my laptop or daily planner, I know that my Google calendar will still be there. I'm not sure I can get my wife to start using it to start coordinating family schedules though.

I'm also a big fan of rss feeds. Another great tool that I've been using are Google Alerts. They send me email updates about any topic that I chose to get alerts on. That could clog up my inbox, but I have them directed to special file folders to avoid that.

Collecting every but of paper that you no longer need at the end of the year and burning them sounds like a wonderful ceremony for closing out the year. I wish I thought of that earlier.